Down The Pier

Took an autumnal trip to the beach over the weekend and took a few shots of Boscombe Pier

As usual, click on the images to enlarge

Light Installation

I went along to the last viewing of Bruce Munro's light installation at Salisbury Cathedral.

This installation, made from 16,000 recycled bottles featured in the Cathedral's Cloisters. Each water-tower of bottles changed colour to choral music - Very soothing :)

Not too bad considering they were all taken hand held.











As usual, click the images to enlarge

This Season I Shall Mostly Be Using My 50mm

Have been using the Nifty Fifty a lot recently. It has been used for the majority of pictures featured on the blog so far this year.

I really love it's low light and shallow depth of field capabilities and the fact that it's a 50mm prime lens means that you have to move around a lot more to get the shot that you want. All this for under £100 - In my view, a must for any amateur photographer.

Here are a couple of quick examples of the shallow depth of field that can be achieved using this lens.





As usual, click the images to enlarge

Let There Be Light

I am currently giving my bathroom a new lease of life as it's one of the few rooms that I have never done anything with since buying the house. So far this project has included putting in a new (and much bigger) shower and enclosure, re-plastering and decoration.

Today was the day when the new lighting was put in. The old ceiling rose (and bare bulb) was removed to make way for some new down lights.

With lighting on the mind I thought the other day that I'd never taken a picture of a naked bulb so thought I'd give it a quick go! Here's how it turned out.



As usual, click the image to enlarge

I Love Cake

It was my birthday last week and I went out with some friends for a meal and some drinks to celebrate the occasion.

Two good friends got me a lovely Belgian chocolate cake and it was so nice I thought I'd capture it in a photo before I polished it all off!

The picture is actually made up of 3 photographs merged together within Photoshop.



As usual, click the image to enlarge

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz!

Driving back through the fog in to Salisbury the other night I made a quick pit stop at the Mercedes Benz garage to take a couple of quick snaps.

With the fog, it was quite an eriee night and I was trying to capture that in photos. That didn't really work but here are a few of the shots anyway!







Looks like their fancy lights need a bit of a clean!

As usual, click the images to enlarge

Facebook Photo Merge

A few months back, I read online (can't remember the site at the moment) about taking long exposure photographs of your computer monitor whilst scrolling through a series of photos within a Facebook album. Guess the idea is to somehow merge a few photos to give you the general theme of the album within one image.

Thought it was an interesting idea so had a quick go to see how it would turn out.

Here are some of my test shots. They are all made up of 2-3 photographs from the same Facebook album.









As usual, click the images to enlarge

Photoshoot With A Friend

Last Saturday I did a photo shoot at home with a good friend Stace who I coaxed (actually she was really up for doing it) in to being my model for the afternoon. We had a great time and it allowed me to try out various different styles of photography (portrait, action etc).

During the afternoon I took around 400 photos and have only had the chance so far to do a first pass and deleted around half which were unusable due to bad focus, blinking, bad lighting and ones which I knew she would blatantly not like!

Here are just a few of the ones that I have liked so far with more to follow once I've had a chance to sort through them.

Flag Waving

A little bit of flag waving to follow on from the Remembrance Day post.

Wetsuit Required

One of the first portrait shots taken with the Nifty Fifty. This is also another example of using textures on my photographs.

Nifty Fifty

I've had the 450D for around a month now and taken quite a few shots with it. I have found (as I'd previously read in reviews) that photos taken with the standard lens (Canon EF-S 18-55mm IS lens) are not always that sharp. This is not a huge problem as a little post processing generally solves the issue.

I have also been keen to get more in to portrait photography and am always impressed with shots taken with a very shallow depth of field. With that in mind I had already seen a low cost lens with a fairly wide aperture of f/1.8 and after reading some rave reviews and a sale on Amazon I snapped up a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II prime lens.

Yes it has a very plastic feel to it (with plastic mount) and does not seem very strong but a for under £70 I don't think you can go far wrong with this. The fixed focal length does not give you the flexibility of the kit lens so you have to move around a bit to get the composition that you are after but I think the shallow depth of field (see test shot below) and sharpness of images is more than worth a little extra effort. I've barely used the kit lens since getting this nifty fifty!