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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.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, rather than going on a big photographing and walking trip I decided just to travel down the motorway a bit and stop at one of the picnic areas. I eventually settled on the picnic area near the junction of the A420 and the A46. There's a nice patch of grass on a hill which gives a nice view of the surrounding countryside. After taking a couple of photos here I then decided to walk round the edge of the grass and see what there was to photograph in the surrounding undergrowth. What followed was a sort of minature safari which was an enjoyable way to spend about an hour in the sun. I've only just got round to sorting through the pictures and I've put a few up here for you to look at.

As I've been trying to archive images off my hard drive this week to free up more space for pictures I've come across a lot of images that I'd 'forgot' about or put to one side to deal with later. One of these is a picture of my brother Mat which I took this Christmas. He was just sitting on the stairs watching TV while I was sat playing with the settings on my camera. I realise that I already have a portrait of my brother Edd on this site but no picture of Mat so without further ado....

This morning, as it was a clear night, I decided that I would try and see if I could take some star trails. I've never taken any before so I went out as a learning experience and to become more comfortable with being out on my own in the middle of no-where in the dark. I took the car to increae my illusion of safety and parked up on a small lane slightly to the north east or where I live. Although there was still quite a bit of ambient light around as it was a crecent moon there were still a lot of stars to be seen with the naked eye. Whether they would come out on the camera or not I was unsure of. I started off with some quick exposures, mainly because despite it being a back road and I thought, pretty deserted, one person drove past while I was taking pictures and one person rode past on a bike! My exposures in these two cases were not so much 'I'll expose it for x seconds', rather 'there's light coming, close the shutter'.