Lens-Artists Challenge #383: Looking Back To Challenge #174 – Shapes and Designs

This week it’s Tina’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is another ‘looking back’ challenge, where the host revisits the subject of a previous Challenge. On her blog, Travels and Trifles, Tina writes: ‘This week we look back to 2021 when our Lens-Artists Challenge #174 focused on Shapes and Designs.’ Back in 2021, Patti, who hosted the Challenge that week, invited us, ‘to share images that feature shapes and designs. Have fun searching for them in nature, in your home, in architecture, in food, in textiles, on the street–and just about everywhere else.’

For pretty much all of January, and forecast for at least the first half of February, Portugal has been battered with rain. So it’s no surprise that I’ve not been out much. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy, my mind is always trying to come up with things to do when the weather improves, and one of those things is circuit bending. This is something I’ve been keen to do for a long time, but what’s always scared me off is the possibility that I might break a camera.

Circuit bending is exactly as it sounds, taking a camera and deliberately introducing changes to the circuitry in the device that corrupts the image that the camera ‘sees’. Sometimes this can be quite extreme, with wires soldered into the circuit board connected to knobs and switches that can create all kinds of variations within an image. This requires a fair bit of skill with electronics, which I definitely don’t have, so I’ve taken what I called the ‘bull in a china shop’ approach and chose the simplest form of circuit bending: jamming metal foil into the ribbon wire connecting the sensor to the main board within the camera. 

Because I become far too attached to the digital cameras that I get especially for circuit bending, even those digicams from CEX for a few Euros, I decided to use the G6 Thumb Camera from AliExpress. If you are not aware, the G6 Thumb Camera is a cheap knock off of the hottest camera of the season, the Kodak Charmera. Like the Charmera, the G6 has a resolution of 1—2MP and has few other features than that. It is cheap though, at around 10—15€, and if broken, will not be missed.

So what I did was cut a thin piece of metal foil from a Ferrero Rocher chocolate and insert it alongside the ribbon wire in the G6s main board. When I turn on the camera, the image on the screen and the photographs are beautifully corrupted, with unusual colour shifts and patterns. As the weather has been so awful, I wandered around the house with the circuit bent G6 snapping as many patterns and designs as I could find.

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 following 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’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Abstract #Challenge #CircuitBending #Digicam #Experimental #Glitch #GlitchArt #Glitchy #LensArtists #LoFi #ShapesAndDesigns #ToyCamera #LensArtists

Lens Artists Challenge #380: What’s Around the Corner?

https://youtu.be/vEymZ3rXOmc?si=w2qBxdeMWuzSjDWx

This week, in the first Challenge of 2926, it’s Anne’s from Slow Shutter Speed turn to host. ‘Have you ever gone out on a photo outing and not seen anything that would have your camera saying, “Pick me up and help me take this picture”?’ asks, Anne. She continues, ‘I have a theory that there is always something to photograph.’ And I agree. You may have planned to make photographs of something and not found it, or you may not have planned to take anything at all and come across a scene that just stops you in your tracks, and I think that’s what Anne is looking for here.

‘What’s around the corner?’ What unexpected image is waiting for you just out of view? But then again, what is a corner? Lots of things have corners. A road may bend sharply around a corner, a racetrack has corners (and turns, and straights). A street has corners, a block — I don’t have much experience with them — has intersections, but each block has a corner. (Right?) Buildings have corners, blocks of flats, office buildings, houses, all have corners on the outside, and on the inside. Rooms have corners. Furniture, doors and windows have corners, picture frames have corners, photos and pieces of art have corners. There are corners everywhere. Even your eyes have corners, as everyone spots something out of the corner of their eye. There’s  no escaping corners.

But of course, that whole paragraph was just a delaying tactic. To give a little space to post a couple more images of the scene that greeted me this morning. I wandered into the kitchen to prepare my breakfast, and I could see this golden glow in the corner of the window. I wondered what it was and moved towards the glow, to be greeted with a thin sliver of sunrise peeking through a gap between the horizon and the thick grey clouds that blanketed the rest of the sky. The light was broken up into abstract streaks by the patterned frosted windows that we have in the kitchen, and I new that I couldn’t let these few moments escape.

With my well-worn Panasonic Lumix GF1 (I didn’t wear the smooth black paint off the corners of this GF1, that was its previous owner, who clearly used this camera a lot), and an Olympus 14-42mm zoom, I filled the frame with the glow and added a slight hint of intentional camera movement to reveal these lovely delicate abstracts. I hope you will agree that you don’t have to be out travelling to be surprised by something just around the corner, there’s beauty in a lovely warm kitchen too.

