Do I really have to get rid of these?

We are moving house soon. It's a BIG move, as we are leaving the big smoke and heading out to the countryside, and we are leaving our jobs in the hope that we'll be able to find new jobs when we get there. So partly because we need the money and partly because we desperately need to get rid of lots of stuff to make moving easier, we're having a massive ebay clearout and listing all the stuff we don't want in batches. So far we've sold lots of books, and I have about ten million handbags listed which will end this afternoon. So far so good.

Except now it's time to ebay the cameras.

Not all of them, obviously, some will never ever be sold. Like my Trip and Holga and Richard's Werra.

But some. Like these.



It's hard to get rid of cameras! I don't know why I get so attached to them, when most of them I don't even use. But they have to go. Sigh.

However the little blue Instamatic in the main photo is not going anywhere. Richard bought it years ago, I think from a charity shop, but it's too pretty to ebay. Look at it. It's blue! And it has some brand new flash cubes!


So I'm keeping it - who can blame me?

Unsuccessful photography

You might remember this post from a while ago, where I did a digital drawing of one of the old cameras, an Agfa Silette L, that we've had lying around the house for years. Well I finally got a roll of film back from the lab today from that camera and oh dear. What a massive disappointment. It looks like the focus is off, and I don't think it's just my bad photography skills that are to blame. What a shame, I really like that camera but I don't think I'll be using it again.

This pink VW Beetle is one of the only shots that was (nearly) in focus.

The good news is that my exams are OVER! So I finally have time for other things, like drawing. And painting. I'm hoping to get back to life drawing classes next week. I've missed them terribly.

Walking the dog

(Or possibly the cat, we still haven't decided what he is.)

Insomnia

Taking photos of the sunrise at about 5am is something to do when you can't sleep.

Stamps - lots of stamps.

I have lots and lots of stamps, and I have some empty frames. I'm going to fill the empty frames with stamps and hang them on the wall, because stamps are awesome. So many different, pretty, interesting designs, so many different countries and so much history. I love them.

I took this photo for my Unravelling course, as this week is about "favourite things". It's currently the desktop background on my iMac :)

A shot from the Werra

Update from yesterday's post: Richard got a roll of film back today that he shot with the Werra. Most of the photos weren't great but here's one we both like. Unphotoshopped in any way.

I like old cameras

We have an abundance of film cameras. They're somewhat addictive. They can be picked up for next to nothing nowadays and they somehow have more personality than your generic DSLR! Here's a couple of sketches of two of my favourites.

This is my Olympus Trip 35. It's rather an iconic little camera - it's fully automatic apart from setting the film speed, and was launched in 1967 and made famous by David Bailey in a 1970s ad campaign. My particular one is from 1979 and is in almost mint condition. I paid hardly anything for it on eBay, but it's my favourite of all my cameras. (Apologies to my D80, but it's true.)

This is a Werra 1. It's a bit of an oddity. It was made by Carl Zeiss, the lens manufacturer, somewhere around 1950 to 1960. It takes 35mm film and to advance the film and cock the shutter, you twist a ring at the base of the lens. I've never seen anything similar on any other camera. The lens hood turns backwards and screws back into the body, and the lens cap screws onto the lens as if it were a filter, rather than just clicking on like normal lens caps do (I imagine this would be a bit annoying after a while!). This is Richard's newish toy. He found it in a charity shop in Stoke Newington a couple of weeks ago for £10 - bargain. He just shot a roll of film with it and left it in today to be processed - if any of the shots are particularly nice I'll update this post tomorrow.

Both drawn with Faber Castell Pitt pen, Caran d'Ache water soluble graphite pencils and a water brush.

Do you still have a film camera?

Unravelling week 2: reflections

This was a hard week for me because I hate hate hate being photographed. There are hardly any photos of me after the age of 14 or so, when I finally got sick of my dad constantly brandishing a camera and started to hide from it. I didn't take many photos this week, and I cheated a bit by not even being in all the photos I did take. (The above is one of the Unravelling writing exercises, reflected in my makeup mirror.)

I have had a kind of nothing weekend. No drawing at all. No painting. And I can't scan anything right now anyway as I rearranged my desk and now my printer lead doesn't reach my computer (did I mention I bought a new iMac? I love it) so I ordered a new one and will have to wait till it arrives. But I'm thinking I might do a doggy version of the "lots of cats" drawing tonight.

