• $1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera – Lose The Tripod Video – Metacafe – What a neat idea!
• UNIX TOOLBOX – One of the best cheat sheets I've seen in a long time

My next format will be Lessons Learnt.

One thing I have noticed is that I have a lot of, in terms of photography, mistakes. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because you can’t learn without making mistakes.

So, with this in mind, I will review some of the mistakes I have made and comment on things I would do differently, if I had a chance to retake the shot. Whenever possible I will put this into practice and provide a follow up photograph.

As well as pointing out mistakes, I will also go through the successful photographs and the approach I took to capture them.

Patience is a virtue…

This image was only possible because I used a gorillapod and had lots of patience. It took almost 4-5 shots to bag this photo, each time I had to wait until there were enough cars waiting for the traffic lights to go green. I think the only way I could improve this picture would have been to change the white balance from auto to tungsten.

Shaky cam

There’s no substitute for some form of camera support i.e. tripod, tall glass, etc.

[tags]photography, learning[/tags]

Here’s three of my favourite photos.

I’ve wanted to capture one of these slow exposure shots for some time. Unfortunately my camera (Fuji FinePix F10) does do night photography very well. In fact in night mode it has a tendency to turn most scenes with any form of lighting into white light. So after a few experiments I discovered that I could get these images using least light sensitivity (ISO 80) and a relatively short exposure (3 seconds). Another bad thing about night photography is that you need steady camera unless you like blur. So the GorillaPod finally earned its keep by providing the necessary stability whilst being tethered to the barrier you can see on the left side of the shot.

I’m really pleased with this shot mostly because it was handheld and I have very shaky hands. I have another shot from the right which had some graffiti, but I think it would’ve detracted from the overall scene. It had been raining off and on during my walk which gave the floor a nice reflective property. I think this picture works well as colour and would’ve been to clinical in black and white.

Yes I know the OXO tower’s lighting has been over exposed, but heck I’m giving you a great collection of London landmarks: Sea Container House, the OXO tower, the Eye and the National Theatre! I like how the lower hanging clouds near the OXO tower have been illuminated giving them a norther lights look. The reflections on the Thames came out nicely too.

The rest can be seen here.

Next week’s task is to find something to photography during day!

Technorati Tags: Photography, Night, London

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Running

• I love it when my worlds collide. Joe Ely@Run with Perseverance has some tips on earning money taking photos at Marathons.
• Ed@a viking, running has a hilarious take on running with headphones.
• I find I’m still looking for good glossary/reference sites for the new terms I come across in running: tempo runs, VO₂Max (which I still think is a new soft drink by Pepsi), BHP, etc. Whilst googling I came across this site that explains tempo, easy, interval and fartlek (stop sniggering at the back).

Gardening

• With Winter here, Gardener across the country are packing up their gloves and cleaning their boots. Some of us use the time to peruse other hobbies such as photography. Trillium@Diary of a weekend gardener decides to combine both at a microscopic level. Check out the beautiful photos here.

Miscellany

• Got a mac with an iSight? Then how about a Kaleidoscopic screen saver that can use your iSight as an input? It’s really quite beautiful to watch, whilst still being freakish at the same time (via iUseThis
• A definitive WordPress coding reference can be found on Lorelle on WordPress. There’s mention of a list of global WordPress variables by Abhjit Nadgouda, but to be honest I’ve read it, and found it dryer than a salt cracker. Still Abhjit has a nice web layout, worth the visit if only to see the Opera like pop-up web link previews.
• Art Face Off is where artist upload photos of their art and the registered public vote on who’s the best. Winners get $1,000. (via Techcrunch)
• OS X Daily have a post about 10 little known command-line utilities, although mentioning fink and MacPorts was a bit of a stretch… (via TUAW)

[tags]computing, gardening, photography, running[/tags]

^*Sharp readers will have spotted that I spelt this word right this time around! Still can’t spell for toffee…

Blurvision
Fruity – these were taken with the focus completely off. I find switching to macro and using telezoom does the job.

Flora – I played around my camera’s night scene mode and kept the exposure to 3 seconds whilst moving the camera around.

