Love

This is a natural shape I found in a leaf in the garden, don’t know what the plant is but it has pink flowers which can been seen through the hole:

 

f/3.2
1/140 sec
ISO 200
6.3 mm

Life Of A Drop

Okay, so here’s the result of me messing around with some black tea and a camera. The photos look as if they’re in sepia tone because the tea fooled the white balance of the camera, should have really set it manually, oh well  – a lesson for next time. Also tried playing around with them in Photoshop to try and ‘fix’ the colours but I wasn’t happy with the results so left it as it is.

 

 

 

 

f/3.2
1/500 sec
ISO 64
6.3 mm
Flash

Ripple

I realise that it’s been a while since I posted anything. This (academic) year I will try and actually try and post on a  regular and reasonable basis. I think one a day might be a little bit too much so I’ve set myself an easy target to get started: post at least one photo a week.

I was messing around with water droplets. I’ll publish a small series of images soon to show the result. The image below isn’t one from the series but is one of the first I took as an experiment/test.

It shows water dropping in a bowl of black tea (yes bowl). The colours have been darkened:

f/3.2
1/1000 sec
ISO 800
6.3 mm
Flash

[ooh la – the kooks]

More Shady Bard

f/3.2
1/4 sec
ISO 200
6.3 mm

Shady Bard

f/3.2
1/15 sec
ISO 1600
6.3 mm

Last weekend I was in London to see Shady Bard, a band from Birmingham who were headlining at The Spitz (a nice bistro/music place). It was their debut album release thingy and there were 2 other bands playing, the first we missed completely and the other (can’t remember their names but I think it had the word ‘monkey’ in it…) didn’t really sound appealing to me. Anyway Shady Bard were pretty good and I’ve started to quite enjoy their music. As I say they’ve got an album out (From The Ground Up) and in the past have released various EPs. I really do recommend you listen to their music (Penguins and Bobby are my favs off the album :D), I think you can get the album from HMV/Amazon/iTunes. I’m in the process of getting one myself (as soon as I get some money!).
Ok so about the photo: first just messing around with the brightness/contrast to give it kind of a negative effect (I think I also converted it B&W first), then used the ‘history brush’ to get the colour. Lawrence, the bleached guy on vocals and acoustic guitar, in this photo reminds me of Spike out of Cowboy Bebop and Gene Starwind out of Outlaw Star but thats probably because I’ve been watch those a fair bit recently!

[cosmik debris – frank zappa]

Another One

f/3.2
1/250
ISO 64
6.3 mm

Following the same pattern from the last photo in terms of style, and again fairly mediocre but makes a nice little break from revision.

[believe – luna sea]

Black, White & Lilac

f/3.2
1/105 sec
ISO 64
6.3 mm

Just playing around, nice little break from revision.

Tip: most of the time its a good idea to dodge/burn b&w to give better tone + contrast; also try the same with colours, makes them more saturated = better contrast.

[Bist Du Nicht Müde – Wir Sind Helden]

p.s. wir sind helden are a fantastic german band, listen to them! i have two of their albums (“Die Reklamation”, “Von Hier an Blind”) and every single track is 5 starred on media player! …really, they are that good!

Spiderman 3 – utter trollocks!

The film had potential to be good, really, really good. Was it? No.

Having just watched the film a few hours I have to say I was rather disappointed. The trailer (see below) looked so good but its another one of those instances where you should just stop at the trailer and not bother with the whole film because they’ve already shown you the best bits.

The film itself was really long and generally I don’t that but this was just a waste of time, they took on too much at the same time and couldn’t pull it off. They should have made two films out of this instead. Then there were the cheesy bits, some of them, to be fair were quite funny with Spidey trying to look cool and getting all the girls. However others were completely over the top with him swinging in front of the American flag and everyone crying in the end.

Anyway, suffice to say Spiderman doesn’t die in the end and Spiderman 4 has already been confirmed so well it looks like there’s plenty more where this came from! I’d advice you not to see the film, especially if you’re paying full price – student prices (£3.50 @ AMC) aren’t too bad even if you end up not liking it. I give it 3/5 (and thats me being generous) and I can honestly say that the best thing about the trip to cinema was the Subway sandwich I had before the film!

Diffused Tree

f/3.6
1/320 sec
ISO 64
7.5 m

Just playing around with the colour and diffused light effects, nothing special.

[the last laugh of the laughter – travis]

 

On The Edge

f/8
1/140
ISO 100
9.8 mm

On top(ish) of Cheddar Gorge, in the background is the town of Cheddar. The rocks are all actually made out of cheese, the contortions and edges are due to people taking bites out of the rocks (even though it’s strictly prohibited by the National Trust).

I wanted to give a sense of depth not of only to the foreground but also to the background, the edge of the gorge does that well. Taking a photo of just the town wouldn’t look interesting (in fact it doesn’t look too good especially because it was kinda hazy). Burned the edg of the rock to increase contrast between the grayishness of the town and sharpened the grass to give it more definition.

Overall I quite like the shot 🙂

p.s. thanks for comments on the previous post, much appreciated!