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 following week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Abstract #AroundTheCornerSurprises #Artistic #Blur #Challenge #Creative #Effect #Exposure #Image #LensArtists #Motion #Sunrise #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #378: The Last Chance

This time there’s no one host to the Lens-Artists Challenge. Instead, the whole team is hosting the ‘Last Chance’ challenge, picking images from 2025 that either never fit in the themes of the weekly Challenge or were not included in any previous challenges.

In addition to the Lens-Artists challenge, for the past couple of years I’ve been dabbling with the Frugal Film Project. This is a monthly ‘challenge’ where for the whole year you use one camera, with a value less than $75, and one film stock for the whole year. This year, my camera of choice was the ‘Golden Wonder’, the Welta Penti II half-frame Soviet-era Rapid format camera. My film choice was Harman Phoenix, which might not seem that ‘frugal’, but since 35mm film has to be decanted into Rapid canisters in12-exposure strips, I could get at least two full canisters out of each roll of Phoenix, which made it much more economical. 

https://flic.kr/p/2rsdFxX

The Rapid format was also a great way to explore different film techniques. In addition to using film normally in the camera, I experimented with redscaled film, where the film was loaded reversed into the camera and exposed through the support level first. I even tried some EBS exposures, literally exposing both sides of the film. I have to admit, though, this wasn’t too successful.

https://flic.kr/p/2rt4bPe

Of course, being me I didn’t just have one Rapid camera. Oh no, I tumbled full tilt down the Rapid format rabbit hole and now have a full range of Rapid, Karat (the post-war precursor of the Rapid film system), and SL (the Soviet version of the Rapid system) cameras. Some of these cameras were awful, but there were a couple of real gems, like the Bilora Radix,  with its square format images, and the Pentacon Electra, which was an automatic camera that still works and produced some lovely results with Harman Phoenix.

https://flic.kr/p/2raDP7D

In addition to using film cameras, I’m also trying to get back into some digital work, specifically glitching and circuit bending. One thing I do like finding are ‘glitches in the wild’, where a film, or electronic advertising hoarding, is accidentally corrupted. In this instance, a thunderstorm over the Maldives disrupted the television signal being broadcast to our villa, and of course I could not resist recording a few corrupted frames.

The featured image on this post was actually taken back in 2022 in a Lomography Sprocket Rocket, but somehow I broke the film in the camera and never managed to get it developed until this year. I also accidentally exposed the film to light when I opened the camera back, so I wasn’t sure that I’d get anything. In the event, I got this wonderful trippy image, which might even be a double exposure.

The Lens-Artists Challenge is ‘on holiday’, until Saturday 03 January 2026 with the ‘Favourite Photos of  Last Year’ Challenge. Generally, 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 following 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’. This is likely to be my last weekly addition to the Challenge for a while, although I’m certainly going to keep in touch with everyone’s entries. I’ll be concentrating on my own projects, as outlined in a previous post, my Intentions for 2026. 

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Challenge #LastChance #LensArtists #LensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #377: Holiday Fun

We’ve got the builders in, and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make an entry for the Lens-Artists Challenge this week. Fortunately, I found myself in the nearby town of Agueda on a pleasant Wednesday afternoon and found the perfect subject for the Lens-Artists Challenge. Kind of. This week it’s Ann-Christine’s (Leya from To See a World in a Grain of Sand …) to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Holiday Fun‘. ‘The Holiday Season is approaching’, she says. ‘This week we invite you to share some Holiday memories with us!’

Although Christmas is approaching, Ann-Christine didn’t actually specify which holiday.  In fact, she writes: ‘Pick any fun and/or happy memories from holidays you enjoyed – your own or others´, at home or abroad.’ Well, I thought instantly of our trip to the Maldives, but I’ve posted far too many from there already. So here’s a quick shot I grabbed of Santa’s giant ass in Agueda. Apparently, this is the biggest Santa in the world (to date), and although I was only able to grab it from behind (no pun intended), it’s worth sharing. Happy Holiday Fun!

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’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#agueda #ass #challenge #holidayfun #lensartists #santa #tongueincheek #lensArtists

Lens-Artists Challenge #376: Wings

This week it’s Beth’s turn to host the Challenge, and she gets straight to the point: ‘I am challenging you to feature anything with wings‘. It’s a little dull and miserable around here at the moment, and even the eagle that soars over Oiã and the woods behind our house is staying in the warm, so instead I’ve got a few winged creatures from our trip to the Maldives in October. 

