Photo Post: WRC Subaru Impreza

Another car from the Flitwick Classic Car Show 2014. A rather tasty looking Subaru Impreza. Don't know much about it as I just took the photos and had to move on. HDR, 3 exposures shot with my Canon 600D. There were people in the photo which I removed (badly, PS is not my strong point).

Photo Post: HDR Eye

Something I always wanted to try, a close up HDR image of an eye. In this case, my 6 y.o.'s, so I got him to sit still for 2 seconds to take the photo(s). Turned out alright, but to many reflections though. Love his blue eyes though.

Photo Post: Ford Mustang Engine Bay

The same blue Ford Mustang at Flitwick Classic Car Show, but a bit of a wider angle.

HDR, 3 exposures, Canon 600D.

Photo Post: Sunrise over Fuengirola Beach

During our holiday to Fuengirola in Spain, I decided I had to get up early one day to see what the sunrise over the sea was like. Turned out quite nice. To be honest I don't think I have ever witnessed a complete sunrise. It was great. I got there about 20 mins before the sun was due to come up so just sat down on the beach and awaited. When it comes up, it comes up fast, surprisingly fast. Was well worth getting up early for. Although it wasn't too early. Sunrise was about 0720 local time. This is no HDR, just a straight shot out the camera.

Photo Post: Sunrise over a Field

Early one morning on the way to work I stopped the car as I noticed a nice looking sunrise and I had my camera with me. I just walked off into a field to see what I could find. Not a lot, but a sunrise can make any scene look good... kinda like snow. HDR, 3 exposures shot with my Canon 600D.

Photo Post: Ford Mustang V8 Engine

A lovely blue Ford Mustang's shiny V8 engine from the Flitwick Classic Car Show 2014.

Photo Post: Reliant Scimitar Interior

Gorgeous interior of a Reliant Scimitar at the Flitwick Classic Car Show 2014 (Flitwick, Bedfordshire, UK).

HDR created from 3 exposures, then some further post processing including one of +Trey Ratcliff 's LR presets.

Trip to Portland, Dorset, UK

This last weekend (03 January 2014), my wife and I managed to get away for a small 2 night break in a hotel she found on Wowcher. The hotel was the Venue Hotel which is located high up on top of Portland, which is situated on a small piece of land that juts out from the mainland, connected to Weymouth by a very thin strip of land (literally just a road).

We were set to go just when bad storms were hitting the south coast of England (great timing), but we had rearranged the date several times already so did not want to put it off again. We didn't have the kids with us so we wouldn't have to worry about entertaining them in the rain. Being on our own we could just do something to suit ourselves...for a change! I think it was the first time we had both been away from the kids (currently 3 and 5) for two nights.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! Here's a warm HDR photo of our Christmas tree; 3 exposures taken with my Canon 600D, merged in Photomatix and processed with Lightroom and Nik software.

Cranfield Astronomical Society

I have started attending an astronomy class at Cranfield University, which is just a short evening class for 8 weeks run by Cranfield Astronomical Society. They give some short talks each week and then if the weather is good, are eager to get outside and get some kit out to look upwards.

Last night was the first night we went outside (only my second week to be fair - last week was thunder storms!). It was cold and really clear. They have a small observatory with the main bit of kit being a Celestron C11. I didn't get a chance to look through the C11 as there were quite a few others lining up for a go and to be honest I was more interested at that point seeing what was going on outside.

They also set up a 80mm refractor, a 100mm refector and a 10" Dobsonian.

I cannot remember the guy's name, but he was setting up his personal kit, which consisted of a hefty go-to motorised mount, I can't remember exactly, but it was some Newtonian reflector ~11" telescope (big bugger), with a really cool auto-tracking system, which uses a smaller telescope mounted on the side with a webcam, which is connected to a computer and watches the stars and drives the mount accordingly. Onto this he could then mount a modified Canon D500 DSLR to do some deep sky object photography.

The mount can auto-track itself, but when trying to photograph long exposures of deep sky objects, even the slightest mis-track would result in a blurry image.

Last night he was photographing M31, the Andromeda galaxy, a favourite galaxy of many as it is one of the closest galaxies to us. It is the closest spiral galaxy, but the closest overall galaxy. It is 'only' approximately 2.5 million lightyears (not 200 million as unfortunately 2 astronomers at the class said it was, which I knew was wrong, but I wasn't about to start correcting people) from us. Small-ish in universe scales, but to us humans, so very, very far (23,668,200,000,000,000 km). Very far but also it means that as we look at it (possible with the unaided eye on a good night), we are seeing it as it appeared about 2.5 million years ago. So even as a close neighbour, we can only see what it was up to 2.5 million years ago. That could start a whole other discussion about why this buggers up ideas of making contact with 'things' in other galaxies (with current technology).

But, anyway, this guy was taking 2 minutes exposures (ISO 800) and every photo was just mind blowing. You could zoom in and see the dust trails already, just in the raw, unprocessed image. It really brings it home that these things are real and there as this guy just pointed a camera at it and took its picture. I think so many people think astronomy is just pretty colourful pictures just like abstract paintings, failing to see that they are images of real things, just like if I took a photo of my cat or the clouds in the sky.

It is hard to perceive depth and 3D in these images as they are so far away, but that's what's good about M31, it is kind of side on, so you get a sense of it being a 'disc' in space, with the front dust trails getting in the way of the rest of it.

He is going to stack up several of these images (to improve the the signal to noise ratio), so I can't wait to see the final result.

To make things more interesting, Jupiter rose whilst we were out, so the two refractors were pointed at that and through the 100mm you could clearly make out two main bands around Jupiter...and of course the Galilean moons. I can just about make out the moons through my 15x70 binoculars.

I look forward to seeing more, hopefully through the C11 next time.

