K-scope.

Making photographs through a toy kaleidoscope.

I first attempted making these little gems way back in April of 2010…

While digging through some boxes in the garage tonight I found a toy kaleidoscope.

I couldn’t tell you how it ended up in my possession, but it’s likely I got hold of it while I worked at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.

Forever the playful child, I had to try shooting through it!

I made my way in the house and pulled out the D-Lux 4 from my camera bag. I took a few shots at 16:9, then switched to 1:1 half way through.

The macro worked great on that little thing.

This time around the K-scope was out in plain site, on a shelf above my art table in the studio. And once again, I went into the house to grab the D-Lux 4, changed the aspect ratio to 1:1 and switched film mode to Dynamic Black and White.

I found a few interesting items to shoot… random grey dots on a piece of white paper, a sheet of ABS with a little white spray paint on it, the home screen of my iPhone, and fluorescent shop lights in the garage.

Making it work was a simple matter of hand-holding the flat end of the toy against the front of the barrel surrounding the lens. The zoom function worked, as well, so getting in closer made for more options, composition-wise.

Very abstract. Very cool.

Dots

ABS

Home

Flourescence

Click – I

The Agfa Click – I.

Another fun shooter from my collection. A very cool, very simple little film camera made in Germany from 1958-1970.

It uses 120 film and has a switch on the lens barrel with three settings: two are aperture sizes, ƒ8.8 (cloudy icon) and ƒ11 (sunny icon), plus a yellow filter which is also ƒ8.8.

It uses a single fixed convex-concave meniscus lens, has a rotary shutter with a speed of 1/30th of a second, and the camera has a slightly arched back-cover that serves as a film pressure plate.

This little guy takes sharp pictures from about 5 ft. to infinity and I’ve even used hand-held close-up filters over the front of the lens for decent macro shots…

Varsi Flowers

Fleur-de-lis

Not happy

Fucshia

Flag, tree shadow

Rose

Clover.

I spotted this close-up shot I made of a clump of clover while digging around in the archives last week. It was taken at our old Santa Clara home, that had a garden window in the kitchen, and outside, just beneath the overhang was a 24″ wide strip of bricks laid in a basket-weave pattern that was framed by the steps into our dining room, the wall beneath the garden window, the AC condenser, and an old concrete patio.

The cracks between the bricks were filled with dust and such and there were always weeds taking root, so it was no surprise to see clover popping up.

This was taken with my Olympus E-PL3 and an Oly 17mm 2.8 lens. Great detail. I really like that bit of purple in the upper left corner!