Feet

Week one of the Unravelling e-course finished today. So far it's great. The writing assignments are very thoughtful. I haven't actually put pen to paper yet (due to exams, yet again) but I have been thinking about what I want to write, and I've got a little journal to put them all in.

The photography theme for this week was "feet". Here's one of mine. I took with my rubbish little compact while waiting on the train. There's a few more in my Flickr, here.

Very bright butterflies

When I first bought my watercolour set, I had no idea what I was looking for, so I bought the biggest Cotman set in Cass Art. There are half pans of about thirty colours, maybe more. Turns out I only ever use about ten of them regularly and some I had never used at all and in fact never even seen on paper, so I sat down last night to have a bit of a play around with these poor forgotten colours. Here's the result! I like painting wet into wet, because you never really know what you're going to end up with till it dries. I'm going to paint more of these, but next time I'll try and make them a bit neater round the edges!

I have really been neglecting my poor camera lately. I have a Nikon D80 and it's a great camera, but recently it's only been used for taking photos of stuff I've made or received in swaps. So I've signed up for Susannah Conway's Unravelling e-course, which starts on 4 May. I have exams at the end of May and always tend to fret and worry around exam time, so this will force me to take a bit of time out and stop fretting for long enough to take a few photos! I can't wait for this to start. I love Susannah's blog - if you haven't visited it, you should. She's a lovely and very talented lady who takes beautiful photographs.

Elvis the catdog gets a faceful of butter.

My horrible husband is a big meanie. Elvis came to sniff what Richard was eating (crackers and butter) and Richard shoved one of them in the poor catdog's face. I snapped some photos very quickly - they're a bit out of focus but I hadn't time to fiddle :-)




Elvis made a halfhearted attempt to clean himself up, but has now given up and is wandering round the house looking much as he did when I took the photos.

UPDATE: About an hour later, some of the butter is still there. He appears to have forgotten all about it.

Neil the chicken

Here's Neil. I made him last night while watching 90210, the new series, which is terrible but for some reason I keep watching it every week.

Update on the "not eating out" thing (i.e. the challenge on purplepinkandorange): I haven't bought lunch at work for a whole week, I've brought it with me every day. We haven't been out for dinner, or even lunch at the weekends. And still no cakes or biscuits. Or chocolate. See my halo? See how sparkly it is? Of course I then ordered the new Grand Theft Auto DS game so any money I'd saved is now gone. Oh, and a flashgun for my Olympus Trip 35. Oh, and some gouache. But apart from that I've been good.

Rollei 35 & Mario baddy - separated at birth?

I was talking to my husband this morning about the Olympus Trip 35 and how cool it is, and he told me about the Rollei 35 which is also cool (and which sells for many pounds on ebay these days). I looked at the photo on Wikipedia and immediately thought of one of the bad guys from Super Mario Bros 2: Snifit. I ask you - do these two photos not look alike to you? He thinks not, but he is wrong.

Incidentally, I've decided I must have one of those little Rolleis, but that won't come as a surprise.

Joining the ranks of the Holga owners!

I love quirky photography, and I especially love vintage-looking images with saturated colours and light leaks and maybe even double exposures. I've always wanted a Holga, but the 120 film is hard to find these days and the processing costs have always been a bit scary. Well, this weekend I finally found a lab who will process medium format film without requiring me to sell a kidney (these guys) and that was that, I was straight to ebay to find me a Holga. It's coming from Hong Kong for a fraction of the price lomography.com wants for one. I can't wait to get my hands on it! I used a photo for this drawing, because obviously I don't have a real Holga sitting in front of me... yet.

Hopefully, the images will turn out something like this Photoshop mockup I did earlier using a photo of an awesome Corolla stolen from Dave_7 on Flickr (original photo from here).


I'm still having tons of fun with the graphics tablet, but I'm not sure I'm approaching the whole "digital drawing" thing in the right way. For starters, I'm only using Photoshop because I don't know how to use Illustrator. And I'm really not sure about blending colours - I've been kind of using a few colours and blending them together using the smudge tool, but I bet there's a better way. I would quite happily spend the whole day experimenting, but unfortunately I've got a LOT of uni work to do.

And with that, it's back to writing about Chico Buarque and the history of MPB... sigh.

