Lens-Artists Challenge #357: Into the Woods
This week it’s the turn of Egídio of Through Brazilian Eyes to host the Challenge, and his theme is ‘Into The Woods‘. He says, ‘I briefly mentioned the Japanese expression shinrin-yoku in a post about national forests … a concept that was developed in Japan in the 1980s as a form of natural therapy and stress relief, or immersing oneself in a forest atmosphere. It is a way to allow all your senses to experience nature mindfully.’ Egídio continues, ‘this week’s challenge is about how you [practise] ‘forest bathing’ in your corner of the world.
Regular readers of my blog may have noticed that the woods behind our house feature regularly in my blog posts. Whether it’s testing a new-to-me camera, or practising a new technique, or just going for a walk to relax or work off a heavy lunch, I’ll always head off for a ‘walk around the block’. For this Challenge, I’m taking one of my favourite cameras, the Olympus Camedia C-100 digital camera into the woods.
The Olympus Camedia C-100 is a 1.3-megapixel CCD sensor with a fixed-focus lens released by Olympus in 2001. It’s fully automatic, which means that you can make next to no changes to the image you are taking, like monochrome mode for my beloved aerochromes. It’s a ‘point-and-shoot’ camera, and the sliding lens cover means that I can’t fix a filter thread to the camera, so if I want to make trichromes or aerochromes then I have to hold filters over the front of the lens, and sometimes the surround of the filter, or my stubby fingers, get into the frame.
The unique feature of this camera is that the sensor is failing, and I reckon that it’s overexposing by around 10 stops. Without any filter the images are completely blown out, but I’ve found that with a cheap Neewer ND2-400 variable ND filter on its maximum setting the vastly overblown natural images are made much more legible. It’s still a little overexposed on bright sunny days, but in overcast weather or in shadow the results are quite ‘good’.
I took the Camedia C-100 on a walk around the block, along with a tripod and a collection of filters. My intention was to try to make some digital trichromes and aerochromes, with red, green, blue, and infrared filters, but looking at the images from the red filter I reckon that the sensor has deteriorated even further and it seems to be even more infrared-sensitive. This did actually have some benefits in that red/blue channel mixed images came out wonderfully, but the images are now full of artefacts. Of course, I’m perfectly happy with that, the more glitchy this camera becomes, the better.
Around the fields behind our house, the woods look as they used to, but now, the once thick eucalyptus woods have been cut down to make way for heavy duty power lines for the long-promised high speed rail line between Lisbon and Madrid. I can still derive a lot of pleasure from the woods that remain, but now I just have to walk a little further.
Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.
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