Blackberry Pickin

Out blackberry picking on saturday..

.. a wasp caught in an abandoned spider web and the morning sunlight..

the local farmers cat, who followed us for miles, we named him blackberry..

Nature taking over part of the old Wilts and Berks canal.

Wales 2

The panoramic view is stitched using Photoshop CS3, I had to tweak it manually in a couple of places, but the automatic photomerge process is excellent. (I guess for the price of CS3 it should be!).

The program I used to use was Serif PanoramaPlus, looks like I got it off a magazine disk though, as the latest copy is £40. It was usually okay, sometimes it got confused and didn't stitch all of the images, but I expect they may have improved that in the new version 3.

The vertical panorama (far left) was just stitched manually in CS3.

Llyn Y Fan Fach

Fantastic walk up into the Brecon Beacons on saturday, around Llyn Y Fan Fach glacial lake. Some cool photos! (If I may say so myself). Even a rare self portrait (even though it looks like I'm about to jump off the cliff, rather than gazing whistfully at the view!)..

Leaf in sunlit stream

Black and white fairy gate.

More panoramics to come....

Chippenham..

With my blog lacking in home town pics, I took a wander and picked out a couple of photos to post up. I'm not sure it says much for Chippenham, but all these pics suited black and white conversion! I left the factory shot bigger than usual as it has some cool details in it...

A quick note on my panoramic shots for Alikat - I stitch multiple shots together. I know there are panoramic format cameras, but I'm guessing they are expensive.

I'm lucky to have access to Photoshop CS3, which has an extremely impressive photostiching process, but prior to that I used a few free photo stiching programs with varying success as well as layering them in photoshop 7. (I'll post up the name of the best free tool when I get home)..

I guess the most useful text book tips are: use a tripod if you can, keep the horizon straight, fix as many settings as possible for photos from sunny side to shadey side (especially aperture).

But then I don't follow rules too much and some of the panoramics are just hand held.

Great Dorset Steam Fair 2007

Down south on saturday for a fantastic day at the best steam rally in the local universe. The sound and smell of oily, smoke churning engines is magical - well worth expanding the hole in the ozone layer for. Really pleased with some of my photos, I think they captured some of atmosphere pretty well..



..Emily the shire horse

..sunset and steam engines

..panoramic view of most of the site (it was massive, this doesn't show just how big it is)..

..ye olde style mono..

..gadgets, dials and stuff..

..the fair at night..