HK$10

As mentioned, I'm off to Hong Kong in a few weeks and this allows me to experience glorious foreign money! Ours is so dull by comparison.

This shot was actually taken with my old Nikon D3000 and it's standard 18-55mm kit lens which I find is a superior macro lens to the 50mm. Obviously it has greater zoom but I also think the minimum focus distance is shorter so you can get closer in.

This shot is also an example of early experiments with post-processing. It's not something that I've traditionally liked to do. Part of it is a complete lack of experience with that type of thing but part of it is that it feels just slightly dishonest to me. I don't want you getting the wrong idea, I'm not a 'straight out of the camera' purist but for my own use, what I want is an exercise in photography, not digital art and post-processing starts you down that route where there's no difinitive cutoff. If I want to use it for correction, surely the obvious feeling is why didn't I achieve the effect with the photo itself?

Anyway, artistic insecurities aside, I did want to explore Flickr's inbuilt editing software (via Piknik.com). It's features are best described as basic but fundamental by which I mean that you can create profound effects (if desired) by playing with rudimentary settings. It also saves versioning so if, after I save the file back to Flickr, I decide I don't like it, I can hop back in and click 'Undo'. Nice.

This is one of the areas where Flickr has shone through a little bit; one of the reasons for me starting this blog was wanting to test Blogger/Picasa/Google+ interconnectivity but Picasa's inbuilt editing doesn't seem to be on the same level as Flickr/Piknik's. Obviously there are a myriad of 3rd offline and synchronised solutions but an integrated host/edit package really appeals.

In any case, the post-processing effects have certainly allowed me to turn the above shot from something decidedly unremarkable into something rather more... eye-catching? The trick now will be to resist slathering every shot in garish post-processing effects to try and make something out of nothing. Frankly I could do without the temptation.

Pause for effect

I've not taken any photos for a bit and there's nothing in particular in the immediate future that I'm aware of to photograph but I do have a trip booked to Hong Kong next month so hopefully some photos will come out of that.

Magic fingers

I seem to have managed to revive my Nikon ML-L3 remote that died. I took it apart and, as expected, it's a single PCB with no obvious visible faults so I just reassembled, left the battery out for a day and when I tried it again in vain hope, it worked. Mysterious but not complaining. I was lucky this time in that a friend had a remote I could borrow but I wouldn't like it to crap out like that again when I'm in the middle of a shoot that needs it. Still, buying a backup remote seems a little extreme. Just have to deal with it if it happens, I guess.

F1 comes to Manchester

On bank holiday Monday (29/08/11), some of the main roads in the city centre were closed to create a closed circuit for former F1 champion Jenson Button to do his thing in the street. I had no idea how big F1 was in the UK; apparently 19,000 people showed up to see this particular event. The course was only a mile long. That meant crowds up to about five deep in places despite on/off rain.

Due to the fact I didn't fancy getting there early early in the rain for an sport I don't really care about, I was behind aforementioned crowds by the time it came to the main event.

This meant that I had to take photos blind by mounting my camera on a tripod, manually setting levels for everything (including manual focus point to stop it focussing on the crowd) then raising my arm at full stretch, holding the tripod from the bottom, pointing it at where I thought the car might be and setting the camera off with a remote. Bear in mind that this thing isn't exactly slow moving either. All in all one of the most difficult shots I've ever taken in that I had no idea what the view through the viewfinder was. A sharp picture? No sir, but pretty good all things considered.

Annoyingly, my camera remote died in the process. Not the battery, the remote itself. It's a cheap thing to replace but it's not exactly done lengthy service and I spent just that little bit more on the official model (Nikon ML-L3) rather than the third party one precisely because the unofficial ones are famed for unreliability. Slightly disappointing.

Manchester Pride parade

It was the Pride festival in town over the bank holiday weekend. I only live a couple of hundred metres from the gay village so it would have pretty negligent not to stroll out and take a look. Also my climbing skills let me scramble up the side of a building a bit to shoot over the crowd. The only downside is that my Tamron lens is really soft when shooting at the full 250mm (should have stepped down the aperture) but some of the shots look ok at this resolution.

You can check out the other photos I took at Pride here.

Form over function

I took this photo of a ridiculous chicken while staying with my parents last weekend. What purpose do you serve, o chicken? Neither meat nor eggs, I'll warrant.

Event horizon

These are my Flickr stats for about the last three weeks. You can see where the riot happened, no?

I was at my parents' house last weekend; took some photos of local wildlife but nothing particularly came out. I'll see if there's anything salvagable.

Moral of the story: take risks

It seems that the deluge of redirections from various contintental news and blogging sites has died down now. The news cycle moves quickly. At least now I know what I have to do for exposure- war photographer.

I jest. Well, mostly.

I picked up my tripod on Saturday and my wireless flash triggers today. I'm still awaiting the flash itself but I've been able to confirm that the trigger and receiver are talking to one another. Hopefully the flash will arrive in the next couple of days.

I was in work on Saturday and was hoping to take some sunset/night shot photos from the 24th floor of my work building but the project finished up sooner than anticipated so that was a no-go. Never mind, there'll be another opportunity in 26 days.

Atypical levels of exposure

My paid Flickr account expired on August 6th. Despite the fact that my intention was to explore Google+-Picasa-Blogger connectivity for photos, the fact that there's been quite a bit of interest in the two photos I took of the burning car and the fact that I'd handed out a few business cards made me think that perhaps I should get the account back up in case anyone took a look.

I'm very glad I did; the paid account gives me access to stats and lets me see where my photos are being linked from. They're being linked from your run of the mill blogs like this guy but also a number of other more serious blog/news sites:

Economics Intelligence: 'The economics of riots and austerity'
Future Conscience: 'UK Riots: Are We Limiting Our Understanding of Violence?'
CommonDreams.org: 'Police and Thieves: Making Sense of the English Riots'
GOOD: '"If We Don't Riot, You Don't Listen to Us": The Case for Chaos'
NieuwsUit: 'Rellen in Engeland - Rellen in Manchester & Birmingham'
Youphil.com: 'Angleterre: la pauvreté, responsable des émeutes?' (currently featuring on their front page)

On top of that, the Wikipedia page about the riots features one of my images (albeit under slightly the wrong day- may have to edit that) with about a dozen Wiki news articles in various language using it.

That's... quite a bit more exposure than I'm used to.

Manchester riots

Another photo taken during the night of rioting in Manchester city centre on 09.08.2011.