Jonathan Gazeley

This week’s Photo Challenge theme is the past.

Take a photo that has a connection with the past. It could be something that reawakens a memory for you, or invites you to reminisce. It could be an old item, or an ancient place. Perhaps a person.

I decided to recreate a self-portrait of my Grandad that he took while on active service in Korea in 1955. We’ve been told we look quite alike, and I tried to emphasise this with my choice of location and clothes.

So this is my way of keeping the past alive.

Incidentally, if you are interested in my Grandad’s unusual colour photos of post-war Korea, you can see them all on Memories of Korea.

Taken for the “Whose hand?” Photo Challenge.

The theme of this week’s Photo Challenge is Randomness. As usual I’ve tried to take as many photos on the theme as possible, with the intention of picking my favourite shortly before the deadline.

I think randomness can have two main interpretations – something that is random in nature, or the more modern meaning of some kind of generalised stupidity.

The latest buzzword used amongst mindless teenagers as a way of showing just so utterly irreverent their predictable sense of humour is. Particularly dominant among English teens and University students, the word “random” or the act of being “random” is a desperate plea for others to recognise how totally against the grain of the norm you are and that you’re really crazy and out there. Trouble is, being “random” is predictable, boring, moronic and extremely sad indeed.

Urban Dictionary

Working on a university campus, I think I encounter enough irritating randomness on a daily basis, so I decided to concentrate on the former. I tried to find random things in nature that I could point my camera at.

The first “random” thing that sprung to mind was rolling a die or flipping a coin. Unfortunately I don’t have any dice but I did find a 10p coin. I put the camera and two flashguns on tripods and used a handheld trigger to fire the camera. Unfortunately it was much harder than I had imagined to fire the camera at the right time to capture the flipping coin (no pun intended!). Out of about a hundred shots, only a handful even had the coin in the shot, and most of those were unusable for one reason or another. This was the best one, although I’m still not pleased with it. It’s too dark, and not gripping enough.

In the past I have tried taking photos of smoke and had decided to revisit it one day. Smoke seems to move in a fairly unpredictable way, so it seemed to fit the randomness theme. I ran into many of the same problems as last time. I tried to use a second flashgun to provide twice the light, but I only have one snoot and the second flash illuminated the backdrop, so I had to turn it off.

I’ve seen fractured ice before, and I like the random effect of the crack lines. I attempted to crack ice cubes with a hammer but it was hard to smash them in a “pretty” way. They also start to melt seconds after being taken out of the freezer, and using an SLR with macro extension tubes and manual focus is a fairly time-consuming exercise, so most of the sharp fractures had melted before I was able to capture them.

This is the best ice photo. You can see my ring flash reflected in a couple of places, because the ice had melted enough to become smooth, reflective water.

Last but not least, I attempted some photos of small bubbles. These are just washing-up suds in a wine glass.

This week’s Photo Challenge was on the theme of Perspective.

Perspective. Think about the appearance of things relative to one another as determined by their distance from the viewer.

For example objects nearer to the viewer appear bigger than objects which are far away, and straight lines leading away from the viewer (such as roads) converge on a point. Take a photo which illustrates perspective, looks at the world from an unusual angle, or otherwise plays with our expectations of perspective.

Here are some examples: http://xenophilius.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/top-20-forced-perspective-photos-photos/

And here’s the Youtube video which prompted this suggestion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivlVfChBkzg

And here’s what I came up with.

It looks like it has been Photoshopped, but it hasn’t. At least, not in the way you think it has. The toy car is really there – all I did was crudely clone out the plastic spatula in GIMP. And before you say – editing is allowed according to the rules of the Photo Challenge!

I tried to soften the focus on it using a localised Gaussian blur but I’m not really very experienced with image retouching so I gave up before I ruined it.

This week’s Photo Challenge is called What is it?. The idea is to take an extreme close up of something, so it’s hard to tell what it is.

I’m still getting to grips with my new Canon 450D, but I bought a set of macro extension tubes and I’ve been experimenting.

I may or may not enter one of these, or another one, into the Challenge itself. So I’m not going to say what these are

This week’s Photo Challenge theme was Plug & Play.

This is a fairly uninspired shot, but I wanted to test out my new camera – a Canon 450D. I tried to aim for a slightly unusual subject, as part of the Challenge this week is to avoid lots of similar entries by doing something unpredictable.

Maybe this is quite predictable; I don’t know. I just felt sorry for my speakers which haven’t been used since my amp died a death last month

This morning was a very foggy one across Bristol, so I decided to take my camera to work and find something for this week’s Photo Challenge – framing your photos with a box. So you’ll understand why these photos are all taken through a cardboard box!

Fog is my favourite weather – mainly because of its feel and smell. It is, however, hard to capture on camera. What looks mysterious and dreamy to the eye looks like a dirty camera lens when you see the photos later on. But here’s what I achieved during my stopoff at Castle Park.

The first one is a view of Bristol Bridge.

Here’s St Peter’s church, disappearing into the mist. The greyish cast over the photo, combined with the rough frame and old architecture makes me think this photo might have been taken a hundred years ago.

This is another view down the river, this time facing in the direction away from Bristol Bridge. It was the buoys that caught my attention.

I can’t take all the credit for this composition. I was trying to compose a shot of the cranes and some birds flew into the frame, so I pressed the shutter as quickly as I could.

This week’s Photo Challenge was Fire. This is my effort.

For those who are wondering, no, this wasn’t a real fire. It’s nothing more luxurious than a Sainsbury’s carrier bag held over the flash with a hair band.

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

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.