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Only a small lake in the centre of the island. It's home to a pair of swans, coots, moorhens and Canada Geese that arrive for a short time every winter.

Here's the view looking left towards the mouth of the estuary and Southend-on-Sea, an important day trip venue for East Enders during the fifties and sixties. East Enders is a slightly derogatory term for people who lived in the areas of the East End of London (of whom I am one, being born in the now defunct East End Maternity Hospital, Commercial Road).

You can see the cockle mounds more clearly here and the birds are Turnstones I am reliably informed,(from googling pictures).

Old Leigh is about 5 miles up the road from Canvey, closer to the mouth of the River Thames. It's tidal, much like Canvey and provides a safe mooring for the many cockle boats that fish around the Thames estuary.

Comprised of 7 photos stitched together with Panoramaplus 1.0 from Serif

I shot this panorma some time ago while on a business trip to Germany. I managed to get into Berlin one evening and subsequently took a lot of pictures of the architecture. I've put more effort in to this picture than it was really worth on the basis that I've learnt a lot while producing it. It was three images handheld at 18mm x 1.6 crop factor. There was some significant mismatching in the stones making up the foreground which I've repaired although if you look really carefully you might just be able to spot an oddity that I've left in! The image has also changed a lot since it started. I started off doing it in colour with a natural look (it was taken in the early evening so it was lightened a bit). I then started going with a bit more of a fantasy look with more of an overdone HDR look (although looking at some peoples HDRs you have to wonder whether there is a limit to how far you can push them into fantasy-land). The final image is obviously black and white and I'm personally more happy with it this way. Taking this image through a process of evolution has been interesting in making me more aware of what sort of look I like and given me lots of (not necessarily wanted) practice at masking!

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.

This is another panoramic image that I took while trying out my new tripod head. It was taken in April. I've fiddled with it to try to give it an 'older look' but it was mainly taken just to use my new tripod. I think if I was to take this again, I would get someone to pose in period farmer costume, maybe with one leg resting on the hoe and chewing a piece of straw. Anyone fancy dressing up for me?

It's been a while since I've updated so I thought I'd make an effort with this post.

Around the end of April I obtained a new panormic head and legs tripod combination for my camera to aid in taking panoramic shots so that they line up properly when you try to stitch the multitude of images together. I decided that I would head out in my car and look for anywhere interesting that I might try out my new 'toy'. The tripod needs setting up accurately for it to work properly so it was also an opportunity to test out the settings that I'd figured out to see how correct I'd managed to get them.