Crêpes Salées

As an Englishman, yesterday marked the highlight of the annual calendar with the arrival of Pancake Day. I divulge from many of my countrymen at this point, preferring a more savoury option. This, depending on your interpretation, might actually make the above a crêpe salées since it's filled with bacon, cheese and spinach. In any case, it's likely the most succesful food photo I've ever taken.

Technicolour bridge

Just a bit more HDR experimentation. This bridge is, well, colourful. It comes from the same location as the previous entry and, being shot close up, likewise escaped the fog that plagued the rest of the shoot.

The Lowry Theatre

Another unreal landscape from my native city (well okay, it's from our sister city over the water but that's kind of a semantics thing as far as I'm concerned). I went to a show here last night, arrived early and took some shots while I waited. Again, forgot the lens hood and didn't bring the tripod and the area was blanketed with fog (not, it turns out, good HDR material) but I still managed to get this shot, easily the best of the bunch. The lights in the bottom left of the frame bother me a lot since they really distract from the main focus of the picture. The vignette effect helped to mute them a bit but I couldn't eclipse them without compromising the composition. Even so, I'm happy with the shot overall, especially after my usual less than subtle post-processing effects.

Time well spent?

Encouraged by recent HDR successes, I took the scenic route home after work (having taken my tripod along) and tried to recreate early token HDR experimentation more seriously. The temperature is below 0 here at the moment and I couldn't feel my fingers by the time I got home. The tripod did its job but I got the photos onto my computer to find that the exposures (a number of them long, since this was after dark) all had massive streaks, specs, smears etc. from crap on my lens. Lesson learned: invest in a lens brush and look after your kit.

The other factor that makes the shots difficult is that I was in the city using my 11mm Tokina lens and the sheer number of lights in the location combined with the all-seeing lens made it very difficult to avoid profound lens flare. The lens hood may have helped to some degree on a few of the shots so I'll remember to take it with me next time.

So there we go: an evening of disappointing photos but lessons learned.