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.

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

These are some more of the photos from my recent Austria trip- HDR shots of the state hall from Austria's national library in Vienna. A blogger working for Vienna university library was kind enough to feature them on the university library blog. I didn't have my tripod with me (nor do I particularly have a reason to think I would have been allowed to use it if I had) but the HDR has come out crisply regardless. Some loss of sharpness in the foreground of some shots so I still need to refine my technique but I think I'm improving my HDR overall.

I can't help wonder if there isn't some duplication in the shots, though. Do I really need all six? What do you think?

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

It's been quite a while since I updated and at least part of the reason for that is that I've been travelling again, this time to Ireland, Austria and Slovakia. I've got some of the best photos I've ever taken from that trip so I think that over the next few updates I'll be sharing some of those with you. The above is from the long room of the Austrian National Library, perhaps the most beautiful and moving building I've ever stood in, which is especially remarkable given that it is not a religious building.

Sounds From The Other City

I was at a festival over the weekend- a local affair centred around the pubs at a major crossroads in my locality's sister city over the river. Challenging photographic conditions with the low light and the movement etc. It didn't help that I set my focus to use the wrong setting but the photo of this gentleman, a Mr. Cole Moldy, came out ok.

Just Jones on holiday

I wouldn't normally post twice in a day but I do have to share this wonderful portrait of my long-term friend and former flatmate Jones. This was taken on my Spanish holiday I'd mentioned in the last couple of posts which was Jones' stag do. You would think that this would perhaps explain the dress but for the fact that he packed it himself, unprompted. One does wonder if his bride-to-be understands quite what she's getting herself into. Regardless, it is one of my better portraits.

Tech upgrade

So the new laptop has arrived and I've got busy with Photomatix and GIMP. Particularly GIMP which I've not really used much before. I've obtained some scripts to replicate some of the effects I used to use with Picnik- Ortonography and Vignette, mostly. I even still dip into Aviary in Flickr when it suits.

Both Photomatix and GIMP run faster than on my old machine (even when it was at its best) but not quite the breakneck speed that I was perhaps expecting but it's ok, I'm happy with the step up. I'm still not entirely happy with how Photomatix operates, though. It comes up with a preview image which you tweak before instructing it to process the final image. The problem is that the final image doesn't match the preview, which is no end of frustrating. Can anyone recommend any other good HDR software? Photomatix is great but it does let itself down in a big way with this one issue.

As for the images that accompany this post, they're more examples of HDR efforts around la Sagrada Familia and one more atheist's love affair with the buildings of a religion he doesn't subscribe to. Christianity does provide some good photo ops, I'll give it that.

Barcelona and laptop upgrade

I've just returned from a stag do in Barcelona. Not exactly a perfect photography holiday but I've got a few that are nice. Most notable was the trip to la Sagrada Familia, a modern cathedral designed by Gaudi with an interior intended to resemble a forest. Very well thought out- the columns are made from different coloured/shaded stone so that from the back it gets darker and darker towards the front until there's a golden sunburst intended to represent God. Even as an atheist, that's impressive.

I was looking forward to creating some HDR images I took there but computer problems have meant that it's running very slowly and HDR processing is lengthy at the best of times. I use Photomatix for HDR and it's taking a full 10 minutes to get through to the preview stage. After that, I have to tweak the presets and settings and tell it to process which takes another couple of minutes. If the image doesn't come out quite right, it's back to the start. Long story short, I decided that enough was enough and bought a new laptop so I look forward to powering through the rest of the HDR work and improving on the image above.

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.