Winter Green // January 31, 2005
Well, I've gone and spent all my money and bought a new camera - a Nikon D70. This is one of the first pictures I've taken with it. It's not particularly inspired compositionally or anything, but what I do like about it is the subtlety of the colours, particularly the pale greens in the distance. This is straight out of the camera and I'm really impressed that it has managed to capture the scene as I remember seeing it. With my old camera, I usually had to do a lot of tweaking for colour correction.
Ceiling Fan // January 29, 2005
This is a ceiling detail from Bilbao airport - just another shot from the archives. I'm really getting fed up with the weather round here at the moment. I want to get out and take photos but it's been so dismal - grey and cold I can deal with, but wet really gets me down.
Kings Skyline // January 27, 2005
This is another silhouette shot - this time of King's College, Cambridge.
I've processed the image quite heavily, which is something I don't normally like doing, but I didn't really have anything else to put up. I passed the original through Neat Image to remove noise and used Curves in PhotoShop to render the college facade as a silhouette and increase the contrast in the sky. This revealed some hideous jpeg artifacts, which I reduced by gaussian blurring the sky. A spot of sharpening brought out the outline of the silhouette. So there you go, not really worth it but hey...
Sky Spider // January 26, 2005
This is part of a sculpture outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (see my previous shot). It is one of Louise Bourgeois's spiders - amazing things if you get to see one up close. I first came across them at Tate Modern in London.
Out of Hours #2 // January 24, 2005
This is a shot from my second night trip to the business park near my home. You can see some similar shots here. Who knew fire escapes could be so funky?
Despite appearances, I haven't done much to process the image apart from a bit of contrast adjustment. I got about 10 minutes of this weird light just as the sun had dropped below the horizon.
No Cycling // January 22, 2005
I took this picture on the sea front at Southwold. It was taken only about an hour after this previous shot, but the quality of the light has completely changed giving a sombre out-of-season feel to the picture. I've tried to enhance this by slightly desaturating the image.
It's a shame I didn't notice the people on the far left when I took the picture and wait for them to move on. They're standing right at the important compositional point where the horizontal of the pier meets the diagonal of the sea wall.
Adrift // January 21, 2005
I found this decaying hulk of a boat just along the coast from yesterday's picture. I've given it a similar treatment in terms of contrast adjustment so the two go together as a pair.
Driftwood // January 20, 2005
Along the Orwell Estuary in Suffolk are the remains of trees that have fallen as the shoreline has been eroded. They create weird natural sculptures along the shingle beach.
I've blown out the sky in this shot so that I could increase the contrast in the interesting parts of the image and emphasise the texture of the wood. The sky was a typical featureless English grey so I thought I could lose it.
Last Stand // January 19, 2005
Thanks for all your comments on yesterday's tree. Here's another one for you taken near the same spot. The treatment is a bit different from yesterday's shot (and I confess, it was actually taken last June).
Oh for balmy summer evenings - they seem so far away in deepest, darkest January.
Tree in Silhouette // January 18, 2005
This was taken early in the evening where I walk with my dog. Charlie got bored while I was setting up the shot and decided to roll in fox crap instead. Nice.
Monday Morning Blues (Reds) // January 17, 2005
Last week was my first week back at work after the Christmas break. I'm getting reacquainted with my alarm clock - a relationship I'd rather do without.
This picture was one of those that you see in your head before setting up but can't quite pull off. I set up strong backlighting to emphasise the internals of the clock and blow-out the white table, but this has produced a huge red shadow that I think is too dominating.
Trinity Lane // January 15, 2005
This is one of the more successful pictures taken on my Wednesday night session skulking about in the shadowy backstreets of Cambridge.
I'm not particularly happy with it but I feel I should put something up after spending hours in the freezing cold battling with a tripod.
Remembrance // January 13, 2005
I've recently rigged up my old Minolta film scanner and have been going through some old negatives taken about thirteen years ago.
This is from the time when I worked as a researcher in a pharmacology lab. We had a fully kitted-out dark room for processing electron micrographs. I used to go in after hours to develop and print my own pictures. I can smell the distinctive tang of developing fluid as I write this and can still remember the thrill of seeing the image appear in the red glow of the safelight.
Some of the negatives were never printed and some didn't even make it onto a contact sheet. For a lot of the pictures, today is the first time I have seen them since looking through the viewfinder of my Pentax P30n thirteen years ago and releasing the shutter.
This particular photograph is of yours truly. Stephen pressed the shutter and he still pushes my buttons thirteen years later, but it's not as if...
Disco Loo // January 12, 2005
I went into Cambridge this evening armed with my tripod to get some night shots of the city. I was hoping to get some really great pictures of college architecture, cobbled streets and the river without the throngs of tourists that invade the city during the day.
This, however, was the best I could manage. It's actually a public toilet just in case you were wondering. It's not just any old toilet though, this one changes colour! It phases from blue, though green and red, to this gorgeous pink.
I'll leave college architecture for another day and maybe another camera. My FinePix will only go up to 15 seconds, which means I need street lighting, and my cheapo tripod is decidedly wobbly.
Light and Shade // January 11, 2005
In this shot I've tried to capture the interesting curves made by a lamp on a wall. I'm not sure whether they are parabolas or hyperbolas - I think they are hyperbolas but let's not get bogged down in the details :-)
The only light source in the shot is the lamp itself.
