LEWIS COLLARD, DOT COM

or, "[h]is articles are like a less-articulate K*Rock that uses rage faces & memes to communicate bad opinions." -- red19fire

My work explores the relationship between gender politics and emotional memories. With influences as diverse as Camus and John Cage, new combinations are created from both explicit and implicit meanings.

Ever since I was a student I have been fascinated by the ephemeral nature of the human condition. What starts out as hope soon becomes debased into a hegemony of power, leaving only a sense of chaos and the inevitability of a new beginning.

As spatial impressions become transformed through boundaried and critical practice, the viewer is left with a glimpse of the edges of our future.

loljk, I'm just a guy from Norfolk who takes photographs and owns too many cameras. But this arty bollocks generator is awesome. :D

I now have an occasional blog again, on which I post absolutely nothing of value. I'm also on Twitter if you want to follow my latest antics there. :)


New things!

As of October 3rd 2011, I'm going to keep track of new things here, which is something I should have done a long, long time ago.

Thursday, 24th May, 2012

My Praktica screw problem is now resolved; Gary White sent me several Praktica bodies, among other things, one of which will be a screw donor. Thanks, Gary!

Monday, 21st May, 2012

Lytro quietly downgraded their specifications for their gimmick camera: while $399 used to get you 16gb of storage and $499 would get you 32gb, it's now 8gb and 16gb. You now pay $100 for 8gb of solid state storage, rather than 16!

Saturday, 12th May, 2012

Rest in peace: the Nikon D2H, died on shutter actuation #400,195.

Wednesday, 18th April, 2012

Long overdue for an update: my page on my ancient Nikon D2H has been expanded greatly. Enjoy!

Monday, 16th April, 2012: A plea

SCREW PROBLEM SOLVED. Gary White was kind enough to send me an assortment of Praktica bodies, one of which is not functional and contains a replacement screw for my Praktica MTL3. A huge thanks to Gary. My original plea for help was below.

The Praktica MTL3 is back!

The friend I lent it to in the United States had problems with light leaking into it since she got it. Strange. I figured it might have suffered some terrible damage during shipping. She sent it back to me, and it turns out that a baseplate screw either fell out or was removed, somewhere between me and aforementioned friend.

So here's the problem: I need one of these screws. I'm hesitant to kill a working or could-work-with-some-TLC Praktica in order to get one. Unfortunately, the screw in question does not seem to match any metric or BA thread size. I've measured it with a digital vernier gauge and the diameter of the thread is 1.34mm (metric sizes are either 1.2 or 1.4mm, 12BA is 1.3mm). The head is a dome head measuring 3.15mm across, and the screw is 3.44mm long overall (about 3mm of which is the actual thread -- this was much harder to measure).

Is this some other thread system, or is 0.04mm within the manufacturing tolerances of a 12BA screw? I'm hoping there are some model engineers or other smart people out there who can help me with this. If you know one, pass it on!

By the way, since the MTL3 is back, I figured you should all have a human-readable howto on using it because the manual is awful. I wrote that and it's over here on wikiHow. You can spot the missing screw if you look hard enough!

Saturday, 24th March, 2012

Land Rover wheel compatibility! We've learned a lot of lessons the hard way so you don't have to. :)

Friday, 23rd March, 2012

Hello folks, it's been a while again. Don't worry, it's not about to turn into a website that apologises for not updating enough. Those of you that don't know me all that well (and honestly, I'm surprised at how many hits my silly website gets, so I'm sure that the vast majority of you don't!) might not know that I actually get up to a bunch of things in other places. Here's some things I've been up to:

By the way, I hang around in #wikihow on Freenode, for those of you that use IRC. Feel free to stop by for a natter; I'm lc2 (that's lower-case LC2, if it's not clear in your font).

Wednesday, 7th March, 2012

New in the gallery: Japanese Perfection and Road, Tottenhill Row. On the latter count: film is always perfect, even when it expired 7 years ago!

I've been away in the wilderness for a bit (which is to say, working up in Lincolnshire), but while I was there, I received a lovely fan mail which apologised for emailing me with questions. This has happened before, too. Hey guys, I love receiving fan mail, that's why I have my email address at the bottom of every page on my site, so don't apologise. Unlike most photography websites, mine has no ads and so this actually costs me money to run. I'd keep doing this if I didn't get nice mail from my readers nearly every day, but it sure does motivate me.

Friday 24th February, 2012

In the gallery: Maria. Another one on the instructional/self-critical side.

Wednesday 22nd February, 2012

Alan of the East Anglian Railway Archive kindly gave me permission to use a very rare photograph of a DMU at South Lynn on my page on remnants of railways in South Lynn. Here it is, thanks Alan!

Wait, did you think this site was still about my photography and cameras and not trains? Don't worry, I finally finished off the roll of expired-in-2005 Agfa Optima in my Kiev 88. I'll get it back in a few days!

Wednesday 15th February, 2012

The Nissin 360 TW, a cheap semi-automatic flash from the 1980s.

Friday 3rd February, 2012

You are not a photographer, either, you just run "youarenotaphotographer.com".

Wednesday 1st February, 2012

A table of 35mm-equivalent focal lengths for the Kiev 88.

Nobody is as awesome as this guy I found today who takes photographs using actual wet plates.

Tuesday 31st January, 2012

New in the gallery: Toyota Celica GT-Four and Symmetry.

Friday 27th January, 2012

Here's an article punching Lytro in the face.

Actual photography is coming; I'm slowly burning through a roll of expired ASA 200 Agfa Optima film in my Kiev 88. Woohoo!

Thursday 22nd December, 2011

I have an article on railway bridges in South Lynn. No great photography there, just a little bit of history.

Monday 5th December, 2011

There's a new mega-review of the camera of the Samsung Galaxy S II, the finest Android phone of 2011 that also has a camera that is much better than I expected from a camera phone!

Saturday 5th November, 2011

In the gallery: Tiny teddy sits under a tree and Tiny teddy on the rocks. Lewis Collard, teddy bear photographer. There's also this one, which is more on the instructional/informational side. :)

Happy religious-terrorists-trying-to-blow-up-a-democratic-assembly day!

Tuesday 25th October, 2011

A new article: the Nikon Series E 70-210mm f/4. Also, Cow, abstract in the gallery.

Monday 24th October, 2011

New in the gallery: Bridge, one I've been hesitating to show anyone else.

Thursday 20th October, 2011

New in the gallery: Tiny teddy watches the sun rise.

Good news: everything in the gallery is now available in much higher resolution (50% bigger in some cases). Better news: I've done that while keeping the file sizes reasonable, so it should still load quickly. Hooray!

Monday 3rd October, 2011

Three new articles in a new miscellaneous section: the Arctic Freezer Pro 7 Rev 2, HP LaserJet 4000 on Ubuntu (short version: use the hpijs driver), and increasing contrast with GIMP.