Ideas - inspirations experiments & notes

As mentioned previously, I've been slowly working through the illustrations in the factory repair manual for the Polaroid SX70 camera. Here's a couple of diagrams from it, reworked and hopefully made a little clearer, to show the basic light path (click to see the full size image). The camera's incredibly complex mechanism allows a remarkably clear, [...]

A quick frame showing some illustration work I've been doing recreating some technical drawings of an old Polaroid camera, the folding SX70 Land camera. The SX70, initially released in 1972, is still a technical marvel - a brushed steel* and leather box that expands with an intricate folding mechanism to reveal a manual-focus SLR camera capable of [...]

Reading a story in New Scientist about caustic light interference led me to the photographs of Philippe Bompas. He created the images using the play of sunlight reflected from a chrome surface or falling through rippling water. Via flickr,l-00.net

Detail from a shot of a recent visit to see some hypnotic jellyfish.

Want one!Jonas Pfeil has come up with a brilliant new way of capturing spherical panorama photographs, using an array of small cameras embedded into a ball. When the ball is thrown into the air, an internal accelerometer detects the highest point of its arc, and simultaneously captures 36 images from the cameras distributed across the surface of the [...]

Really like the photos by Mark Laita that were picked up by New Scientist today.Some beautiful shots of some amazing creatures, including this one of a porcupine puffer fish. Hmmm - spiky sushi...

How to replace the broken LCD screen on a Lumix FS62 digital camera

Detail from one of my photographs of the tropical plants at Kew Gardens.

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One of my photos taken using a Canon IXUS running the CHDK firmware to unlock some of the camera's deeper settings. These are ~1/10000 sec shutter speed exposures of a lighter being lit, with the flint sparks and igniting gas frozen in time.

One of my photos of Stockwell bus garage in South London. The huge arched concrete roof was designed by Adie, Button and Partners, with the engineer A E Beer. When it was built in 1952 it was the largest unsupported area under one roof in Europe, and is now a Grade II listed building thanks to the campaigning of, amongst others, Will Self, who lives [...]

One of my beloved cameras. Contaflex were 35mm SLR cameras produced by the German Zeiss company in the 50s and 60s. This particular one is a Contaflex I, featuring a between-the-lens leaf shutter in a lovely Zeiss Tessar 45mm f:2.8 lens.This thing is built like a tank, has amazing optics and has zero electrical components. On the downside, the lens [...]

Travelling on a Southeastern train over the weekend I noticed the effort that had been made on the interior. Some parts of the design were perhaps technically unnecessary, but I like the fact that someone has considered these small things.In particular the detailing around the overhead lights pictured above brought to mind classic sci-fi scenery [...]