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Solar Eclipse 2026 – Partial in the UK

Last night we were in the garden with our little home made pin hole projector.

Piece of white paper, with a project from a pinhole showing the eclipse of the sun

The last solar elipse in the UK was back in 1999. I got up at 3am in the morning and rode the few hundred miles down to the line of totality. Then pointed the motorcycle at the bluest and clearest bit of sky and road to the south coast.

Piece of white paper, with a project from a pinhole showing the eclipse of the sun

Parked up in a pub carpark sitting in full biker leathers with a glass of cold lemonade I enjoyed my first and only total solar eclipse.

Piece of white paper, with a project from a pinhole showing the eclipse of the sun

Last night it was about 90% in the uk, so with a piece of card, that we had punched a small hole into, and a piece of white paper, we projected the sun onto the paper to view it safely.

It did go darker and it was a great experience.

The next one is about 50 years away so its looking doubtful that I will make that one.

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Cinema Lens

Nude blonde model kneeling on a bed, she has black hold up stocking on and is covering herself up with a sheet.

There has been a Long tradition with movie makers to find classic old lens with a certain look and have them re-cased as cinema lens.

Nikon announced a while ago they would be releasing a range of cinema lens and recently Cooke announced that their SP3 and AP3 cinema lens would now be available for the Nikon Z mount.

As is generally the case, these will be outside most people’s budgets.

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The World Wide Web

I have a had a long career in IT. From mainframes to the start of the PC revolution and the start of networking computers. I have memories from the 1990’s of pulling up the floor to find where the good old coax cable had become broken and brought the whole network down.

I was browsing Mastodon and came across a reminder that last week that we are in the 35th anniversary of the World Wide Web.

Back then the first web browser just ran on powerful Next Machines at Cern, but they developed a universal command line browser similar to w3c that I use sometimes on one of my Linux ThinkPad.

A screen capture of the w3c command line browser I sometimes use on one of my ThinkPads running Arch.

Now with restrictive laws and age verification we are killing the open web; forcing people to use Facebook and other gatekeeping closed systems that steal from us and feed us a lie.

Thank you Tim Berners-Lee and the team, lets hope the open web survives.

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Street Photography – sneaking a shot or asking?

An older couple sat in the corn hill square in Lincoln. Both are sat resting after doing some shopping.

I see a few styles of street photography. The shot above, a general scene, people in the shot. Its a shot that people do not mind too much being in shot.

A charity working in a pretty dress collecting money. She has blond hair with a blue hair tie and a blue dress.

For the more street portrait style, I go up and ask people. It’s only polite. But I know some people just shove a camera in peoples faces.

Young blond model in green trousers and black top stood next to an old lamppost. She os stood in an old street in Lincoln.

Of course the opposite to street photography, when I hire a model and take her for a photo walk on a city street.

What’s your way of working?

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Batteries

A unboxing photograph of a Leica M10. Its sat on a wooden table with a leather half case next to it.

If you have an older Leica M9, M10 or M240, then I see Leica batteries are back in stock.

When it comes to Nikon as they have kept the same battery format since the D800, I have lots of Nikon Batteries, but when I bought my Leica I ensured I bought some spare batteries to go with it.

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Having a break

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, been concentrating on other things. Had a few studio shoots, catch up with my favourite model and generally concentrating on the day job.

The heat and humidity just seems to go on at the moment.

Hope your all taking care in this warm weather.

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Camera Aspect Ratio

Black and white shot of a young model wearing an off the shoulder dress. She has her arms up holding her long hair up.
Young dark haired model, one hand going over her head the other touching her neck.

The joy of large megapixels is the ability to crop, select different aspect ratios without loosing too many megapixels, but you will always loose some.

Panasonic took a different route.

  • 4:3
  • 3:2
  • 16:9
  • 1:1

You can with most cameras select an aspect ratio but it just crops in camera and you lose pixels. Panasonic created a sensor that keeps the diagonal pixel count the same, so if you switch to a narrower and taller aspect while a traditional camera just looses pixels of the side the Panasonic extends the height.

It’s one reason why a lot of people like the Panasonic GH and compact range.