I will begin a review of the equipment, and systems I have used over the years, and I will try to explain why that equipment was good or bad and whether or not I would use it again?

So first of all let’s start with my first camera, given to me one Christmas by my paternal grandmother; a Kodak Brownie. The camera was originally given to grandmother by my father. She had used it for many years before passing it on to me.

(Image source; www.canalscape.net)

This was a fairly basic camera; it took 127 film (black and white or colour) and the only controls I can remember were the film advance knob and the shutter release. They were extremely popular at one time, being very simple and relatively inexpensive. I seem to remember Kodak had a “motto”, “you press the shutter and we’ll do the rest”.
If I remember correctly I only ever put two films through it, and of those two films one “holiday snap” was quite good.
It was a scenic shot of Ventnor taken on our family holiday the following June. It was enough, the bug had bitten and I was hooked.
My dad, who was quite keen on photography having been an aerial photographer in the RAF, had an Olympus OM10 and I believe an Agfa rangefinder type camera, he used to take slides on 35mm. I could not aspire to that type of equipment at that time as I only had my pocket money (not much in the 1970s).
I would have to wait until I left school and earned my own money…
I have still got the Brownie somewhere, and I still have the negative that got me hooked; If I can find it maybe I’ll scan it in and upload it here. Then you can decide whether or not I have improved…

One of the issues causing the most problems for our poor competition secretary at the moment is the difficulty some members have with ensuring their entries to the DPI competition are the right size and format.

If this is you, you may find the video below of use as it leads you through two simple ways to accomplish this task.

If the video is too small, you can click on the icon bottom left to make it full screen, if necessary used the “cog” icon to increase the quality to HD…

I duly turned up and set up my equipment and began to take images for a 360 panorama.  someway through the process I noticed I was getting some very strange exposure information on the histogram display.  I could not figure out what was happening.

I then noticed I was getting some odd reflections in the images, I had never seen these before, at first I thought it was something like flare as if I shaded the lens I could minimise the effects.

The exposures though were way out.  I switched off my camera and restarted it.  I took lenses off and replaced them.  No luck.

Then I started to get an odd shadow on the images.  I took the lens off again to check the sensor and this time I happened to look at the back of the rear lens element.  There on the back element was resting a small mirror.

It was the small sub-mirror from behind the main mirror and it had obviously become detached.

Nothing for it, it had to go back to Olympus for repair.  It was away for just over 2 weeks, although I had a Sony compact which is very good, I really missed my SLR.

Thanks to Olympus, it is back, fully functional and I am rearing to go take some new images…

It is now at version 4.

More information is available here;

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom.html

Read it here.

• Resizing in PhotoShop

  
  

Hope you like it…

Adobe – Adobe Store – United Kingdom – Adobe Photoshop CS5.

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