Flash powder, light a lot with just a little Everyone has seen a photographer, in movies, burning something that seems to make more smoke than light. That was the flash powder. It consists of a metal part and an oxidant. A mixture that resembles gunpowder. This was used for photography from its very first decades up to nearly…
Very robust and reliable TLR camera. Because it has a bellows, it offers the convenience of a small selection of interchangeable lenses and also various accessories such as a porrofinder (pentaprism viewfinder) and a grip. Interesting option for 120 films in 6x6cm format.
What is a photographic lens? Any scene you can shoot is made up of objects that emit light (own or reflected) and it is from this light that the lens will form an image to be recorded on film or digital sensor. If it were possible to block almost all light coming from a scene,…
A legend in photography, the Leica designed by Oscar Barnack was visionary, creative and anchored by an obsessive mastery of execution. Ironically, it was the microscope manufacturing engineers who saw the enormous opportunity that was opening up and knew how to conquer and maintain their territory for decades.
Light and colors, physics and perception Yes, light is a wave, and then … Wave, is a phenomenon in which there is energy transmission without transport of matter. It’s like energy traveling in space. It is easier to understand if we think of an example where there is matter transporting energy. For example, to drop a…
Lambe-Lambe was a profession, a process, a camera and a portable darkroom, all at once. Today it is a memory that some passionate researchers try to keep alive. For those who din’t have the opportunity to be portrayed by, and avail himself of lambe-lambe by its primary end, it is yet interesting to learn about it…
The practice that I will describe is the one that allowed me to take some reasonable pictures of seagulls in Hamburg harbor in Germany in 2008. Later, in other occasions, it served me again and I lost less time to catch some images birds flying. That is the case, to my level of requirements, of this picture…
With digital cameras is always good the possibility of checking the result right after the click. Those who never used film don’t know how good it is. But sometimes, a quick evaluation may show that the picture registered is OK and later, on the computer, we realise that shooting it was not at its best….
If you consider adding some chemistry to your photography, but are uncertain about the difficulties in setting up a darkroom in terms of time, work and money… then this post is for you. The idea is exactly to reflect upon ways and alternatives to leave for a while the digital. I say “for a while”…
The intention in this post is to explain what softwares for image editing do when you adjust sharpness of an image. Sharpning in a great many of contemporary photos, done and retouched digitally, has turned into a sort of convention and photographers may feel like missing the party if they do not produce that crispy finish in…
Alternative processes in photography When we think about alternative processes in photography, what comes to our minds, is a sort of brownish prints showing cloudy images, because they were produced the way it was in the infancy of photography. Many people associate this kind of roughness to constrains given by early phases of film and…
A simple and nevertheless very important point in darkroom practice is keeping control of time for baths and processes. For a long time I used the “triple timer” and it it never failed. It works till today. But the electronics embedded on it falls very short when compared even with an entry price smartphone, and there is…