If you ever gave up about a camera because of missing or broken ground-glass you will regret about it after reading this post. It is very easy to produce a high quality ground-glass for replacement or for a new project for a large-format camera. Nowadays when old processes, old lenses and cameras are getting more and more attention, this is...
Small and stylish device for using powder flash. The burning is manually induced with a mechanism that activates a lighter stone. Track the burn at 1/15s intervals and understand how to synchronize with the camera's trigger.
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 mid of the twentieth century. Then fortunately it was replaced by...
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.
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, like this one from my apartment window, leaving only a blip on the side of one of the buildings, we...
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.
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 stack of cans in a bazaar, a person uses a ball of...
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 as it can make us think...
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 made in Peniche, Portugal, in May 2016...
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 that happened to you, than...
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” as in many other areas in...
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 their photos. I...