Photo Project 1, 20. Self Portrait

I've got a feeling this has been covered off before in a post about the 10 Second Challenge - basically you set the timer on the camera and run to be in shot, some of the mores tricky locations for this were on the end of the Grand Canyon or on top of the Death Valley sign (the silly footwear was on account of American Airlines deciding to send my shoes (and rest of clothes) on a tour of the states without me).

Also on that previous post was me staying very still in a river... well I've taken that picture and added it to a few more to make a panoramic.

Photo Project 1, 19. Light and Dark

Light and dark meaning Silhouettes?

Photo Project 1, 18. Texture or Pattern

Its a pattern, amazingly complicated... and normally dogs don't stay still enough to notice this detail. Luckily for me Jazz was fast asleep at the time.

Photo Project 1, 17. Mirror or Window

Well out the window it was pretty rainy, sadly the view out of our windows is onto an office car park... which is only entertaining when it's covered in snow.



So instead I have a pirate getting rained on.

Photo Project 1, 16. Pastel Palette

Pastels remind me of excel 2003's colour choice... but not wanting to put a graph up here is a flower which went through some effects to make like a comic book page.

Photo Project 1, 15. Sunlight

Sunlight, honestly?! Oh I'm loosing my rag with this project.

F13 1/250 ISO100 @ 34mm on a 400D with polarising filter.

This is possibly my favourite photo of all time (that I've taken anyway), it was taken on my old camera with what I'd class as a 'knock about' lens now... but it goes to show that being in the right place at the right time is often more important than the gear you have on you. The best camera for the job is the one you have with you... and other such expressions.

Infact I like this picture so much we have a variation of it printed on canvas and hung in the living room.

Photo Project 1, 14. Faceless Portrait

This is easy... B loves to hide behind things.

Enjoying last autumn (2011) in a national trust garden.

 Or here's me playing with a home-made light ring idea I had...

It looked a little like this:

It’s quite simple to do, just buy some cheap LED lights from Ikea and poke them through a piece of cardboard in a shape of your choosing, then cut a hole the right diameter for your lens of choice. While interesting to try, it's not really sensible outside the house.

Photo Project 1, 13 Mother Nature

Again, I picked this photo project because it was suitably vague and girly enough to present a challenge. Mother Nature could surely be nearly anything?! Well I'm guessing we're supposed to go down the weather route, and I don't enjoy photographing in the rain. So here is some water hitting a rock instead.

This actually turned into quite an expensive shot to get, a that tide of water coming in hit my tripod... and it's never been quite the same since it got salty water on it.

ii. Coffee

So I'm a little behind with the blogging - mostly as we went to Disneyland last weekend, one of the few trinkets we brought back was this mug... purchased for B from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride it's already been used for Coffee, and the amount of coffee I'm having at the moment is helping me sort all the pictures taken.

Here is one of the photos which has already been stitched together - It's the first time I've stitched long exposure photos, but it came out really well.

The other bonus to doing long exposure photos is that it nearly completely removes the people in the way of the shot. This worked well on the London by night pictures too.

10 second challenge

Right, pictures... they're great, so great in fact sometimes I want to get in shot.

I can't really leave this down to other people, because I'm known for taking pictures nobody else bothers to bring a camera!

This means I can use the remote, which is great but its range is only slightly longer than my finger. Leaving me with my camera's 10second timer, for some shots this is a little hairy.

Of course the world record for 100m is under 10seconds... but I'm not that fast and jumping around near the edge of the Grand Canyon, over rocks in a stream or up the Death Valley sign require a little more attention


Here's a few examples of it working:

Sneaking in on the right

Climbing up that sign wasn't as hard as getting down.

It looked more dangerous at  the time.

Up a Tor in Devon

In a stream (still in Devon).

And one of it not working:

I didn't manage to pose, I blame it being gravel, wearing wearing flip-flops and not wanting to fly off the end. We did get it next time, but to be honest with all the cloud it really wasn't worth the effort!

Dartmeet - Yet again.

I was up at Dartmeet a couple of weeks ago for Matt & Elly's wedding but was back again so decided to do a 10second challenge.

This shot was taken about 100m up stream of where we took the photos on the bridge.

Panoramic USA

Way back in June (2011) a few of us headed off to the states, while I still can't work out how we all survived I do have a lot of photos to prove I made it. Although if American Airlines had their we there wouldn't be any photos, but luckily my camera was in my carry-on.

Anyway, I'll avoid the rant by getting back to the subject of photos.

As we were going around America I found a liking for making panoramic photo stitches, basically you take a lot of photos with reckless abandon and let programs do all the hard work later. Sadly I only started doing this after we'd been through Yosemite, so missed out on some amazing views...

But now I've been back for some time and I didn't know what to do with the pictures - the quality and size of these in Google + and Facebook was to be honest, crap. To do a collection of ~180 mega-pixel pictures it was going to take a bit more effort to host. I can't really print them out, as B still holds going on a two week holiday with the boys (+ 1 honorary boy) against me.

Now I've got a website of my own I've put aside two little pages to show these pictures, ones in SD (which will work without any trouble) the other in HD (which will no doubt take a minute to load each picture). The biggest file is only 26mb, but captain cheap here didn't get the best web hosting.

I hope you enjoy them: USA

 

 

Visit to Petworth House - West Sussex

Right, best start blogging - it's been low down my to do list for a while now.

Last weekend me and B made it to Petworth house, a beautiful National Trust house which provided a good excuse to get my camera out and take some pretty pictures.

 Sneaky pap shot of B walking, away as normal.

 

  

Hoping to use this on a Christmas card or two

 

 

 For some weird reason there was a massive number of ladybugs.

 

 And soap, that that made more sense in the kitchen museum, I appreciated monkey brand.

Ending with a panoramic shot of the house.