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Wow! It's been a while since I've updated due to spending long evenings at work doing coursework and generally not being in the mood to sort out any of the photos that I's recently taken. I thought I'd break the drought by uploading a couple of images of my friend Dave taken at Kimmerige Bay. I have lots of other ones still to sort but I generally choose images with friends in to work on first as they have the most meaning to me.

This weekend it was inevitable that some sort of insect would become trapped inside the house and subsequently die what with the hot weather and the windows being open. Sure enough, the first dead fly appeared on Saturday and inspired me to try some super macro photography but this time I wanted to try a slightly different technique that that I used last time. This time I wanted to try to use the distance of the lens away from the camera sensor to provide the magnification. I had an old Pringles tin which I cut the end off to form a subsitute bellows, affixed one end to my lens-less camera with sticky tape and wedged my macro lens in the other. After setting up I noticed that I was getting an odd light bloom inside the image. I thoguht that maybe the light was bouncing around inside the tube as the inside was still silvered so I improvise a dark material to line the inside of the tube (it was a black bin liner) and tried again after wrapping another bin liner around the join between the tube and the camera to cut out any possible light leak through the rough join.

I've been playing with some of the photos from the photography weekend a couple of weeks ago. The first image out is a semi-collaborative effort between me and my friend Dave. I asked for him to model for me for a silhouette photo. He agreed and once he'd seen the results he wanted a go too. So to summarise, I took the picture of him, he took the picture of me. I'm entirely to blame for the Photoshop work. ;-)

After the challenge was set by Dave and Pat I resolved to do something creative with my spoilt photographs. Under the read more link is the result.

If you use Firefox you may have to first zoom out of the image.

I knew I would finish late from the course I am on tonight so planning ahead, I packed my camera and tripod to take some pictures of the Clifton Suspension bridge. I intended to get a smal panorama of the bridge to see how it came it. Amazingly, there was a hot air balloon just drfiting very near the bridge as I wa taking pictures so armed with a view of two of the things Bristol is famous for I happily snapped away, dreaming of the cool panorama that I would produce from it.

Got home.

Realised I never set my camera back to ISO 100 from ISO 1600 after checking out the images I took and seeing they are all 'noise-tastic'.

Set my camera back to ISO 100 so I don't forget again.

Repeatedly bashed my head against the desk for continuing to have the same stupid mistake occurring as happened on my photo weekend with Dave.

Anyone got any ideas what I can do with 350MB of unusable digital pictures apart from delete them?

What a waste :-(

Underneath the 'read more' link I've uploaded the first panorama I took last weekend at Kimmeridge Bay. Me and my friend Dave got together in his neck of the woods to take photos and use each other's gear. Dave has a nice ultra-wide Sigma lens which I borrowed in the hope of taking some panoramas that didn't consist of masses of photos to stich because my 60mm doesn't give a large angle of view. As there was not enough time to do a proper calibration of the lens onto the tripod head I just used a quick and dirty calibration based on the settings for my 60mm. The resulting images proved a pain to stitch but thanks to a lot of help from johnh over at the PTAssember Formums, I eventually got it stitched and looking reasonable.

Here's one of the beads made with the Lentil Press, (used for making a shape out of a molten blob of glass held on a mandrel). I decided to have some fun. What is life without fun. So,

Kat bought me a lentil press for my last birthday. The press is so called because the bead is pressed between two blocks of brass to give it a lentil shape, a flattened sphere.

As you may have gathered I have got into trying to take panoramic photos in a big way lately (stitching 2 or more images together to forma larger picture). A couple of days ago I started my computer off calcultaing and stitching together a set of photographs that I took of the main street in Marshfield Village. Tonight it finally finished and outputted a stitched picture. It's not a finished picture by any means. It needs cropping and other sundry tweaks to get it looking even half decent (using the same exposure settings on the camera over a large field of view inevitably produces areas that are more dark or more light than you like. So to stitch my 56 images together has taken about 48 hours for my 1 GHz computer to process (although my computer performs a few other jobs between while computing but nothing particularly arduous).

Was it worth it?

Probably not but it's the largest 'photo' I've ever produced with a single tiff file of 686MB.

A couple of months ago I visited my friend Dave for a weekend of photography. It's always fun to take photos with someone else as they view things in ways that differ from you so you can start to see a little what their world looks like. We started by driving out in the forested area near where Dave lives. Since I'm meant to be travelling back down to Dave's for another photo jaunt I thought it was probably about time I put some of the first lot of pictures up here.

Yesterday was another 'random' photo day in that I just got in the car and went looking for interesting things I might photograph. I ended up at West Kennet Longbarrow which is near Avebury around 8:30pm. At that time it was pleasantly empty with one couple just leaving and a fellow photographer with a tripod trying to take pictures of the inside of the barrow. The barrow is well restored and quite roomy compared to the Nympsfield and Hetty Peglers Tump barrows which I visited recently.