More Macro Shots - Not of a Katydid

Further to my previous post (macro-shots-of-katydid), I happened across another of these creatures and managed some snaps. I think they are some variant of Cricket. In these photos I believe it is a Speckled Bush Cricket.

Got a couple of passable shots, but a long way away from the professional type macro shots. These were all handheld shot with my Canon 600D with a Raynox adaptor on the front of my Canon 55-250 lens in the garden, whilst he was crawling around on leaves...pretty hard to get some tidy shots.

I then imported and processed them in Lightroom.

Photography - Got a DSLR!

I have been interested in Photography for some time now, mostly just as a hobby, but also enjoying looking at what the professionals do and wishing I could do that one day.

I have always enjoyed making the most of the equipment I have. My last camera was a Fujifilm HS10 which was a great camera to 'bridge' the way from simple Point And Shoot cameras and phone cameras to DSLR.

BUT I have recently been blessed (by my wife, +Lisa Reynolds) who bought me a Canon 600D DSLR for my birthday! What a fantastic present! Thank you Lisa :)

And so now I am hoping to further improve my photography skills now that I am finally in the world of DSLR. Already, just shooting general photos, the quality of the images is so noticeable compared to the HS10.

One reason would be the sensor size. The HS10 is only 6.17 x 4.55mm vs 22.3 x 14.5mm of the 600D, so light collecting ability is just so much greater.

Also the lenses for a DSLR are going to be much better quality.

One thing I am really interested in is doing some HDR photography. +Trey Ratcliff is very much a source of inspiration for me and he very generously shares his photography and knowledge freely over the Internet via his Google+ page and his own website, http://www.stuckincustoms.com/.

I am certainly going to be purchasing his tutorials in the very near future as I am merely starting to scratch the surface of HDR photography.

I have tried a few HDR shots before using the HS10, but here is my first attempt with my 600D (click to view full sized version).

It isn't the most exciting, in terms of the sky, as I have been waiting and waiting for some decent sunsets and its been cloudless for the last week or so! so this was my first chance.

Got a lot to learn to improve the quality, but its a start.

Cinemagraphs

Just experimenting with Cinemagraphs. This is my first attempt made from a short video clip. Its by no means perfect, I haven't tried to make the image look 'nice', its just as it came out the camera. Ignore the dodgy leaf movement.

Link to Google+ post for bigger image

This was all created on Ubuntu.

I edited the clip in Avidemux to narrow it down a small section with just enough frames. Then exported the video as individual JPEG frames.

I then imported these frames 'as layers' into GIMP. I then narrowed down the number of layers again to a minimum (6 in this case) that was enough to make it work (well enough to make something look half tidy but mainly to prove the method).

Then on each layer I went Menu > Layer > Transparency > Add Alpha Channel. This allowed me to use the eraser on each layer in turn to remove all but a section I want to move.

So using the Ellipse Select Tool, I drew an elliptical selection around the area that the windmill is moving in. Then I feathered the selection and then inverted the selection. I then used the eraser on each layer, EXCEPT the last layer, to remove everything except the windmill. The last layer was left in tact as the static part of the image.

Then I changed the colour mode: Menu > Image > Mode > Indexed... Chose the Optimised palette (animated Gifs can only be 255 colours).

Then, export as gif, choosing the animation option. Seemed to work OK.

What I need to figure out in GIMP, is how to apply colour effects to all layers. This does not seem to be something I can see how to do yet, hence the colour is just 'as is'.

Will try to do some more of these, as I quite like them. Better next time!

Macro Shots of Katydid(?)

Another few macro shots I took a while ago. Found this fella (or girl) sitting on top of my wheelie bin. I am not quite sure what it is and am struggling to identify it, so if someone recognises it, please leave a comment. I have seen a few of these.

So of course I stuck a camera in his face. What was quite amusing was that he/she seemed to get a bit offended and took an offensive stance and even seemed to make attacking type moves towards me as if to say 'piss off!'.

Anyway, click here for a few more shots.

Another Moon Shot with Registax

Another attempt at a shot of the Moon using 14 images from my HS10 and then stacking them with Registax.

Still unsure whether there is a marked improvement over just one of the originals. Not sure if I need to try and get more images to start with...will try more next time.

The Moon and Registax

As part of my goal this year to get more knowledgeable on astronomy, I finally got round to trying out Registax to stack some photos I took of the Moon ages with this very thing in mind.

I always wanted to try this out but to date did not have a computer powerful enough to really do it. But that has recently changed as I finally have a decent computer in the form of a Dell XPS 15, which I must say is rather nice! Its an i7 with 4Gb of ram so it will serve purposes such as using Registax perfectly. This is compared to my Samsung N130 netbook, which was my main computer before, with its little 1.6GHz Atom processor.

Anyway, I know with most astrophotography that is built up from stacked images, the source is usually a video feed, which I guess is like having lots of individual photos, but combined in a video. Registax pulls out the individual frames like photos anyway. I had 5 photos that I took on my Fujifilm HS10. I took them as a 'burst' so they were all within about 1 second, so little movement between shots (not that it really matters).

A Photo Of The Moon

A photo I took of the moon with my HS10. I used the 'A' (Aperture priority) mode, set AE to 'spot' and maximum F number for the aperture (smallest physical aperture).

Panoramic Photo Stitching With Hugin

Update 19 September 2013: I have since updated the gallery page. As I am moving away from using Drupal, some or all of the links below may not work any more. I made a simple gallery page which makes use of Brain Maps API to emulate the Zoomify function. I also used the great jQuery Masonry library to layout the gallery page.

Something I discovered a while back was stitching photos together to form panoramas. I have been trying out a few examples, which are shown in the pano gallery. Not much of a great selection, but I keep meaning to do more.