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Sunsets
I am lucky enough to work on the top floor of my building and I am lucky to have it directly facing west; looking out over a low-rise London directly facing sunset. I am even luckier that there is a balcony on that side of the building, allowing me to capture some amazing sunsets.
I haven’t always remembered to bring my DSLR in, and the image below is one of this times and necessitated the use of my iPhone instead. Despite this limitation the colour reproduction wasn’t too bad and it still as enough depth to make it an eye-catching photograph.
I’ve decided to make a greater effort to bring my camera in with me to work now so hopefully there’ll be lots more of these coming soon.
Paradise Island
As you maybe know I went to Mauritius for three weeks in July and took an awful lot of pictures (over 1000 no less). After several months slaving away over Photoshop I’ve managed to go through all of them, filter out the ‘family snapshots’ and post process all the ones that I deemed good enough to put on my portfolio and Flickr.
This brings us to now, November, and this process is now complete. I’ve added the best of what numbers to about 100 pictures on this portfolio and as usual the rest can be seen on Flickr.
I’ve tried to not post many ‘stereotypical’ shots on a tropical island and focus on some other aspects, such as the abundance of nature and culture that you can find here. We were lucky enough to have a holiday that coincided with a Chinese festival which gave me the opportunity to get some great pictures.
Below are the some of the pictures that I’ve added to the portfolio. You can also find them in the appropriate subcategories in the Photography section.
Laura Marling @ Westminster Central Hall
Low light photography is always a tough one without a tripod, as I found out when I took my camera for the first time to a gig (luckily Laura Marling gigs are quite calm and my camera survived!). It was quite interesting trying to get good pictures; being quite far back I didn’t have a huge amount of light getting into the camera, so even with my f/1.8 35mm lens I was still around ISO1000 to be able to get less than 1/35sec shutter speed.
Vibration Reduction worked reasonably well for my zoom lens, but most of the results for both lenses were not hugely sharp (though this is less noticeable on the web-resized versions).
I’ve posted up the photos on Flickr, which can be found here.
St. Mary’s Bay
It’s been a while since I last posted, I guess the working life has a way of eating all of your time so by the time you have come back from work, cooked, maybe played a little guitar it’s time for bed! I have been up to a few interesting things though, namely going to Mauritius for most of July (photography coming soon hopefully). Another interesting thing, and the main purpose of this post, was a trip to St. Mary’s Bay, a beach near Newchurch.
I was lucky enough to go at night, we didn’t see any of the Draconid meteor shower, but I did get some nice seascapes, despite not bringing my tripod with me. Check out the best below, but for a couple more check out my Flickr.
New Layout Live
So I’ve been pretty busy lately and one of those projects, as I mentioned in my last post, was this-here portfolio. As (I am sure) you can see, it is now complete! It is a stark contrast to the previous layout, but I felt it was time to break away from the norm and do something different. The Web Design section already shows I can create professional looking layouts so I am now using the portfolio’s layout as part of the portfolio itself; showing that I can also be creative.
If you have any comments feel free to leave them below, otherwise, I hope you continue to enjoy browsing my work.
Christmas
This is a bit late I know, but I’ve been pretty busy lately, with a few web projects, one commercial and the others for personal interest, one even being this portfolio itself (so check back soon for a new exciting layout, you won’t be disappointed!).
Over the Christmas period I took a few pictures and one of which I have added to my portfolio (below). If you want to see the rest, check out my Flickr.
Final-Fantasy-14.org is live!
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a pretty big fan of the Final Fantasy games, and that I have been known to run fansites on them. This is also the case with the series’ newest incarnation: Final Fantasy 14.
What I have now is the second version of this website, which is a massive overhaul of the first. I’ve been at this project for a few months now, with the majority of the time devoted to developing the custom Content Management System that the site needed to drive it. Dubbed ‘Crystal’, the CMS is efficient, extensible and lightweight; written in Object-Oriented PHP and using a MySQL RDBMS.
The UI features XHTML Strict 1.0, CSS 3.0 (though some opacity hacks break this unfortunately) and a smattering of Javascript and AJAX to make things a bit more ‘swish’ when using the site.
If you want to check out the complete site, visit it at www.final-fantasy-14.org.
Morning Wander
So the clock strikes 05:00 and I awaken to take an early morning walk down to Greenwich Park at the crack of dawn. After getting there almost an hour early and having to wait for the 07:11 sunrise I managed to get quite a few decent shots, and being Greenwich Park, a couple of squirrel photos too!
What this shoot reminded me most of all is to invest in an graduated filter, but for now I’ve resorted to using HDR techniques for some of my images, which unfortunately seems to introduce some noise to them. These images are currently on my Flickr (16 on from the linked image) whilst I determine which I shall put on the main site with a selection of them on this website (below).
The Last of the Summer Escapades
My post processing drive is finally over, London Zoo, London Tour Bus pictures have all been added and now we have a second visit to Hampton Court to add to the mix. As before these mainly feature on my Flickr but I’ve also added one to the main gallery (below).
London Town
And the processing drive continues, this time from a Tour Bus ride around London. A couple of these made it to the City / Urban album in the Photography section (below), and the rest can be viewed on Flickr.
