Akuma is Tiny Badass

The original idea was for it to be my silhouette in the window but this worked nowhere near as well as using that of my Akuma figure.

Au revoir Picnik

I'm meant to be revising for a series of Japanese exams and this, of course, means that I've been doing anything but revising for my Japanese exams. Procrastination breeds portraiture.

This picture was also a first experiment in Flickr's new inbuilt browser after Picnik integration was discontinued following it's purchase by Google (rival to the Yahoo-run Flickr). I have to say, I'm far from impressed. Picnik had a decent variety of features and filters but its replacement, Aviary, is not much more than Instagram in terms of variety. The most important omission (for me, anyway) is the ability to vary the strength of the effects- maybe I like one of their filters and it'd really bring out a photo if applied at 30% but ruins it at 100%. No dice; it's all or nothing.

This a dealbreaker for me and I don't think that I'm really left with an alternative other than looking into Photoshop which I'm reluctant to do. Picnik was a perfect tool for me as someone who took to post-processing somewhat reluctantly; it offered a decent variety of simple but potentially profound and scalable options with sensible options and parameters which supported versioning in the browser. Photoshop, by comparison, is an infinite, cumbersome tool and a technical can of worms I'd rather not open.

HDR Town Hall

Just another HDR image from my home city. This was taken very much off the cuff and I'm amazed that it came out as well as it did. Especially since the overexposed shot was so blurry. The HDR process helps to restore that.

On photographing marble

I initially found marble very difficult to photograph; the light tends to behave oddly as marble is slightly translucent and it can be difficult to achieve good contrast. This was a rare case that came out despite that and where the orange of tungsten lighting that typically blights many artificially lit photos actually worked to its benefit when brought out by some post-processing.

For a non-flash picture, I like how the background has entirely faded to black, giving the impression of the stone form looming out of the void. I also have a moderate phobia of statues. That might help.

Taken at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

Lens indecision

I've been thinking of reviewing which lenses I use. My cheap Tamron 18-250 that I picked up is alright but seldom does it provide images quite as notably sharp as those taken on either my Nikon 5mm prime or my Tokina 11-16mm. At least part of this is the lack of vibration reduction provided by that model, ever more important at the long end of things.

Swapping it for a Nikon equivalent gives me the options of 55mm or 70mm to 200mm or 300mm. Either way, I'm losing the 18-55 range. From that perspective, Nikon's 18-105mm appeals but them I'm weighed down with four lenses and that certainly doesn't appeal:

Tokina 11-16mm
Nikon 18-105mm
Nikon 50mm prime
Nikon 70-300mm

That's a heavy bag.

Our Glorious Dead

The company I work for is well established in the area of the city where we're based; we have an extensive network of buildings and have had for over a century. There's some really good architecture in our premises, a number of which are listed buildings. One feature I was hitherto unaware of until I came across it yesterday was this; a war memorial built into the very stone of the foyer of the building that houses it. It lists the employees of the company who served and died in the first world war; "Our Glorious Dead".

There must be 3,000 names there.

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.