Jonathan Gazeley

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?

Sorry, I’m useless at names of flowers. But these are pretty, and I like the depth of field from my new lens

This is the back of Osborne Villas, as seen from the tops of the buildings on Woodland Road.

This chap was sitting on a bench in Brandon Hill park one lunchtime, reading. Hana thought it was me! Slightly offended – that guy was probably in his 60s and bald with glasses. Perhaps Hana needs glasses

This view is from the top of Constitution Hill.

I think photos of flowers in black and white are unusual – probably because flowers are noted for their colour. I took a few floral photos on this roll of film, and they were mostly quite average. But this one appealed to me for some reason. I think it’s the bokeh in the background.

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 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.

These yellow roses were in a vase in my parents’ living room. The room wasn’t dark at all – the sun was streaming in the window but the roses were brighter than their background.

I took these photos with a 35-70mm lens, using an additional macro lens.

A pink lily

Cotton reels

A crystal of aragonite

Unfortunately the developing lab treated my negatives pretty badly, as I wrote about on my blog earlier today. Here’s a close-up of some of the scratches on the second aragonite photo, which I think are really distracting.