Jonathan Gazeley

Since moving into a new house that has a garden, I decided to buy a chimenea – a traditional Mexican wood-fired outdoor heater and stove.

Last night, I invited a couple of friends round for some beers and a curry on the patio, and needless to say, the appeal of playing with fire was too strong to resist. Between us, a chemist, a physicist and an engineer, we stoked the fire until it was leaping out of the chimney.

Later on, the fire died down and I was able to get some shots of glowing embers. These ones were stuck around the grate at the top of the chimney.

And these ones were flying out of it!

This photo of scraping the ash out reminds me of an iron forge.

As I wrote recently on my blog, I bought a Tamron 90mm macro lens. Up until today, I’d only published a boring photo of a piece of Velcro. But over the last few days I’ve taken a few photos with it, and here are the results.

This is a screw. Bonus points to anyone who can correctly guess which type!

This is a piece of 35mm film. It’s black because it’s the exposed film leader that I snipped off when developing a film the other day.

A close-up of the aperture ring of the beautiful, scary and fun camera that is the Braun Paxette Electromatic II.

And finally, here are some flowers that I saw in Royal Fort Garden. No idea what they are. Anyone?

This is nothing more than a test shot for my new Tamron 90mm macro lens. If you’re interested, I’ve written a few words about it on my geek blog.

No doubt there will be many more macro images posted here in the future!

I’ve never really attempted to take photos of graffiti before, this week I saw two pieces in particular that I really like – and a third whose photo also came out OK.

I spotted all three of these in the Clifton area of Bristol. This first one isn’t that interesting, but I like the contrasty black & white look.

Here someone has painted a picture of a mains plug onto a piece of street furniture.

And this last one is a picture of Derren Brown, along with a playing card. His face was about five or six feet tall, and was just one part of a larger piece of art. There were two other faces that I didn’t recognise, but it was obvious that they are also magicians.

I just realised yesterday that I haven’t played with my macro extension tubes since I got a couple of new lenses for my DSLR. I was just messing around when I took this photo but I think it’s of my camera bag, which was on my desk. I love how the background looks like smoke.

Taken with a 50mm prime lens and macro extension tube on my Canon 450D.

Recently I’ve heard quite a lot about “tilt-shift” photography, or “fake miniature” photography. Done with a proper tilt-shift lens, you can mess with the lens to make a real scene look like a model. It’s also possible to fake the effect in post-processing, which is what I’ve been concentrating on since I don’t have a tilt-shift lens.

My friends Paul Seward and Dave Musson have also recently published fake tilt-shift photos, of Royal Fort House and Acocks Green railway station respectively, and last night I also looked through this page of 50 beautiful examples of tilt-shift photography.

Today I set out to take a photo that could be turned into a fake model. It’s not just about editing on a computer – you have to start with a photo taken from a high perspective, as if you were looking down upon a model. So I headed for the Clifton Observatory, which overlooks the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Avon Gorge.

I took this photo looking down the cliff onto the A4 that passes beneath, beside the river.

Despite it being a mediocre photo, I’m quite pleased with the result. I will definitely revisit this concept, and working on a university campus I have access to lots of tall buildings. Watch this space!

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.