Hiphopsideproject

To keep the blog ticking over in this busy period, here’s a draft I’ve had for a while. Enjoy!

So, my weapon of choice (uuum… what’s the term for camera? you know, like an axe is a guitar?… anyway) is a canon 400D (that’s XTi to some). And whilst I love love love it for all it’s worth, I do love my lomography and vignettes. Sooo I once saw this tutorial on how to make your DSLR into a pinhole. Nifty, thought I! So here we go!

Here’s your ingredients

1 DSLR camera (or, a camera with convertable lenses)
1 spare body cap (don’t use the one that you actually use, cos we’re gunna drill holes and shit)
Thin aluminium or thick tin foil

Here’s the tools you’ll need

Coarse sandpaper (try 20 or 40 grade)
Dremel/hand held drill/power drill
Thin needle
black marker
electrical tape (darkest colour you can find)

First things first, you want to sand off the name from the body cap. There’s no real reasoning to this, other than it gives you a nicer flat surface and looks tonnes neater with the finished lens. Use you rough sandpaper, or one of your dremel attachments, then finish with a finer grade.

Then, drill a hole through the very centre of the body cap, quite a small hole is best! On the inside of the body cap, over the top of the hole, stick your thin aluminium/tin foil using the black electrical tape. Through the centre of the hole, and the aluminium, use the finest needle you have to poke a tiny little hole. TADA! You’re done.

Here’re some photos I took using the said pinhole lens, have fun playing with you camera settings for this one! Long shutter speeds and a tripod are most definitely your friends. I also really like the dirt spots, but they also make me feel like a bad camera mother.

I’ve seen these photos floating around for a week or two, but after spotting the ad in this months Elle I decided to really needed to see the other photos properly! Shot by photographer Ellen Von Unwerth, Kylie features in these fun styled images for TOUS to promote their jewellery and accessories (some of which I think are partly her babies?). There seems to be a bit of a love/hate relationship with these photos across the interwebs, but I really like them. I think the colours are a great, cute combination, and any campaign that features giant teddy bears and macarons really has my love ♥ The inspiration from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is very evident (same pallete, styling, saccharine sweetness…), and whilst it doesn’t quite match up with the amazing aesthetics of that film, I think it’s a pretty good photo shoot for a celeb, ‘cos lets face it they usually turn out pretty shitty! & Kylie looks amazing, right? Even if she is airbrushed to hell.

What do you guys this of this shoot? I’m interested to hear your thoughts seeing as there’s such a differing buzz about these photos!

The view across from Kowloon at night, we were waiting for the light show (which is so-so), but this view is just amazing. Didn’t have a tripod (or remembered to bring my gorilla pod, grr), so this is just a rocky high iso shot.

Not far from the flower market you can find the Bird Garden/Market where loads of old guys gather to sell and socialise their birds. There were a lot of white-eyes (not sure if they were the japanese white eye? they looked smaller…) and lovebirds in cages of all varieties. Here’s a couple of photos, you can find more on my flickr.

I always enjoy taking photos of jellyfish, it’s usually a pretty challenging place to get photos, what with no light and only back illumination. Granted I usually bump my ISO right to the top, but still, you can get some really pretty photos! I seem to manage to take photos of jellies in every country I go to (Australia, Canada.. don’t think I have any from the US though). Here’s one I took yesterday at Ocean Park.