The Plastic Lens ~ Words » Australia

BBF under the ‘Big Sticks’

Cameron — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 02:08:14 +0000

It is completely inexcusable of course, but I haven’t had a chance to do anything much except fulfil work & family responsibilities lately, so my apologies for any lack of content here. I hope everyone has had a very safe & happy festive season and wish you all a incredible New Year!
Here is a small edited snippet of some 8mm film I shot for Powershovel/Superheadz featuring my favourite plastic Twin Lens Reflex Camera, the blackbird,fly – http://www.superheadz.com/bbf
Thanks to my nephew who filmed most of this clip (on a Fujica ‘Single-8′ P2) whilst I wandered around with my bbf. Many, many thanks to Nick and all at Powershovel/Superheadz.
I have edited the footage in iMovie ’09 the backing music is ‘comfortable mystery’ by Kevin MacLeod – http://incompetech.com

The Kitchen Darkroom

Cameron — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:20:55 +0000

One Saturday a group of friends with a common passion for analogue photography got together to convert Paul’s kitchen into a darkroom for the afternoon for the purposes of making some traditional photographic ‘wet’ prints. Those of us not experienced in this art (Lea, Sophie & I) watched & learnt from our friends Paul & Jock. I captured this time-lapse of some of the process, not really expecting it to come out as well as it did.
I hope this can inspire others to delve more into the fantastic world of traditional photographic techniques.

Melbourne in Winter

Cameron — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 13:25:41 +0000

This post is not about photography or toy cameras per se, but about Melbourne at night this Winter. I went to the excellent Dali – Liquid Desires exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria late night and afterwards wandered around with my BBF attached to a tripod, shutter set on “B” for some night exposures. In Federation Square they had this great installation set up called VOLUME. It’s an audio visual installation made up of LED embedded pillars which respond with light and audio to people walking around them. It’s absolutely facinating and has to be experienced to truly appreciate it. This short video captures some of the ambience of thi audio-visual installation, which currently at Federation Square in Melbourne as part of The Light in Winter 2009 events. Some of the video is captured with the Digital Harinezumi by Superheadz and some on a more conventional Kodak M1093S camera. All audio is actual sound from the installation (and ambient surrounding noise)

VOLUME from artpunk on Vimeo.

Pinhole Day and a Quick 1st impression of Harinezumi

Cameron — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:20:40 +0000

Pears WPPD 09

This years Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (last Sunday) was less than optimal (for me) for a lot of reasons. The weather was shocking, we had power failures, my computer froze when the power finally came back on and I was suffering from the jet-lag feeling that comes from just finishing night shift and having to adjust your body clock through a 12 hour 180º shift within a day…
Apart from those factors, I had fun and actually managed to grab a few pinhole exposures that I thought were not too bad (not brilliant either however). My two cameras of choice this year were my converted Polaroid EE66 with Polaroid 125i pack film and my Holgamods Pinholga using type 84 packfilm. I started the day with little coffee cups and ended (as I seem to do) in the kitchen with some fruit…

I‘m having a lot (A LOT) of fun with the Digital Harinezumi.

Harinezumi by Harinezumi

This probably has a lot to do with how much it reminds me of using an analogue toy camera. When in still capture mode, you do not get a LCD viewfinder mode, you have to estimate what you are capturing (and anyone who uses toy cameras will know that their viewfinders are less than accurate) You also have the option of turning off the review mode of the camera so that you won’t know what you have got until you download the images to your computer (so I suppose that’s the digital equivalent of waiting to get your film developed).
In movie mode, they’re is no audio as such, there is a bit of white noise. I think it may have been fun if they had the option of the whirr of an old 8mm camera sound as well as the movies generated by the camera remind me of those and the results look very analogue, like some old family home movies from the 1960′s.

Macro Toes by Harinezumi

The colours are kick-ass funky and similar to some sort of weird cross processing type of thing going on…
As you can see from some of my initial test images, the macro function (two choices of focus here macro or normal) works very well. There is nice grain in lower lighting conditions, feeling more reminiscent to me of film grain than ‘digital’ grain. I could go on and probably will, when I do an ‘out of the box’ video review of this little electric hedgehog later on this week, but I remain impressed with what Powershovel & Superheadz have come up with.

New Look & Stuff

Cameron — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:06:03 +0000

Regular visitors to the plastic lens may have noticed some changes lately. It’s a long story, but basically the php script running the ‘front end’ (the photos part) was a bit naughty and became unmanageable once I reached a certain number of images, causing problems with the server, in some cases resulting in the site being inaccessible. So I am converting the photos part to a WordPress based blog (as the ‘words’ part is) and am now trying to find the right template. I quite like the current one you see, but unfortunately it doesn’t handle lightbox (the pop-up images script) and doesn’t have thumbnailed archives. Stay tuned and thanks for your patience!

To all my Australian friends asking about the bbf please check out the Via Alley site. This comes to me today from Kat White (thanks Kat) -

“I have spoken to one of the guys at the Via Alley store (based in Paddington) and he has told me that they will have them instock in 2 weeks and they will be selling them for $180. I’ve asked him to tell me when they come in stock, so I’ll let you all know. Oh and they will be getting all three colours in”