Jonathan Gazeley

This glowing standby light reminds me that the appliances in my flat are never asleep – even when I am.

Last weekend I found my old microscope, that I was given as a child. Even by the standards of a school science lab, it’s pretty poor – but as I child it made me feel like I was a real scientist.

Today I decided to see if I could take pictures with it using my camera. I set up the microscope without its eyepiece, and added a macro extension lens to my Fuji S9600. It took quite a while to get it set up properly – the hardest part was aligning the microscope with the camera on its tripod, but I eventually managed to stack up some DVDs.

Then was the fiddly issue of focussing it. I had to focus the microscope in the usual way, by turning the knob. Unfortunately, that made the whole barrel of the microscope move up and down – changing the distance away from the camera lens. After setting up the microscope, it was a case of moving the camera back and forth by tiny amounts, and lastly changing the focus on the camera. Of course, changing the focus on the camera moves the lens and not the body, and just touching the camera moved it around. It took ages to get it right.

I backlit the subjects of my photos using a halogen desk lamp and a small mirror that’s built into the microscope. Apologies for the quality of this image – it was taken on a phone.

Then it was just a case of running round the flat like a 6-year-old, looking for things to put on a slide. First I had a look at a daffodil petal. The microscope has three objective lenses, 150x, 300x and 600x respectively. Of course the camera’s macro lens also adds an additional 1.5x or so. I started with 150x…

…and then increased to 600x…

Bored of my botanical subject, I plucked a hair from my beard. Here it is at 300x…

…and at 600x…

And finally, here’s the end of the hair that was once attached in my follicle. This one only looks more zoomed in than the previous ones because I cropped it quite closely on the computer.

The bluish area in the picture seems to be the camera’s way of telling me it didn’t appreciate having a bright light shone right up its barrel, so I decided to call it a day before I broke something. I might revisit this idea with my 35mm SLR (which has better quality optics, and no CCD to accidentally ruin).

This a candidate shot for this week’s Photo Challenge theme – glass. I’m not sure if I like it that much, but time is ticking away so it might have to do.

A while back I was approached by another Flickr user, who asked if he could use one my photos alongside one of his poems.

Of course I said yes, and since then I completely forgot about it – until today.

You can read the poem, Loss, on his blog.

Recently I was asked to select some of my photos so they could be framed and displayed in a new meeting room at work.

I chose a night-time shot of Oslo, a snap of the new centenary sculpture, and a photo of traffic outside the Victoria Rooms in Clifton.

And here’s what they look like

This week’s Photo Challenge was a thousand words.

I tried to capture the feeling of a row between a couple, and one member of the couple storming off in the car, running over the roses they had just been given.

It’s my birthday today, and Hannah bought me a Whittard of Chelsea coffee grinder. Needless to say, it grinds up beans and makes good coffee, but I also like the look of it. The base reminds me of a plinth that a statue might stand upon.

All this talk about the cold snap recently reminded me of my visit to Geneva in February 2003. I saw some spectacular ice around the edge of the lake that weekend.

These were scanned from 35mm negatives, taken with a disposable camera. Not bad, considering!

I shot a roll of black and white film over two snowy days on the 6th and 7th of January, 2010.

I wasn’t sure how it would come out, given that black and white film can only “see” the colours black and white, and the snow is white. As it turns out, I’m very pleased. Anything that’s not snow appears as black, and the contrast is striking. I think it’s right what they say about black and white photos showing more texture. I will definitely be using black and white for snowy scenes in future!

This is the snow sitting on my balcony railing. I love the texture.

This is a snowy car on the street outside my flat at night. I like the way the street light deepens the shadows in the tyre tracks.

Some students walk through the archway of the Royal Fort gatehouse on their way to lectures.

Some students built a huge snowman in Royal Fort Gardens. It must have been about ten feet tall, but when I visited it a day later it had started to lean.

This snow was sitting on the branch of a tree outside the physics building.

I recently built a pinhole lens for my 35mm SLR. I took some photos over Christmas and I just got the film back from the developers.

The results are good, given that this “lens” is a piece of tin foil with a hole in it. The focus is pretty good, although not perfect. The bigger defect is that most of the pictures are over-exposed, because my estimations must have been wrong. I’ve managed to largely correct the exposure on the computer.

Here are my favourites from the roll. To start, we have a picture of a bare light bulb.

A view of Clifton Triangle, Bristol. This is a bit like one I’ve taken before, although that was with a normal, sensible and boring lens.

And finally a view from my bedroom window at my parents’ house in Nuneaton. There was a little snow, but sadly not enough to do anything fun with other than admire for about ten minutes. I think the yellow spot is where the sun was, and I’m putting its colour down to a developing anomaly.