Jonathan Gazeley

This week’s Photo Challenge theme is “street scene“.

This isn’t a particularly inspiring shot, but unfortunately the rain started just as I took it. It’ll have to do!

I’ve recently taken an interest in medium format photography. Aside from the “disastrous” first roll, this is the first picture I’m pleased with it.

My Conway camera doesn’t have a tripod socket so this long exposure (probably about 15 seconds) was taken by holding the camera tightly against my balcony railings. Unfortunately I knocked it a bit, as you can see by the kink in the headlights in the distance.

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 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.

The other night, I saw a strange cloud formation at a weather front forming around sunset. I rushed to get my camera to capture it before it disappeared. The result of my haste is a pretty poor picture of a weather front, but I like it because of the way the fish eye lens curves the street.

Shame I also left it in automatic mode – the dark areas are quite noisy.

Last night I was woken by noise and flashing blue lights, so I immediately went to the window. I saw a car on fire in the street below my flat, so I whipped my camera out. It was a bit dark for decent photos, but this is what I saw. I’ve no idea how long the fire had been burning when the fire service arrived, but I guess not long, given that the fire station is about 200m from here.

At one point the flames reached about twice this size but unfortunately I was fiddling with my camera’s settings to try and get a sharper image.

The fire service quickly brought the flames under control and eventually put them out.

You can see the ghostly outline of a fireman in this picture, backlit by the blue lights of the fire engine.

The car is still there this morning, just a shell of its former self. I hope they remove it soon – it’s an eyesore on an otherwise pleasant street.