This is the third time I have written this post, but me darn computer keeps crashing. I have found this FANTASTIC set of Photoshop actions, I would even go as far as to say the BEST IN THE WORLD! dA user *rawimage has developed a set of actions that can turn any digital photograph into an image that look just like a Polaroid photo! No longer do I need to buy SX-70 film at £30 for 10 shots, "I'll just do it all in post". Haha!

Polaroid Generator V2

A photograph by Margaret Bourke-White.

In 1976 Diego Goldberg from Argentina decided to start an epic document of his family. On the 17th June every year the family stop and photograph them selves to "stop, for a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by."

To see their 33 year (and expanding) document of a family, visit the page on the Zone Zero magazine site: http://zonezero.com/magazine/essays/diegotime/time.html

Whilst stumbling around photography websites, I came across a site with some of the best locations found on Google Maps all turned into fantastic-looking wallpapers! The site was created by Austrtailan photographer, Ashley Ringrose (I think), who is part of the Australian inteactive agancy, Soap Creative. There's the link.

A new TLR has been unleashed on Japan. A plastic beast that takes 135 film; The Blackbird, Fly.

These little toy cameras are the latest thing to come from Japan. Well... there are only available in Japan at the mo, for ¥12,600 (about $127, £75 or €94).

Like the 35mm Holga back, it comes with different mattes, allowing you to take the classic TLR square images. 3 masks allow; standard 24x36 - for portrait shots, 24x24 - for small square images, and full frame - 36mm high and completely exposing the sprocket holes.

It can be used with the regular top-down view, or to achieve better landscape shots, rotated 90 degrees for use with a viewfinder.

The photos I've seen from it all look quite good, for a 'toy' camera. I really need to brush up on my Japanese and fly over there and try one out.

Stats:

Focus - 0.8m - infinity

Aperture - f7 and f11

Focal distance - 33mm

Shutter - 1/125

Features:

Bulb/Normal modes

Hot-shoe

Tripod mount

That's all I can get from my very limited Japanese, if you're better than me - http://www.superheadz.com/bbf/index.html translated it yourself.

I've been reading this great blog recently. Go Holga is a great site dedicated to the bare-bones Chinese camera. It's updated on an almost daily basis and is very conveniently arranged into categories, with a gallery and now a new forum. Go on! Check it out!

Another good one I found was Satsuei - basically, it Japanese for photography/photographing. The actual blog in fortunately in English, and has some brilliant shots on it.

A couple of weeks ago I was given an old, 120 camera spay painted entirely gold; don't ask why. But anyway, I cleaned it all up with white spirit and washing up liquid and did a pretty good job of getting all the paint off. It looked like one of the later Kodak Brownies, but had a little logo of some kind and the words "INDUSTRIA BRASILEIRA": Made in Brazil on the top. It was getting more intriguing. On the front, under the lens, it had big sliver letters spelling out "KAPSA" (Brazilians seem to like their capital letters). So I did a little Google search and came up with very little; things like the "Korean American Pharmacy Student Association" and an Arabian dish made from chicken and rice. With the general search being a bitter disappointment, I moved on to other things. I had a gander at Flickr and found a handful of people who still use them.

I thought to myself "that can't be all there is on the internet!" and had another look at the camera. Then I noticed that on the metal bit around the lens was the peculiar word "VASCROMAT", again in block caps. Crossing my fingers, hopping I found something relevant. It was a hollow victory when the 75 results came back 0.49 seconds later; they were all in Portuguese! And most were just telling you how much they were worth. I did manage to find the most important information. The shutter speed. It is apparently 1/100. Which means that I have to use 160 ISO film. Which unfortunately does not want to be found easily. So rather than wasting my life hunting film in the vast planes of eCommerce websites, I decided to use 400 ISO that was stopped down to 200 with an ND 2 filter.

The camera has a little window on the inside as a mask for the incoming light. It it no bigger than an inch square, so I could just get some ND lighting gel. You can buy a whole sheet for the same price as a regular glass filter, but I only want a tiny square. That is where a little help from my friends come is. I know a woman who is a TV production designer and she said that she could have a word with a lighting technician who would have some ND gels. So until then I'm stuck with 400 ISO colour negative film. I did read about red scaling colour film some time ago and remembers something about you having to adjust it exposure by a couple of stops. I looked it up again and indeed, the celluloid is ND 2-3 so I just did that with some 35mm with the canister blue-taced in upside down where the new spool would normally go and taped the leader to the take up spool and I'm looking forward to seeing the results.

Image by Rodrigo Moraes

Sorry if you've been trying to access the blog in teh past coupkle of weeks, Blogger have been taking down their FTP support, so I move the blog to Thingamablog instead. I've been templating for days to get it to work and it's still not finnished!

To make it up to you, here, check out JPG magazine.