The place where we stay is a small island resort. It’s actually teeming with wildlife, even if the most obvious signs are the humans sunbathing on the beach, paddling or snorkeling in the sea (or lounging around the several bars on the island). There’s a black bird, that makes an unholy high-pitched scream, which I always thought were the bats that fly around the island. The bats themselves are really elusive, and I’ve never managed a good image, or any image apart from this terrible photo when we came across one feeding in a tree a couple of metres above our heads.

There’s also a white parakeet, known as ‘Snowy’, who frequents a couple of the bars on the island. In the mornings s/he can be found in the Banyan restaurant, perched on the shoulder of a member of staff and eating from the plate of pastries and fruit specially prepared for them. In the afternoon, Snowy can be found in the Lohis bar, being fed by the staff there.

This crane is a bit of a thief. S/he will wander around the Beach Grill, looking for scraps of food, and gobbling down pieces of burger bun thrown at them (specifically burger buns, any meat is ignored). One day we were enjoying our lunch, and the crane was doing their normal patrol, walking slowly around the benches, seeing what people might have. On this day s/he zeroed in on our table, watching as we enjoyed our burger and chips (that’s french fries, just to clarify). Slowly s/he edged closer, and we watched in amusement. Then, s/he jumped up onto the bench next to my partner, paused for a second, then lunged at her plate, defly grabbing the top layer of the burger bun before retreating to safety. All we could do was stare at the crane, then laugh uncontrollably. From then on, whenever we saw the crane hovering around a table, we’d warn the occupants, ‘be careful, that bird will have your lunch.’

It rained a helluva lot during our holiday, though it was warm rain and it didn’t spoil our enjoyment. We would walk around the island, clutching our umbrellas and dodging the puddles, enjoying the vivid greens that the rain-soaked leaves would reveal. One day, ambling back to our little villa, I happened to glance over and spotted this wonderful parrot on the veranda roof of a small building. Like Snowy, I don’t think this parrot was a pet in the strictest term, just an occupant of the island who realised that they had a good thing going mixing with humans.

In the conclusion of her post, Beth asked: ‘When you think of wings do you think of birds, insects, angels and airplanes? Maybe you think of … fantasy beings like dragons and fairies.’ Well, there were dragons on the island too, but sadly they didn’t have wings.

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’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#birds #challenge #dragon #lensartists #maldivas #maldives #parrots #thief #wings #lensArtists

Lens-Artists #375: Where to Find the Mysterious

This week it’s Patti’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Where to Find the Mysterious‘. On her blog, Creative Exploration in Words and Pictures, Patti writes, ‘When life is a bit crazy … I go out with my camera, hoping that someone or something catches my eye. … I’m searching for something beautiful, something I’ve never seen before, or something mysterious’.

Patti asks us to, ‘share your mysterious images captured for this challenge’, so I thought I would post a few images taken this afternoon and make no comments about them at all, except to say that they were taken with a toy camera, the Photo Creator MiniCam, with a variable neutral density (ND) filter at its maximum setting. The images were taken in colour, but you’d hardly know that from the results.

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’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#abstract #challenge #lensartists #themysterious #toycamera #canaltoys #lensArtists #lofi #minicam #photocreator

Lens-Artists Challenge #373: Looking Back to Challenge #31 – Landscapes

It’s Egídio’s turn to host the Challenge this week, and it’s another ‘Looking Back’ Challenge. In a post on his blog, Capturing My World Through Brazilian Eyes, Egídio says, ‘when we began the Looking Back series, I was excited about the prospect of revisiting some previous challenges I had missed.’ He chose ‘Landscapes’ as the theme for the Challenge this week, revisiting Amy’s (of The World Is a Book) Theme from 2019.

A few years ago I picked up a DJI Pocket 2, a small digital camera on a gimbal that was great for videos on the move, not that I ever used it much for that purpose. What I did have great fun with, though, was the panorama mode. I would set the camera on a tripod, press the record button and it would create a lovely 180° panorama. The Pocket 2 went with me all over the place; in Aveiro,  the woods behind our house, and down to the beach at Barra. Nowadays, I still like panoramas, but I’m more likely to use a film camera, like the Horizon 202 or the 1920s Kodak 3-A folding camera.

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’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Architecture #Building #Challenge #DJIPocket2 #Farol #Landscapes #LensArtists #Panorama #Seascape #barra #LensArtists #portugal #URBAN

Lens-Artists Challenge, #372: Ephemeral

This week it’s Tina’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Ephemeral‘. She began her post with a, ‘short and simple definition of the word ephemeral – “lasting for a very short time“.’ A ‘short time’ can be quite subjective, from a few hours to a few days, or even longer. To my mind, an alternative term is ‘temporary’, and there’s nothing more temporary that interests me than street art.