Photography, 1956 style

Just for a change, I put away the D80 and put a roll of film in an Agfa Silette L that has been in our loft for years. I'm not even sure where it came from. The focus ring was completely stuck and wouldn't move, but a blast of hot air from a hairdryer sorted that out! The shutter sticks on B and 30, but at 60 and 125 it's fine. I had a wander around taking photos of random things, but I can't post any of the photos here because they haven't been developed yet! Remember that - having to wait on the film to be developed before you could see the photos? Sometimes I think it was more exciting in those days... Apparently this camera went on sale around 1956, and I think it looks very cool.

So since I have no photos to post, I drew this with my graphics tablet and Photoshop. I'm still learning but it's huge fun.

Things and stuff.

What have I been up to since my last post?

Well... I've been crocheting again, and I have a new crochet book. It's Tiny Yarn Animals, by Tamie Snow who is the brains behind Roxycraft which is a website anyone who's into crochet will no doubt recognise. I hoard amigurumi books but seldom actually follow the patterns because I find most of them too big, and I really prefer tiny little toys. Tamie's book, as the name suggests, is full of patterns for tiny little animals and they are all cute enough that I actually want to make them. I made this hippo for today's Thing-a-day. He's from a pattern in the book but of course I abandoned the pattern and did my own thing after a while. My husband named him Gregory - why I have no idea, but I think it suits him. I also learned how to do an invisible decrease from PlanetJune today - it's absolutely shocking to think that I've been crocheting for this long, and I own so many crochet books that no doubt give instructions for this, and I never knew it existed till now. And it makes a huge difference.

What else? Well yesterday was Valentine's Day, but my husband is a very vocal hater of the greeting card industry. So instead of buying him a card I drew him a picture. I should explain that he's a big Resident Evil fan, and also happens to work for a very well-known videogames company who make a certain zombie-filled game. And he is definitely better than zombies (although I do like zombies too).

He did get me a card though - the first year I've one that said "wife"!



Instead of going out and paying over the odds for a meal in a packed restaurant, we spend the day in the V&A, which is one of my favourite places. And I did an EDM challenge when I was there, which was #38 - draw in a museum. Unfortunately it didn't turn out as I wanted. It was very busy and people kept walking in front of me and blocking my view, and eventually I got annoyed, scribbled a few very rough details, and left in a sulk. This is a bust of Charles II and I'm posting a photo of the original beside it - can you tell the difference?

My second life drawing class was on Friday and it was as enjoyable as the first one. We moved on to using different 3D shapes to represent different body parts - cylinders, spheres, cones etc. My drawings are still not looking all that much like actual people! It was very very difficult to get half decent photos of my drawings, due to the lack of light in this apartment. I ended up having to put them on the floor and rig up a tripod (my husband's awesome Manfrotto that I wish was mine) so it was kind of kneeling over the paper, then using the brightest lamp we have as sidelighting and using a remote release to get a long exposure although I think I ended up using flash after all. And the photos are still absolutely terrible even after some photoshopping! There must be an easier way!


One thing I am happy about is that having upgraded to Photoshop CS4, I can finally shoot in Raw, which is making me want to go out and photograph everything.

Finally, the socks are done! Not only that but I've actually worn them out and they haven't fallen apart, and are so comfy that ordinary socks now feel rubbish. I've started another pair for my husband in some lovely blue yarn.

The roaming gnome returns.

I've been participating in the Roaming Gnome swap on Craftster, and today my gnome Filbert finally made it home. He's been to Marburg and Waiblingen in Germany, and Texas and Florida in the US. He even got to go to Disneyland! Lucky gnome. Here he is with all the stuff he arrived back with. He also had an album and CD full of photos, all of which I've uploaded to Flickr so I can look at them and remind me that my gnome has been to two countries I haven't been to myself. (It's true, I've never been to the US. One day though.)





He arrived with some goodies from Disney and I caught Pokey trying to steal them - have you ever seen such a guilty looking cat? Or come to think of it, it might be anger. "Whatchoo lookin' at? It's ma stuff."




My Thing-a-day today was a tiny little amigurumi bird. I thought these would be nice for Easter but I want to tinker with it a bit and make a slightly fatter one. I plan to write up the pattern and post it here in case anyone would like to make one for themselves. I've been playing with Poladroid a bit, which I think is very cool in a Lomography sort of way, so the little birdie got the polaroid treatment and I also tried out the new font I made with my own handwriting (make your own at this website, it's free and very easy).