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...
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 printing development. But actually, that...
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 always...
This is probably the most cult of the miniature cameras. It has an excellent optics and is extremely well finished in the mechanism that lasts forever if it is well taken care of. Produces in the format 8x11 mm in own spools that can be reloaded from 35 mm cut film.
– Olympus Pen EES2 – Olympus – 1968 to 1971 – This is my first camera. I acquired it, brand new, in 1979, when I was 20 years old. In total Pen Series history, 17 millions of cameras were sold. Launch was in 1959 and the Pen EES was launched in 1962 . There were 19 different models produced from 1959 onwards for more than 20...