First, a confession: I was all amped up this morning to get out and about and record some of my favourite pieces of street art around the neighbourhood. But what happened as I was bending over to put some rubbish in the bin? I felt something move in my back and I think I slipped a disc. So here I am, temporarily (ephemerally? 😉) confined to bed. So instead, I’m going to raid the camera roll on my phone for some of my favourite pieces from Aveiro and Meco.

This first piece you’ve definitely seen before, depicting a vampiric figure with the message ‘we scream but we have no voice: No! No!’ Back in 2021, when I first ‘found’ it in a back street in Aveiro it had already been there for several years and was quite worn even then. But nowadays, this photo was taken in October 2025, it’s even more decayed. With the development going on in this street at the moment, I suspect it might not last much longer.

A few years ago, I took a walk around Meco looking for pieces by the Portuguese street artist Dalaiama, who first visited the area in 2006, then again – I think – around 2011. He makes pieces protesting capitalism and the ‘fat cat’ culture in Portugal, and is known to work especially on electricity substations and junction boxes. I came across one spendid piece tucked away in an abandoned structure in Meco, which was in lovely condition. Sadly, a few years later the whole structure was demolished and the piece lost.

This second piece from Dalaiama is representative of the ‘fat cat’ art with a Pac-man styled figure in a car with a top hat gobbling up what I think represents a dove of peace. Often these stencils are surrounded with a red border, or are over a pile of ‘euros’. This piece on a wall was around for several years, and I had an image of it somewhere, but in the past few years it was partially covered with a generic tag. A shame, really.

Back in Aveiro, one of my favourite spots for street art is the Yacht Club. Just down the road from the Club is the overpass of the A25 road that leads to Barra. The concrete supports of the overpass are naturally a tempting spot for street artists, and are covered with tags. Someone also thought it would be a good idea to cover one of the tags with a load of publicity posters for the television series, Andor. Not the second season from 2025, though, but the first season, released in 2022. By the time I noticed these posters, the elements had already done their worst, and the paper was peeling from the concrete support, but the Star Wars style was unmistakable.

My final examples of ephemeral street art are two tags on the side of a building that itself is proving ephemeral in its own way. Just outside the coastal town of Costa Nova is a long abandoned stone building. When I first came across this building, probably over a decade ago, it was in much better condition, though even the the elements had been to work on it. But now all that remains are a couple of walls marked with these old tags that themselves are nearly invisible. Within a few years time there will just be some coloured bricks on a stone wall, if that survives.

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’.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Challenge #Dalaiama #Ephemeral #Graffiti #LensArtists #Mural #Streetart #Summerinmeco #Temporary #Weathered #LensArtists

Trinity Falls Waterfall

https://islandinthenet.com/trinity-falls/

Lens-Artists Challenge, #371: Street Details

Preamble: I originally created a series of animated GIFs for this post, which I uploaded to Giphy and embedded in the WordPress post. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and the images were not displayed properly — or at all. So instead I have displayed red/cyan anaglyphs, which actually looks quite cool although you really won’t see the stereo effect without 3D glasses.

This week it’s Ritva’s turn to host the Challenge, and her theme is ‘Street Details‘. On her blog, Ritva Sillanmäki Photography, Ritva didn’t waste any time getting to the point: ‘This is a simple challenge … , skip the classic street-portrait approach and zoom in … . The goal is to reveal the often-hidden, magical world, of the details we never take the time to notice’.

For this Challenge, I took the Fujifilm Finepix Real 3D W3 digital stereo camera down the side streets of Oiã. I was looking for those items that might normally be overlooked: a worker’s stepladder in the street, an abandoned house, benches and bins in the new park, and a few other places. The abandoned sofa, on the road leading to Estação de Oiã, the railway station, has been there for a while, and I recorded that the first time I was out with the Real 3D W3. The park has only been open for a few months, and the ‘yellow brick road’ provides a pleasant short cut between the main road and the Town Hall.

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’.

Addition: Instead of using Giphy, I uploaded an album of the animated GIFs to Tenor. This was not easy. First of all, the images needed to be approved before they could be accessed, and to add insult to injury several were flagged as ‘spam’. I appealed those decisions, and hopefully these will be restored. In the meantime, I will attempt to add an animated Gif with the ‘Tenor’ block, but I can only do this on the desktop.

If you are on Mastodon, you can now follow this blog directly. Just go to Mastodon and follow the ‘Snapshot’ WordPress account at @keithdevereux.wordpress.com. All new posts will be automatically updated to your timeline.

#Abandoned #Building #Challenge #LensArtists #Streetphotography #Townscape #LensArtists #park #street #StreetDetails