Year: 2008

Bosham

Bosham

Saturday was a special day, so my girlfriend and I headed down to Bosham for a day out.

Bosham is a lovely little place in West Sussex.  It is right on the seafront in a natural harbour.  It has a couple of shops, a nice cafe over looking the sea and a craft centre.  It also has a waterside car which is underwater when the tide comes in!

We walked around the natural harbour following a man made path.  Every 10 or 20 metres there was a sign which said, “This path is flooded at every tide!”

It was quite a cloudy day, with some sun occasionally poking through.  At one point, we both saw it break through a gap in the clouds and we quickly put the camera to our eyes and starting taking photos of the light on the sea!

After we had walked around the area little we head to the craft centre before it closed.  There were a few nice things in there, but are visit was fairly short.  As we exited the centre I glanced across the top of the cafe to see a slight redness in the sky.  Quick I thought, theres a sunset!

We were greeted by this!

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It only lasted about 10 minutes as sunset do and as we were finishing we saw another photographer there taking a couple of photos, but he said he seemed to have missed it.  Apparently they had seen the sky when leaving Chicester.

The sunset was the end to a lovely day

Slowly Does It

Slowly Does It

Well things are slowly getting easier at work, which is good news for my stress levels and I’m just managing to relax a bit more.

Christmas present shopping is nearly completed too, just a couple more to get tomorrow and the royal mail to do their job and delivery the remaining items.

Its the Maltings Christmas market on Tuesday as well, so busy getting things organised there.  I’ll be in a different location with a different table layout, I think more room!  So that will be interesting working out how to set that up on the day!

The Market, although not technical the correct date, marks 1 year of first meeting my Girlfriend! Wow, where has that year gone!  Must have enjoyed it!!

Well still got photos to print and things to sort out, so better get on with that I suppose.

Servers, DNS, Firewalls and IPs

Servers, DNS, Firewalls and IPs

Well if you understand that you might have a bit of an idea of the headache I have at the moment!

At work things were moved around and I had no idea of the grief it was about to cause me.  I had complaining mails, phones calls and all sorts for issues.  All of them out of my control and I’ve been trying to track down people to help fix things.

At one stage I had 1 mail every 2 minutes for 3 hours!  Nightmare.  Lots of chasing, problem sorting and issues!

7 days on, its still a headache but a little easier.

Hopefully things should get easier soon. They had better as Christmas is approach and I want to relax and enjoy it!

New Photos Added & Computer Issues

New Photos Added & Computer Issues

What should have been a very simple task last night taking no more than 20mins actually took an hour! I have uploaded some new photos to the website. They are in the landscape pages & europe pages, and of course in the latest page

For some reason when I updated the pages, the web browser wasn’t showing the images, despite the fact they are actually on the site and correctly reference. I even opened a separate browser which should have fixed any caching issue and still it didn’t work.

I got to the stage where I was going to remove the new images but for some reason I closed the upload tool and they all started to show! Silly thing! I think it have got a bit confused as I was uploading and quickly navigating around the tool, which seemed to make the browser think the images didn’t exist, although it showed some and not others.

Anyway after half an hour of frustration, it worked. Boring I know but thats computer for you and what we have to put up with some times.

In fact this week has been a bit frustrating alround with my computers. A while ago my laptop just stopped its wireless access. After a lot of fiddling and finding a new internal wireless card it still didn’t work. This week I bought and external card only to find the PCMCIA slot on the laptop, wasnt a card slot at all, just a remote control slot! So still no wireless access on that.

My A3 printer which has given me about 5 years of continuous good service seems to have finally stopped. Every time I print a photo, it prints lines all over it. It started this back in about May / June and I thought I had fixed it. Each time it did I removed the cartridge a gave the pins a clean, but this time it didn’t work. Luckily it looks like ebay has come to the rescue and I have found a newly new one, so fingers crossed on that being ok when it turns up.

Christmas is Coming!

Christmas is Coming!

Its getting to that time of year again.  People are putting up their Christmas decorations, some people since October!  Shops are getting busier. Days are getting colder and nights are getting cosier! (is that a word?)

Also the pressure of trying to get Christmas presents, either thinking of what people might like, or getting lists from people to help out.  Luckily I seem to be doing well with getting mine and have a few ideas and bought quite a bit already.  This is partially to do with an early Christmas event this year to try to get some of the family together.  Its always tricky when several families are involved.

This time of year also means Christmas Craft Fairs!

2 at the Farnham Maltings in December (6th & 16th evening) and 1 in Farnborough this Sunday.  So its a busy time!

I’ve been able to create lots of news designs too by going through my images again a picking out some that haven’t been used.  That’s the advantage of taking so many, you can always pull on new designs even when you haven’t taken many new images!

Fireworks Night

Fireworks Night

We got invited to my step brothers fireworks night.  He’d set up lots of fireworks in the garden and built special rigs.  Its start with a rocket shooting toward the back of the garden into some gas filled balloon, Cool!

It ended up being the best home fireworks I had ever seen and the weather held off too!

On Saturday we eagerly watched the rain in the hope that it would stop for the Farnham Fireworks.  It did, but not for all of them unfortunately, but it didn’t rain hard.

