I came back from the trip with about 200 photographs in total, a lot of which were holiday style snaps taken on my Fisheye2. The fisheye camera was great for capturing quick snapshots while exploring the cities and towns of Bulgaria. The Vivitar v3800n is only really a budget analogue SLR camera, but I have to say it was excellent for a short trip abroad. It was just the right size to carry about and the photographs it produced looked great!

Here is a collection of my favorite photographs from the trip! enjoy!

I saw this cat while I was walking around a small village up in the Bulgarian mountains, I quickly lent down to snap a shot and I love the result I got!

A small village in the Bulgarian mountains – taken on my Vivitar SLR

Rozovo by Night – photograph taken on my Vivitar SLR

Old Town, Plovdiv – Just one of the many great buildings in Plovdiv

The Barn, Rozovo – There are plenty of cattle barns like this dotted about in the small village of Rozovo, but the corner of this one looked particularly interesting… especially through my fisheye viewfinder!

The Wonderful Bridges – These amazing rock formations in the Rhodope Mountains were created when an earthquake destroyed a cave.

Houses in Rozovo – Another long exposure night shot taken in the small mountain village of Rozovo.

The Vacha Dam.

Part of the Roman Theatre in Old Plovdiv.

Stray kitten on the walls of the Roman Theatre, this was taken on my Lomo Fisheye2 using an out of date film.

Bulgarian Mountain View.

Up in the mountains for sundown – taken with a wide angle lens fitted onto my Vivitar SLR

Stacks of firewood – there are plenty of these dotted about in Bulgaria

A night photography shot, taken on the way out of Plovdiv

A double exposure portrait taken on the seats of the Roman Theatre in Plovdiv

This is the corner of a garden fence, I love the way the fences and sheds are nailed together with whatever wood they can find.

Double exposure up in the mountains at Melnik Monastery.

Wide angle shot of one of the Melnik Monastery’s garden features.

Photograph of a typical house in the mountain side village of Rozovo.

A cart parked up for the night – Lomo style shot taken at dusk using an expired film and a warming filter.

I set this up because I wanted to scan some of my medium format negatives… and here is the first attempt!

Lomography Technique – First attempt at using a homemade backlight with a regular scanner

All you need for this to work is a normal flatbed scanner, some plain white paper and a lamp (lamps with a dimmer switch or a low wattage bulb in will work best)

I have used an old Canon CanoScan Scanner and a bedside lamp with a dimmer as my backlight

It’s really important to make sure your negatives and your scanner are both clean, as tiny hairs and dust will show up quite easily using this technique. Also be prepared to experiment with the amount of paper you use and the brightness of the lamp, as you may have to change these depending on the original exposure quality on your negative.

Step One
Place your nicely cleaned negative (face down) onto your nicely cleaned scanner.

Step Two
Place your paper on top of your negative, I suggest starting off with trying 5 sheets of paper and adjust the amount accordingly. Obviously less paper lets in more light (you may want to try going down to a minimum of 2 sheets of paper if you have a particularly dark negative to scan)

Step Three
Place your lamp onto or over the paper (make sure you don’t have your bulb touching the paper – You don’t want to start a fire!!!) I suggest the lamp is about 30 to 40cm away from the paper; you can obviously experiment with the distance to get the best results. I also had my lamp on the first (dimmest) dimmer setting.

Step Four
Scan your results in, changing the amount of paper or brightness of the bulb to get the best result.

Step Five
When you are happy with your results, I suggest scanning them in at the highest dpi setting your scanner will do! Enjoy!

I personally really like the effects you get when you make the lamp brighter and add more paper on top of the negative, it captures the grain of the paper in the scanned image to give your end result a real grainy and sometimes misty effect.

Double exposure of my VW Camper and myself.

Another double exposure – for this shot I steadied the camera on my knee and took a 3 second exposure down the street using the “bulb” setting, then set the shutter back to normal and took a photograph using the built in flash of myself and my girlfriend.

And again… This time I took the self portrait first using the flash, then spun around, using the bulb setting to capture the streak of street lights.

For this shot I took a picture of the sky at dusk, I then had a happy accident and managed to take a picture of myself over the top.

Same kind of dusk shot, but not so much an accident with the second exposure.

I had to take this shot, I really liked the contrast between the bright daylight and the strong shadow which was cast by the hillside… Plus you can’t own a fisheye and not take a landscape shot!

I took this shot about 1ft away from the front of my camper van, I love how vehicle’s look when you take a shot like this.

Triple exposure consisting of a long exposure night shot, followed by a self portrait and finished off with a quick twist of the camera body to capture the streak of street lights.

Erm, what can I say… I thought this would look funny… and it does.

And again…

This shot was taken from inside my camper van, followed by the second exposure which was a shot of the sky taken out of the van window.

These shots look great with a fisheye lens, get as close to the ground as possible!

And again… trying not to get the camera wet this time!

And finally, with this photo I was simply trying to fit the whole of my parents house into one shot. I really want to take alot more shots of buildings and structures, I really enjoy the way the lens distorts what are normally straight lines.

Picture taken on a Lomography Fisheye2 camera.

If you are at all interested in taking your own fisheye photos, then I strongly suggest you look into the Lomography Fisheye2 camera. It’s a really great compact 35mm camera, with a built in flash (which is great for night photography), a “bulb” setting for those long exposure shots and a multiple exposure button which allows you to layer 2 or more exposures to create a single photograph. The lens gives out a 170 degree field of vision and you can take photographs from as little as 3cm from your subject, out of all the cameras I own, this is definately my favourite!

When I first got this camera I used 2x 35mm films as an experiment – to see the results from those 2 films – Click here.

The basic concept is that, the longer you leave the shutter open, the brighter the image will become. So this is a very useful technique when taking photographs in low light conditions.

One main point to note when taking a long exposure shot, is that anything that moves while the camera’s shutter is open will become blurred. For this reason, it is strongly suggested that you use a tripod when producing a long exposure photograph.

Analogue (or Analog) Photography is a term for photography which uses a chemical process to produce an image onto photographic film or plate. The chemical process used for photograhic film is called “gelatin-silver”.

Photographic film is coated with a photographic emulsion containing silver halides. When light falls upon these silver halides it produces a latent image upon the film.

When taking analogue photograghs, the camera’s shutter system opens to allow light to fall upon the film inside, which forms the latent image.