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I've experimented with merging multiple photo exposures together a few times now. Four years or so ago I managed to cobble two photos from a Pentax *ist DL together with the help of a lot of layer masking, and the result was okayish. In 2007, and armed with a copy of Photoshop CS3, I managed to bodge two handheld shots of the Eiffel Tower together into this:

.. which I still quite like, despite it being rather rough around the edges. This weekend, though, I've been testing Photoshop CS5, which includes an improved "Merge to HDR Pro" tool that can attempt to automatically remove some of the blurring caused by objects that move between exposures. And so armed with that, a tripod and a camera body that can auto-bracket exposures, I gave it another shot.

First I tried the docklands. Between getting harassed by a Barclays security guard and rained on a bit I did manage to get one shot of the dome:

.. and this shot of one of the docks, which came out fairly well:

But with next to no wind nothing served to test the ghost removal. And so to the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge, where it was blowing a gale and raining on and off. First I tried this postcardy shot:

.. and, as it turns out, the ghost removal worked a charm: without it this image contains three planes (top left) and a blur under the bridge where the boat was moving, but with the ghost removal option ticked both are sharp. For something a bit harder I tried some trees – these were blowing in a wind that was strong enough to smack me around the face with the camera strap:

Again, the tool did a fantastic job here – the trees are a tiny bit messy, but so much better than the green-blur-covered original. All in all, I was thoroughly impressed – getting a sharp HDR merge has gone from a task that takes a few hours to a matter of minutes on a fast computer. And although some HDRs can look really, really naff, I did get a shots that I quite like, including this:

And an elephant:

And a ruined church:

.. so the results don't have to be too lurid. All things considered I can't see myself using this technique that often, but for the occasional shot of buildings when there's a suitable wall or tripod available it could be a nice way to get a more complete image.

One of the great things about working on a computing magazine is access to a lab full of all sorts of geeky stuff – including a microscope. This belonged to PCW Magazine, may she rest in peace, but on Wednesday Anthony managed to get it working again, and so during lunch we rigged up a camera to take some photos. Here's the ball on the end of a .5mm Bic Cristal biro:

.. and the embossed letters on my (surprisingly spangly) credit card:

.. and the end of a pin on an Athlon CPU, which as it turns out is made of two metals:

We also managed to shoot some video. Here's the minute hand of my watch, ticking along 1/2600th of a revolution every second:

It's quite impressive. The camera setup we have is somewhat jury-rigged at the moment (picture here) but I'm hoping to find a proper camera adapter – Nikon used to make Coolpix camera mounts for this SMZ800 microscope. In the meantime, more pictures of stuff up close can be found here.

Cats, flowers, cats, flowers. Need to photograph something new.

I spend far too much time on Flickr and a lot of that time gawking at photos shot on old-fashioned film. Flickr may have millions of users toting digital-compacts, and probably just as many who are unhealthily obsessed with their DSLRs, but it also has a really strong community of those who won't – and it's mainly won't, rather than can't – move from film to digital. And many of them take some really beautiful photos.

And you can see why. For one, some films seem to impart a unique look to photos that's at best time-consuming and at worst impossible to replicate on a digital image. I loved the look I could get from Provia in my F80, even if it did cost a fortune to process and posed serious questions about how much film it is acceptable to keep in a small home fridge:

Film also imposes some discipline that's helpful if, like me, you have a tendency toward crap photos. Each roll holds only a few shots, so you must compose each carefully. And then there's the cult-of-film aspect: unlike the millions of plebs who take digital snaps, film photography is, now, a more niche pursuit. Those with a liberal arts degree might want to to knock up one of those dichotomy lists so beloved of theorists and/or poseurs (digital/film, many/few, snapshot/art, blah), not that it would prove anything. But anyhow. I owned several film cameras, then sold my best to buy a DSLR because digital photography is, in every way, more practical.

And then on Sunday, while diving through cardboard boxes in pursuit of batteries, I found one of my film cameras: a "vintage" (old) 1973 Zenit E SLR. This camera was made in the USSR, designed with the aesthetic care and attention usually lavished on anti-aircraft emplacements and made from what I think is a solid chunk of aluminium. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be radioactive – it's got that "made before safetly considerations" look to it. And then, lurking in the bottom of the box, a spare roll of film. What better way to waste a sunny afternoon than to give it a whirl.

The Zenit has five shutter speeds (plus one for bulb exposures) selected via a dial that regularly falls off the camera and its light meter gave up the ghost some time ago. Probably before I was born, actually. Remarkably the results came out pretty well exposed, and a few of them look OK. I quite like the soft background and colours on this:

while Hunter survived his visit to the 1970s, too:

And there's no denying that using the Zenit is strangely fun: the viewfinder makes everything look like a 1980s Thames TV broadcast viewed on a slightly frazzled Trinitron, all colour-cast and barrel distortion, and there's an amazing mechanical KER-CHUNK noise when you press the shutter accompanied by the whiz of the speed selector spinning around and doing its best to remove the skin from your hand.

There's also something undeniably neat about taking photos with a camera that requires not a single battery: the Zenit could probably survive a nuclear blast and still work (in fact, it'd serve as a handy hammer should you need to take part in civilisation-rebuilding). Truth be told, everything about taking photos on film again was enjoyable. So will I start lugging the Zenit, or perhaps a more practical film camera, around along with the D80? No chance. And here's why:

Dust. Gets. Fucking. Everywhere.

That's the shot of Hunter in Lightroom, and each circle is a dust spot correction that I had to add to remove the assortment of crap, crud, grime, hair and fluff that my film scanner picked up. And that's on a negative strip straight from the lab (there's one, conveniently, across from my office). Argh. And many of the other frames were far, far worse, to the point where I couldn't be bothered to clean them up. If it weren't for Lightroom's tools I probably would have just given up and chucked the film out.

So that's quite enough messing around with stips of chemically-treated plastic for now. I've packed the film scanner away again, and put the D80 back in the bag with a 4GB card (400 JPEGs – luxury. In my day, etc). But I won't be throwing the Zenit away – I'll come back to give it another try. Next summer, maybe.