Chesham in Fog

Wow, I can't belive I have not updated my photo blog in so long! Quite a lot has happened in the past 9 months (no, not that!), and I guess it has taken me this long to get back into the swing of things.

My first offering is Chesham in the Fog. This was taken about a month ago on my way home. The lights and were halo-ing in the fog creating such a dramatic effect. Unfortunately, being at night, the light was difficult. This particular photo was taken by balancing the camera on a post while crossing the bridge.

Sheep Wranglers Caught in the Act

Well, not really. But it did look funny seeing truck full of mini Superlambananas stopped outside of the cathedral in Liverpool.

These were delivered around Liverpool as part of the 2008 Capital of Culture celebrations. A total of 125 Superlambananas have been placed around the city and are on display for 10 weeks.
Unfortunately, one has already been stolen from a small flock of construction Superlambananas from Hope Street, near where these photos were taken.
Being the cynic that I am, I expect there to be many more reports of the poor things being stolen and vandalised during their display period.

Inspirational Photography... in Lego

A friend of mine sent me a link to a flickr album the other day which totally blew me away. As I've said before, I both love and hate flickr. This is a reason to love flickr.

One of the things I often say when viewing other people's photos is "I wish I could recreate that shot". Well, Balakov has recreated some of the most famous photos of all time in Lego. His Classics in Lego set contains macro photos in which Lego figures are posed to recreate a famous picture. Not only does Balakov give you the Lego picture, but he links to a copy of the original, and shows the setup of the shot too.

One of my favourites of his collection is the recreation of the Tennis Girl photo from 1976 (seen on the right). I unfortunately, never bought the poster as a kid. I certainly knew of its existence. There is a great story about the photo on wikipedia, which, for me, gives it even more importance in the world of photography.

 

Balakov's most recent (re-)creation is of the 1967 Bigfoot sighting. This is yet another image which has been in and out of sight during my lifetime. Every time someone announces they have seen bigfoot, the news/documentary/magazine drags out this famous still for comparison.
In this picture, I particularly like the fact a Chewbacca figure was used. I think it adds a certain irony; one picture contains a fictional furry character from a famous film, the other contains Chewbacca. :-)

The only problem I have now is that I see these images and say "I wish I could recreate that recreation of that shot"...

All images were used in this article with prior permission from the author. Thanks Balakov.

A Night on the Tiles

.... or Tales of a Park Bench.

The other night I went out to meet friends. I went to the Clachen in Soho (no you aren't on Lifelongpubrun). I won't blog about the pub just yet as I didn't manage to get many pictures of the pub.

One thing I did do was take a few photos on my way home. When going from Soho to Chesham, one must go through Baker Street station.
This station is filled with references to Sherlock Holmes because he lived at 221b Baker Street (now the home of the Sherlock Holmes Museum). The tiles to the left can be seen in the concourse area of the station. There are also friezes representing some (if not all) of the Sherlock Holmes stories down on the underground platforms; probably something worth gong to photograph at a later date.

Once I have reached Chesham, I have quite a long walk home. One way I can go is via Bois Moor. While walking I took a few photos of various things I passed (trees, muggers, etc.). Upon reviewing them, I noticed two photos which looked quite nice, both of the same green park bench. Admittedly I did get a bit snap-happy, mainly because I could; I love digital photography!

I really like this photo. Admittedly, the park bench is not the most photogenic, but the way the flash plays across the bench and touches the tree gives me a sense of solitude. The grass also looks quite frosty, which is again the flash doing its bit, this time with the dew.

 

It took me ages to work out what was going on with this second picture of the bench. The night was quite warm, but it was too far away from sunrise for the dew on the grass to start evaporating. I also don't smoke, ruling that out. The only explanation I can come up with is that I breathed quite heavily before taking the picture, so that the foggy breath reflected the flash. I feel it gives a certain eeriness to the picture.

These three pictures are a great example of why digital photography is great. Sure, none of them will win any awards for topic, composition, or quality. What they do show is that no matter where you are, or what time it is, do not be afraid to take pictures. First of all, you never know what will come out. Secondly, if you don't take photos, you cannot review them and try to improve! In computing, there is a saying RTFM (I'll let you google that one). In photography, it should be TTFP.

:-)

Getting Back to Posting

Having been back from honeymoon for a couple of weeks, I expected to be back to full speed on my posting, but I haven't got myself in gear for posting any of my pictures.
I have been attempting to go through the many photos of my wedding day and from the honeymoon. One thing that has been indispensable when viewing pictures online has been PicLens.

PicLens is a browser add-on which enables you to view, in full screen, any pictures or videos which are on whichever website you are viewing. You can also search flickr, picasa, youtube,facebook, and other sites directly in PicLens. Definitely worth a look.

Why I Love to Hate Flickr

Like just about every other photographer who publishes their photos on the internet I have a Flickr account. In fact, posting my photos to, and exploring Flickr was what really got me back into photography. I loved putting my photos up for friends, family, or anyone to view and hopefully comment upon. I also loved the inspiration I got from exploring other people's photos. Many a better photographer than I uses Flickr as a showcase for their photos.