Abstract
Fruit and veg, stalks and bottoms

Still life
I find perfume bottles, the various shapes, sizes and colours make them good fodder for still life. This is especially the case when you use them as filters.

The bathroom can be full of surprises too…

[tags]photography, abstract, still life[/tags]

I’m looking forwarding to see what kinda stuff I can shoot with it!

Oh and the gorillapod has finally made to our shores. I spotted one in Jessops for just under twenty quid. I haven’t used in anger yet, and of course I came across the classic egg and chicken problem of how to take a picture of the gorilla pod when you only have one real camera.

Luckily the iSight after much coaxing was able to come up the goods. I used CamGrabber software to do snaps, since Apples native Image Capture tool refused to recognise my Firewire iSight camera.

Here’s some pictures of the gorillapod in action, or not.

[tags]polaroid, gorillapod[/tags]

• Sean McHugh has a wonderful site with lots of useful tutorials suitable for beginners to advanced photographers (via digg).
• Steve McCurry has an extensive portfolio of South East Asian photography. I don’t think I’d have the guts take photographs there or the ability to remove myself from all the abject poverty in these places (via swiss miss)
• Jan Von Holleben has great photography on his site, I recommend the Dreams of Flying set in particular. Jan injects a lot of humour in his photography, but none of is forced laughter, it’s far more subtle. (again via swiss miss)
• Whilst I often cite them, I should really recommend photojojo as a source for photography 2.0. These guys are web savvy, but are able to still dish out the clinical photography techniques.

If you want to keep tracking my latest photography related discoveries, please check out this news feed.

[tags]photography[/tags]

I say I haven’t been doing much gardening, but I have been searching for gardening blogs, so far I’ve found the following “gloggers”(tm) of which a few are British. I believe they’re nearly all allotment gardeners, it looks like they struck paydirt and have started harvesting loads of yummy fruit and veg – I’m jealous.

Here’s my current collection of gardening blogs:

I’ve been very quiet on the photography front too. I only managed to snap the following.

Thanks to Lou, for pointing out how pretty and flowerlike the beetroot looked after having its stalks cut off.

As with the my search for gardening blogs, I’ve also been looking for blogs by photographers. I wanted to go beyond just photoblogs which tend to be just be the photographers work rather than the whole process of photography. Here’s some I’ve found:

Finally in addition to doing a test upgrade from MovableType 2.661 to current release, here’s what I’ve been busy working on, my wiki pages for my Mac Mini tweaks and an upgrade site documenting my trials and tribulations of upgrading various software I and Lou use to maintain our websites:

• http://booyaa.org/dokuwiki/mac_software
• http://booyaa.org/dokuwiki/website_maintenance

There’s so much I want to write about, but I’ve got to get ready to leave for late lunch. So until later on! Ciao!

[tags]gardening, photography, apple, movabletype, mysql, upgrading[/tags]

Not perfect I know – crowd control: should either have a swarm of people gushing out or none at all. Still became a rather nice black and white shot, an improvement over this one.

I got a lot more detail this time around.

[tags]photography, london, black and white[/tags]

A few months back I bought two A3 sized cards, a black and a white one. I had planned to use these to improve the quality of my still life and setup shots. I’ve finally had the chance to play around with them and here are the results.

I suspect this shot could’ve been improved by using a reflector to light up the left side, but I love how I’ve isolated the pot of basil.

It’s interesting to note that the white background makes the overall image stand out more, the black adds shadow to the yellow top.

I think overall top picture’s stones have a brighter glow. I suspect this is why jewellery is exclusively photographed on black velvet.

Things I have noticed since I’ve started to use my backgrounds is that I need some kind of clamp/prop to hold the card in place. Also the black card reflects a lot of light which gives it the appearance of grey in places, so I plan on getting some black velvet material in the not too distant future.

Buy yourself some card (it costs only a couple of quid), get a friend to hold it in place and start snapping. It will improve your pictures no end, at very worse improve your eBay sales

[tags]photography, focus, background, technique[/tags]