I had a little bit of a snafu with my server and had to reinstall WordPress from a backup. Which didn’t have the media files on it.
Because I am an idiot.
Over time I’ll repopulate my posts with some images, but it’s been a wee bit of an effort to get back to this stage already.
I haven’t been very active in keeping this blog of late, but I really should have posted for September’s partial eclipse. After all I did get up at sparrow-fart and headed to the beach to take some photos. I wasn’t the only person doing that, either.
In October, I went down to the Moray Place entrance to the art gallery to protest the Prime Minister. I have to admit in the moment instead of shouting something like “Justice for Palestine!” or “Pay the nurses!”, my brain kinda shorted out and I just went “Boo!”
The eclipse was already starting to wane by the time I got to photograph it, but I managed to resolve some of the redness, even so. Here’s a picture of it, and another of St Clair Beach with some interesting lighting.
Both were taken on a Pentax K10D.
I think I’ve found a format that I really like: XPan ratio panoramas in black and white.
It started with trying out a secondhand lens: the Pentax 15mm f/4. Which on an APSC camera like my Pentax K3 mark iii Monochrome is pleasingly wide. So I made my way down to the Dunedin Botanic Gardens and took this shot of the Winter Gardens there. I often take photos around there. I could never get the whole thing in frame before, but with such a wide lens I got a great shot dead on.
The pitfall was that there was a lot of stuff in the shot I thought didn’t really help and Lightroom’s widest preset crop, 16:9, didn’t really crop out enough. I wanted a standard panoramic crop ratio and I discovered the XPan ratio. XPan was a panoramic film camera developed in a joint venture between Hasselblad and Fujifilm and
I was very pleased with the result.
This made me want to start composing more of my shots using that ratio, but the trouble is my camera only shoots in 3:2. I know some Lumix cameras offer the ratio as a native option, but I’ve got no plans to buy any more gear for a long time yet.
It turns out one of the viewfinder grids in the K3iii, while not being bang-on the ratio, is close enough for composing an image with the crop in mind. By composing in the middle two rows, I can get some great panoramas.
The images themselves end up being 14 megapixels after cropping, so are still very usable.
This last one was taken with a more conventional 35mm lens.
I have a feeling I’m going to be using this crop a lot.
My resolutions are pretty prosaic and are largely recycled:
● Read more.
● Lose weight.
● Reduce time online.
● Be political.
● Learn something.
● Travel somewhere noteworthy.
● Be a more diligent photographer.
● Keep this blog.
Happy 2025, everyone.
Pilot boats moored at Carey’s Bay, Dunedin.
Lindsay Creek, Dunedin Botanic Gardens
I’m getting a bit more interested in infrared photography and I have a little point and shoot I’ve installed CHDK on – a hack that allows it to shoot RAW – and I’m planning to make a hardware modification to it to turn it into a dedicated full spectrum camera.
In the meantime I have to satisfy myself with slow shutter speeds and a 720nm filter that is best rendered as black and white. Here’s an example from last year.
I’m really into long exposure photography and night shots are an easy way into that. This photo is one I took last year on my Fujifilm X100V.
The Esplanade Restaurant, Dunedin
Really need to do some more of this.
Nothing much going on today, so here’s a photo I took a while back.
