Fruition

I don't believe I actually mentioned it on this blog but, quite a while ago now, I received my fist payment to license one of my images. Well the project finally went live. It's part of a commemorative collection of Olympic stamps featuring photos from places on the Olympic torch route. Here's the photo in question:



It's actually one of my older photos, taken on my D3000. I'd probably have cleaned it up more these days but it clearly someone felt that it was good enough. Also I'm cheap! :D

Lessons learned

Take a look at the above shot. Those flecks dominating the top right corner of the frame are sadly not a feature of the instagram-style filter I sadly had to use to make the shot even remotely work. Yes, I had crap on my lens. Normally this wouldn't be too much of a problem because at typical exposure, there's enough light coming through the lens to eradicate it but for a HDR shot, the underexposed frames are already limiting the light coming into the lens so the specks show up more. The HDR software then picks up on these details out and exacerbates the effect.

Obviously the solution is very simple- one of those inespensive lens pens/cleaners. Hama do one for all of £7 on Amazon which I've picked up since (and can recommend) but sadly it doesn't help those photos I took at the time.

Uneventful

Not much happening on the photography front for me.

I've been very interested in the leaked photos and rumoured specs for the Nikon D600. 'Affordable' 24mp full frame? If it'll do five stage AEB, I'm pretty much determined to pick one up, but that's not been mentioned in the specs yet.

I've also booked a big trip for New Year- I'm off to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand so that should yield some really good photo opportunities. I'm still not sure what, if anything, I want to do in terms of lenses but I think that my Tokina 11-16 should suffice. It's done pretty well so far.