• BLACK CAT Extended Range
  Exposure Guide
• Andrew Lawn’s Exposure Calculator
• Human Rangefinder Card Generator

Full Manual Photography

Quick Photo Links

Lately I have been spending less time gazing at digital cameras and the resulting pictures and instead have been more interested in the analog counterparts. In my hours of browsing through flickr, I continuously notice that a lot of people are creating beautiful images with toy cameras. Last night, I remembered that several years ago, I was given the camera pictured here. It’s an Ansco Pix Panorama. It’s 100% plastic and is completely fixed — fixed focal length, fixed focus, fixed shutter speed, fixed aperture. There is no way to make any sort of adjustment other than the placement of the camera.

Here are the specs:

• 28mm lens
• fixed focus
• 1/125
• f/11
• 35mm film
• 13x36mm panorama mask

This camera was new when I received it, and I think I have only run one roll of film through it since. I just wasn’t that interested in it when I received it. Things are different today. I’m hoping to grab a roll of film on the way home from work today to try it out.

Some Ansco Pix Panorama photos on flickr:

• Ansco Pix Panorama by That was my foot.
• Ansco Pix Panorama by escapo
• Ansco Pix Panorama – flipped lens by QsySue
• ansco pix panorama by mey0r
• Ansco Pix Panorama by Alex Hills

Ansco Pix Panorama

Lighting 101 is the foundation on which Strobist is built, and is the best place to start. The PDF version of the tutorials is mirrored here as a service to the Strobist community.

Strobist Lighting 101 (pdf)

Strobist Lighting 101 PDF

From what I have been seeing in the DIY Ring Light arena lately, it doesn’t get any cheaper than this.

Dirt Cheap Ring Light

I think this photo speaks for itself. Banksy does it again.

Throw Away Your Television

Chris posted this recently, and I just had to share it. For my use, however, I’d like to see the space bar be a little taller.

Google Reader Keyboard

From Christmas

A few days ago, I had not ever heard of High Dynamic Range Imaging, or HDR for short. When I saw an example, I knew I had to try it out. I first found out that the file format for these special images is wide open. It seems that Industrial Light & Magic created this format and open sourced the code to work with it. I found two excellent resources for studying up on HDR. And most importantly, I found Photomatix, which is the software for creating HDR images. I have barely scraped the surface of HDR, but I do have a sample image ready to go. I’m seeing the potential for a lot of fun photos with HDR. And apparently, there are a lot of great examples out on Flickr.

High Dynamic Range Imaging