So, not only did I have to try and photograph fireworks, but in the rain too!

These wre a couple of hte best ones.

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I was very pleased with the results especially considering the rain.

Winkworth Again

Winkworth Again

As the weather was better the other day we decided to give Winworth Arboretum another go!

Having been there only 2 weeks ago, we had a good idea of where to head for the best colour.

So, first stop, the toilet blocks, no not to use the but to photograph the lovely acers outside.  2 of them had lost their leaves, so there was only one lonely acer there, but still in lovely red colours.  Heading a slightly different way than before we saw a few different acers in full autumn colour, ideal!

Then we worked are way onlong one of the middle paths to the group of big red acers.  Just before that, I saw another acer (ok, there are lots there) and got this lovely photo.  Now a backdrop on my laptop!

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Then we moved on.  A couple walked past us and saw the cameras in our hands and said, “there are some lovely acers around the corner” (I know i thought, thats where we are heading!).

After spending a bit of time there, we walked around the lake.  I want to get a nice view on the other side.  The sun was out at the right time, so we were lucky, although we did have to wait for the wind to drop to remove the ripples from the lake.

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Lastly we visited the Acers meadow and took about 60 shots of 2 of the remaining acers there.  They were close together so I was able to get some photos of them with a mass of red nicely lit by the sun which had decided to come out again!

Its Snowed

Its Snowed

Last night is snowed!

This morning there was still some snow in the garden.

As I was having breakfast I saw a bird flitting around in the garden, so I decided to put some bird feed out.

I got about a metre from the bird table when I Robin landed on it. i froze! It stopped and looked at me enquiringly. I managed to throw a little bird seed on the ground, it jumped down a eat some. I managed to crouch down while it was still feeding. It was only about a foot in front of me.

Then it flew off.

I put some food on the bird table and went backing wishing I’d had my camera, so I dashed up stairs changed the lenses and went back outside. About a minute later the Robin was back!

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After trying to get a Robin in snow for years, it seems this time I have succeeded a couple of times!

Winkworth in the Rain

Winkworth in the Rain

Last Sunday we had planned to go to Winkworth Arboretum with the Nokia Camera Club. This arboretum is one of the best places in the South East of England to visit for Autumn colours. I normally end up visiting a couple of times in the autumn and once of twice in spring.

So we watched the weather forecast eagerly all week. Rain was predicated! It was meant to clear by 1pm, so we were hopeful for some sunny photos!

We all met up in the arboretum car park and 11am, in the rain!

On entering the arboretum, a person approached us who worked there and noticing all our cameras suggested we head off in one particular direction to see a large red acer tree. It was actually the direction we were going to go, but it was good to know we had the right idea, and it we were not to early for the colours!

It continued raining!

So I thought it would be ideal for HDR images (High Dynamic Range). These images consist of taking an under exposed image, correctly exposed and over exposed, and then combining the using special software which then brings out the details in the highlights and lowerlights, in other words areas of the photos that might normally be lost.

I tried this with a few images and a couple of the views. These are a couple of the results.

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It still continued to rain.

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So when we had finished getting drenched, and trying to protect our camera gear, and as there was sign of the promised sun, we head back up to the top of the arboretum, and went in search of a nice warm pub and food!

It was a really enjoyable and wet day, but we got some good photos.

Now, I like to add, that I have always said I don’t like to modify my photos. This still stands. I don’t clone out bits and add bits in, but I do change the brightness and contrast where necessary. HDR is a similar thing. Its using the 3 or 5 (even up to 9) images of differing exposure and combining them together. So the photo isn’t really being modified like cloning, but enhancing the depths and highlights of the image to be more like you see with your eyes. Some HDRs can be over done, but I’d like to think that mine are subtle enough that you might not be able to tell.

You will see more and more HDR added to my website, but they well be labeled. See what you think!

Its the Weekend Again!

Its the Weekend Again!

Where does time go? Its the weekend yet again! This weekend is going to be a bit more relaxing, at home tomorrow then out with the camera club on Sunday.

Time really does seem to fly. I’ve been reading over some of my old entries in my blog, good and sad, happy and stressful times, but when reading them, they all seem like yesterday.

Where has the year gone too? Its nearly November and thats nearly a year since I first meeting my girlfriend at the Christmas craft fair and in a months time, i’ll be preparing for that fair again!

As you get older time just seems to get faster and faster. It also gets faster when you are busy and also enjoying yourself, so thats why the year has flown by!

Have a good weekend!

A Photo Shoot with a Difference

A Photo Shoot with a Difference

Saturday was interesting.

We were invited to help out some friends with a photo shoot. The event was a royal regency ball.

Our friends were taking portraits and had a studio setup there, while we did all the event at different stages, like the guards outside, the meet and greet, and the dancing.  I was a busy evening, taking photos for pretty much 6 hours!

Its meant that we got to see the event as it happened where sadly our friends were in one room taking the studio photos all evening.

Taking photos of people dancing proved quite interesting, as people were moving around so fast.

Despite being apprehensive about the shoot and getting all the correct shots, it went really well and I enjoyed it!