After a while, I grew less enthusiastic about Flickr. One of my  main problems is with the comments which people leave on photos. Quite often, all they say is "Great shot" or "You have been nominated to post this photo on [group xyz]". These kind of comments annoy me. Why did you like the photo or feel it should be nominated for a group? Which part was it? How can it be improved? If a photo moves you, say so! There is not one photographer I have met who would not appreciate praise of criticism of his/her work.
The other thing I dislike about Flickr is their map; although this is only since they changed it (about a year ago now, I think). I feel that it is not user friendly. It's default is a semi-working pseudo-tag-cloud. It is only once one plays around with it a bit (quite a bit!) that it becomes clear how to change the map to something useable (tip: click on the three pink dots in the top right). The map may have got me into geotagging my photos, but why change a main feature of your site to something less useful?

Finally, Flickr has come under attack recently for being overzealous with its censorship. Because the company is owned by the big monster that is Yahoo!, it must toe the corporate line. However, my personal feelings on this are that it is not so much a problem with people putting content on, it is that Flickr does not have decent enough filters. Why not have a level of censorship on the searches akin to SafeSearch where the user must adjust their search settings to be less stringent? It is not a perfect solution, but it would be a lot better than having "Flickr are censorship bastards" pictures everywhere.

10 Reasons to Like Flickr:

1. Put your photos somewhere for your friends to see them.
2. View other photographer's work and comment on it.
3. Have people comment on your photos.
4. Join Flickr meetups/scavenger hunts to meet other photographers in your area.
5. Browse by tags for similar photos or inspiration.
6. Surf a world map for photos taken in a particular area.
7. Find your digital camera model and see pictures that other cameras have taken with theirs.
8. Ability to specify permissions and access on a per picture basis (compared with Picasa web album).
9. Organise your photos quickly and easily.
10. Whatever your style of photography, there has been one taken for you to look at.

10 Reasons to loath Flickr:

1. Users who comment with "Nice shot".
2. Users who comment with "I have chosen your photo for group X" and don't tell you why.
3. A world map user interface which is difficult to understand and therefore off-putting to the less technical user.
4. If you don't have someone jumping in your photo, you probably won't get to be on the front explore page.
5. A very small limit of 200 photos and 3 albums (compared with Picasa web album).
6. "Hot Tags" always containing the same thing (pic-a-day).
7. Too many pictures being stolen by people who do not know international or local copyright laws.
8. A blog whose only real purpose seems to be to advertise Flickr's latest affiliation/marketing campaign.
9. Tag clusters; why can't I just drill down through tags?
10. Groups cannot be browsed for, just guessed in the search box.

Three Badly Timed Photos

I spent the weekend up in Liverpool. There are some quite picturesque parts of the city. One of the nicest areas of the city is Hope Street. It is on the outskirts of the city and has a cathedral at each end (one of which is the fifth largest in the world). Other features of the road are The Everyman Theatre, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Luggage sculpture, The Philharmonic Dining Rooms, The Everyman Bistro, and various other cafés and restaurants.
Every year there is the Hope Street Festival which is a food and drink lovers paradise, as well as including many varied performances from artists, actors, and musicians. I recommend going there if you find yourself in Liverpool.

Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral

With everything that Hope Street has to offer, I thought I would take some photos with my new camera, mainly to blog about the street, but also as a possibility of placing them on Picture Nation (my stock website of choice). When I downloaded them off the camera, I was not impressed at all. They are very dark, and the shadows make the photos look very flat. one can also see that I didn't actually take a second look at all before taking the pictures.

 
Looking North Up Hope Street

So, back to the drawing board with this set of photos. If you are taking street scenes, or pictures of a public place, take a second look before pressing the shutter release. If I took a second look before shooting the cathedral, I may have seen the seagull flying past, and probably would have waited for the person walking up the steps to move away. The other two have similar problems (the person by the theatre, and the car). I also would have realised there was no longer any light in the street and not taken the photos. Still, if I got it right every time, there would be no fun in photography for me.

Looking South Down Hope Street

Post Processing Fun

Part of my enjoyment of photography is the thrill of the hunt. I like trying to find a good shot, and then playing composition/exposure/aperture roulette to get the film to see what I see. I have taken many photos which I thought would look good, only to see I could have used a different aperture to reign in the depth of field.

Nowadays, in the digital age, this isn't as big a problem as it was during the 35mm days. One of my pictures of the last entry was a little red flower. When I brought it up on my monitor, I felt that the picture could have benefited from a shorter depth of field. Just one stop would focus the eye in on the flower, and hide a not so exciting background. So I went about trying to do this manually.

I use GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as my photo processor mainly for the fact I cannot afford Photoshop. The advantage of GIMP is that it is free and contains many of the features of Photoshop.

So, a quick bit of searching lead me to GIMP Guru's tutorial. I followed the instructions and came up with this:

So, from this:

We get this:

I think it works quite well. Click on the pictures to see the larger versions.