The Limbo Connection's photos with the keyword: smile

Lacock Abbey; one of the chambers accessed via the cloisters. The cloisters survived the building of a new house by Sir William Sharington, its new owner following the dissolution of the monasteries: he simply built on top of them. Not so fortunate was the abbey church; he demolished it for use as building materials. Many visitors to Lacock Abbey have been inspired to come as a result of seeing movies about J. K.Rowling's Harry Potter character. I don't know if the lady in the picture and her family were there because of that, but they were very cheerful and tolerant of photographers in their way. This photo was taken using a Nikon D700 and a Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.3-5.6 G lens. I am on my third copy of this lens, having sold the earlier two, mostly out of photo-snobbishness that they weren't pro grade optics. However, they have other virtues, chief among them of being astoundingly light in weight for a camera lens.

In my limited experience, approaching strangers to take their photograph provokes varying reactions. By far the greater number readily consent. Surprisingly few show any interest in seeing the result.

Nikon D2Xs and Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF-D lens. 400 ISO, f/4.5, 1/80th. Window light.

Irrespective of whether I use the 35-70mm on a full frame or a crop sensor camera, I strongly favour the maximum telephoto setting. I might as well just fit an 85mm and shoot with that.

A photograph which I bought on eBay. It was not the best of compositions; something like a haystack in the background blended in with the girl's hair disconcertingly. With the aid of the simple editing tools in the Paintbrush application, I attempted to tidy it up. The original photograph was printed on Kodak Velox paper, a very slow printing paper producing a blue-black image suitable for contact printing. As the original print measures 3.25 x 4.25 inches it is reasonable to suppose the negative came from 118 type roll film such as a Box Brownie might need, or a Kodak Model 3 or a Hawk-Eye. All this helps to date the photograph, but the best indicator is on the reverse which has a repeat motif of ‘Kodak/Velox/Paper' in three lines. That dates it to sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, unless the developer was using old stock. Kodak discontinued that paper in 1968. Kodak advertised Velox as ‘the only photographic paper made exclusively for amateur negatives’. The imperfections on this particular print indicate it was not made by a laboratory striving to maintain a business reputation. Later I rendered it infrared via a filter effect, and now I have added a Daguerreotype effect in the Picmonkey editor. Collections of photographs which once meant something to somebody are a staple of house clearances. They are bought in auctions and sold online.

Many Zenit cameras were supplied with a Helios-44 lens of 58mm focal length and a maximum aperture of f/2. This lens was a Soviet copy of the Carl Zeiss Biotar lens and had distinctive bokeh characteristics. So Helios = Zeiss. Possibly. This photograph was made with one of the original Helios-44 lenses from the KMZ factory - not one with -2, -3, -4 or M after the "Helios-44". It has a preset diaphragm where aperture adjustments are made at the front. The handling is dreadful. But the results are rewarding, save for the high rate of attrition through bad focusing and wrong exposure (both being my fault, not the fault of the lens).

Was only a jpeg to begin with. Cropped. Converted to B&W. Result: tiny file. Nikon D2Xs & Tamron SP AF 17-50mm f/2.8.

A girl. A smile. A camera. Click. Later: A black-and-white print (No name, no details). Much later: The black-and-white print On eBay. Sold. (No name, no details). The girl - Who knows?

Devizes market place. Nikon D2Xs + AF-S DX Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G lens.