photography
Blenheim in sunshine
Monday, April 6th, 2009 | leisure, photography | 1 Comment
I thought it was time for another picture post. So here’s a panorama of the garden in Blenheim Palace with the house itself in the background. (Click on the picture to enlarge)
Another bit of changed perspective
Friday, March 20th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
It seems that I’ve got a theme on changing perspective going on. Tha must be because it’s always intriguing to feel that little click that happens when you see things in an ever-so-slightly different way. Here’s a picture that that changes your perspective in an ever-so-funny way - that’s a good thing to see on a Friday!
Fun in the snow 2
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
Four pictures in one post are too many, I’ve decided, and split this post into two parts.
… On the quieter times of our little outing - and also where I was actually the one holding the camera, this is what came out (yes, I DID make some fun people sledding down small bumps shots as well). The first piccie of the snowy meadow was my attempt to play with the RAW format in Adobe camera RAW. I love the way you can manipulate the photos almost indefinitely doing no damage at all to the actual image - and the fantastic effects you can achieve doing it.
The second picture of the boats on the canal is another of my attempts at HDR - I’m quite happy with this one. Again, having a camera that actaully has auto bracketing helps immensely by eliminating the need to fiddle about with controld when what you’re supposed ot be doing, is keeping your camera absolutely still. This one was even taken without a tripod - although I did have something to lean the camera against.
Well, this is the photographic fun for this round - I’ll have to go do some more shooting soon.
P.S. a word of warning - or rather regret: the pictures don’t come out very well on most browsers it seems - I’m much more happier looking at them in my photoshop and preview rather than in the web.
Fun in the snow
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
Firstly, thanks to Joe for lending me his old SLR! It’s so much more fun to have a real camera - there’s just something about having something solid in your hand, where absolutely everything is adjustable - it just invites you to explore the possibilities. The possibilities explored on our (the camera’s and mine) little outing were not all that many - but we sure had fun together (well, my friends who were participating in the outing were included in the fun).
..And Rachel said: I dare you to take your shoes off. And I replied (with about 0.3 seconds delay): sure! (knowing full well that she’d have to do it too if I did it). And so it came about that I was running in the snow in my bare feet and having considerable fun - and Rachel was perhaps slightly regretting her dare - but putting on a brave face. I turned out to have the most frost-resistant feet of the two of us. 
Mental note to self…
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | leisure, photography | No Comments
… to get creative! I stumbled upon the work of Jason Lee, who has an on-going project of photographing his daughters. His work is fantastically creative and it just reminds me that it’s time to get out there and experiment. So I thought I’d post one of my latest experiments to evidence that experimenting is indeed lots of fun.
I find that I easily get stuck in a rut once I get an idea (such as the HDR shots) and fail to actually have fun with the camera. Even the subjects I consider for my shots become somewhat uniform (sorry to all the people I’ve ever dragged into churches to just look at the light and then discard the resulting pictures because I’ve already got a dozen others exactly like that).
This series of not-particularly-serious pictures were taken by mum and me on our little getaway in Portugal.
Something about being on the ocean at the end of summer made us run arond and jump with joy (and occasionally contract ourselves …mmm.. myself into quite obscure poses). Hope you enjoy these. (Click pictures for full view)
More HDR
Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | leisure, photography | No Comments
I think it’s time for another picture-post.
I’ve received some nice feedback on my first one, and Kate was asking for some more for inspiration, so here are a couple more pictures in the same genre.
These are both taken in Denmark on my last visit home. The thatched roof house is part of the Open Air museum just north of Copenhagen. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid and had forgotten that it’s actually well worth a visit. The museum is spread over a large territory and you wander around and discover quaint buildings built in different styles of different parts of Denmark in different times. I took an awful lot of pictures, which I have not processed yet. Also I have not yet seen my mother’s pictures of me taking pictures - I’ve only got a tiny pocket tripod, which necessitates me to stretch myself out on the ground in all sorts of contorted positions to get the shot. Maybe I should get a bigger tripod soon.
First experiment with HDR
Sunday, March 16th, 2008 | leisure, photography | No Comments
This is completely unrelated to academic me, but I thought I’d show it off anyway. This is my first experiment with HDR photography, which stands for High Dynamic Range photography. It’s a technique that allows you to get a high level of detail in a large range of light intensities in one picture (all photographers can now clearly see that I’m a mere amateur, because I have a very vague notion of photo-vocab). Usually a camera only captures any significant level of detail in only a small part of the light-dark spectrum. So if you have a generally dark picture, the bright areas will tend to be over-exposed and visa versa. In HDR you take a series of pictures of the same subject (3 in this case) with different exposure times. So you get an underexposed copy (with details in the bright areas) a middle and an overexposed one (with details in the dark areas). Then you superimpose the three pictures and do a bit of fiddling (which all happens in a piece of software like Photomatix and is all complete black magic to me - I just pulled on some levers till it looked right) and voila! you’ve got yourself a pretty impressive piece of photography.
This picture (or rather these pictures, because it’s technically 3 of then) I took earlier today at Winchester Cathedral. This is the oldest Norman part of the cathedral that just instantly makes you see gloomy monks up on that gallery. Apparently, the gallery - the large one beneath the yellow-lit arch - once ran all the way around the cathedral and was used by the monks for processions. They pulled most of it down when they brought the cathedral up to more ‘modern’ Gothic standard. They had to remove it where they wanted to put in the higher pointed Gothic arches - which are stunning in their own way.
If you look closely, there is another smaller gallery visible at the top of the picture. This was used to close the shutters in those top windows before they were glased.