Vintage Camera | Tim Guihot Photography

A New Week…

With new ideas and new inspirations.

Still working on keeping my stress levels down, something which certain entities seem hell bent on preventing.

Been experimenting, doing some landscape photography (something I don’t consider myself as much good at yet) and various post processing tricks. Also playing around with more controlled studio/still life stuff. I have received some positive feedback via my deviantart and 500px pages. I have a few more ideas that have yet to come to fruition (distracted by food and the cricket) but I will probably get around to it soon and do another post here. Meantime anyone can follow what I am doing in bulk at either of the aforementioned sites.

i decided to give my 24-70mm 2.8 Sigma another chance this week. It’s been a hassle, this lens. the lack of weather/dust proofing became an early issue since I live and photograph in a frequently dusty and usually windy area, and it was quick to get some larger dust specks between the elements. The majority of them have shifted but one is still there. Generally it does not have any effect on my photo’s that five seconds with the spot removal tool in LR won’t fix, but for some reason it effects me psychologically lol. My main gripe is it never seems to perform as well as my 50mm or my other Sigma lens, the 70-20mm DG APO OS HSM 2.8 which I rate highly now that I am used to it and it is hardly ever off my camera unless I need wider coverage. So I went landscape hunting with the 24-70mm and my Manfrotto tripod to see how it performs under strict controls to improve it’s sharpness. The landscapes at the bottom of the post (bar the black and white IR pic at the end) were made with this lens and I will admit I am more happy with the results than previously.

My favourite project for the week has been ratting out the old Praktica film SLR, giving it a bit of a clean and playing around with studio type lighting. This old camera was picked up by my uncle around 1969/70 while he was serving in Vietnam and it was passed to my father for some reason and then found it’s way into my possession. It has the full kit, flash, meter, a small aged tripod, the full hard cover, a bag and three lenses (the third not pictured as it is stashed somewhere else I think) I am not sure it still works too well. The shutter works, it loads film though the film advance lever gets stuck on occasion. Everything else seems to work but until I get it checked and run some film through it properly I can’t tell how well it works. Thhe lenses all need a bit of TLC as well.

In one photo, on the side of the long lens, you can see engraved my uncle’s army number on the tripod collar, the number is also present on most of the kit. Bit of a family heirloom then as such. Would love to get it refurbished (or at least working, I don’t care about cosmetics really) and run some decent B&W film through it. One day I’ll also get an old Nikon F series camera (or two(or more lol))

Now for some pics.