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This weekend I spent exploring the part of the Cotwold Way national trail. I took some panoroama photos and some others that I am still sorting out but to keep with the stained glass theme that is currently going on I've uploaded a couple of panels I photographed while on my travels. The first is from St. John's Church in Old Sodbury. The church was closed but this panel is located in the entrance porch.

St. John's Church: Stained glass panel located in the porch of St. John's Church, Old Sodbury.

It's not been a good weekend for me for photography. I went out yesterday with my camera, walking from where I live over into the Winterbourne area of Bristol and wandering around the country lanes and fields there. I only took 21 photos for the 4 hours or so I was out and 6 of those were related to a panoramic picture which is currently suffering from a photo join mismatch in the sky area where two power-lines don't quite join up. It's annoying as the rest of the photos go together well.

It's been a weird day today. I was expecting a hard day at work due to various problems and fully expected to get shouted at over something that isn't really my fault but that I now have responsibility for. Instead there was no shouting but a lot of embarrassment.

Before dismantling my cobbled together macro lens I decided to make the most use of it as possible in case I couldn't get it to work easily again. I decided it would be cool to see what weird images I could get when looking at things close up. The following are nine images of things within a few meters of where my camera was set up in the kitchen. If this works correctly, there should be a table below with the images as thumbnailed links.

Today has been another 'experimental photography' day and this will be a long post.

Last weekend, after having lunch with my friend and his family, I trotted over to Ashton Court to play with my long lens some more and get some shots to practice stitching panoramas. The day was bright, although cold, and it seemed lots of people were taking advantage of the nice day to get some fresh air. The car park at Ashton Court was a gamble as the recent wet weather had turned the mud and grass into a squidgy mess and one car was already stuck and unable to get out.

I haven't posted for a while or played with my camera very much recently so this post is a 'killing two birds with one stone' post.

I wasn't too interested in going on a big trip this weekend so I decided instead to pick an object I had around the flat and try and see how many types of pictures I could obtain from that single object. I picked some apples I had and proceeded to take varying shots of it. I fiddled with different ways of lighting it from simply standing them next to the window to using a torch with coloured filters to illuminate it. I had to improvise tripods in a lot of cases, which was amusing, and several of my books and a vice I made during engineering workshop training all took turns to provide perches for my subject and my camera. Once I'd taken a number of pictures I decided I wanted an interesting way to show them off and thinking back to a sampler stained glass window my mother made many years ago I decided that would be a good theme. I also wanted to creatively title the piece so had some fun with Blu-Tak and the top of my dining room table. The result is below.

Apple Sampler: A sampler image of apples. Clockwise from top left: infrared, green filter, shot of the skin, duotone, shot of the stalk, yellow torchlight.

Let me know what you think?

I'd just tumbled out of bed this morning when one of the cats alerted me to the fact that there was a visitor to my parents garden. Bill the cat made a growling noise which normally is associated with birds but this morning implied something much bigger. A fox was wandering across the shed roof looking for a way back to it's den. After being put off from going into the rear neighbours garden by their dog it settled down amonst the ivy growing on the fence wall. I managed to take the photo below using a different lens to normal that I am just getting used to.

So it's officially New Year in the UK and the fireworks have almost finished. All today I've been reading articles in the weekend papers describing what people have been deciding will be their New Year's resolutions. It seems that everyone is making resolutions but me. I can't say I've ever made a New Year resolution. It just seems strange to make some sort of 'vow' to do something just because the number for the year has changed. Why would anyone think that it would be easier to keep your resolve to stick to something from New Year than from any other time in the year? According to what I've read it seems that most people break their resolution quickly anyway so what's the point? If your gonna try and do something to change your life just do it! Don't wait for some arbitrary designation of time to increment by one.

I don't think I understand.

I'm sitting in the arm chair at my parent's house and I appear to have survived Christmas relatively unscathed this year. My mother is currently probably somewhere on the road between Reading and Essex after taking my middle brother back up to his flat there; ready for work tomorrow. I took my youngest brother to the train station this morning so he could get his train back to his digs in London. My dad and uncle are both asleep in the living room and the only noises are the tapping of the keys of my parents laptop that I'm playing with and the occasional creaks as the cats change position on their chosen sleep furniture. One cat is wrapped around a soft toy which is on top of the radiator while the other is on top of a beanbag bought especially for cat use. Christmas this year has been surprisingly quiet and New Year will be quieter still. In fact Christmas hasn't really felt like Christmas at all this year. It's only really the faint hint of snow in the air that gives it away.