Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Lack of lenses

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Warning: the following tail of woe involves some serious spleen venting!

Having finally made up my mind up that I would go for the Canon 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM, I placed an order with Warehouse Express on Tuesday evening hoping that, with next day delivery, I would have it in time for the Easter weekend. I also added the appropriate lens hood and threw in the Canon 50mm f1.8 whilst I was at it as there seems to be a general consensus that this is well worth the little money that you have to pay for it. It then wasn’t until late Wednesday afternoon that I checked my e-mail and discovered a message saying that part of the order wasn’t in stock. I phoned Warehouse Express and was told that the lenses were currently on order from Canon. When I asked when were expecting a delivery I was told: “Err, maybe sometime in May?”. Why oh why don’t online retailers advertise stock levels on their sites? Is it incompetence or is it because they would lose business that way? Somehow I’d taken the fact that the “We’re having trouble getting hold of this lens” message had disappeared might mean they actually had them.
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Learning experience

Sunday, February 18th, 2007

Hursley Photo Club had it’s first “learning” exercise yesterday when six of us turned up at work for some to teach and hopefully for everyone to learn at least something. We started with some of the basics but by the end of the morning had also covered more advanced topics such as composition and lighting. Particularly thanks should go to Richard Hopkins for not only imparting lots of his knowledge but also giving the event some structure.

Photo selection

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

I’ve resurrected my Flickr account to display a selection of my photos from the Winchester Photo Challenge. There are four or five that I like the most but I need to select three before the deadline on Saturday so let me know your thoughts!

Frosty starts and caterpillars

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

261We headed out to the New Forest again yesterday morning for the SOC junior training session. Whilst the trainee coaches were busy setting up I had a chance to wander around taking some photos of the local wildlife. In particular, a group of ponies who were very obligingly standing motionless as the bright sunshine burnt off the morning frost. As well as being a lovely colour, this one seemed to have a cheeky grin!

264After lunch, Christine had planned a novel caterpillar relay. Once again, I was just a bystander so could enjoy watching the chaos unfold! Had to collect a few more controls at the end of the day which was a great excuse to wander in the peaceful woods (and take a few more shots).

Winchester Photo Challenge

Sunday, January 28th, 2007

Yesterday afternoon the Hursley Photo Club hit Winchester for a two hour photo challenge. I made the mistake of starting up at the Great Hall but quickly realised that it was far too dark inside to be shooting without a tripod. Unfortunately it was also pretty grey outside with the blue skies from the morning having clouded over. I wandered down towards the Cathedral where many of the others had congregated. There were some great shots to be had of the Light Division buglers having a fag break outside. Sadly, I wasn’t sufficiently bold to take them (or at least don’t have a sufficiently long lens!).

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Impressionist image

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

252As the sun was still shining this afternoon we went for a stroll through the local woods around Knightwood Park. I took this shot of Christine as she was walking away from me. The exposure was far too long though and I was just dropping the camera to look at the display when the shutter finally clicked. I quite like the impressionist effect and all without the aid of Photoshop!

Image recovery

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

A couple of weeks back I managed to wipe an SD camera card having failed to copy across a few images. Nothing too disastorous but I thought I’d see if I could get them back. Top marks to Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery which found 120 images on the card including the ones I’d deleted. Meanwhile, my brother, who made the rather more serious mistake of wiping a whole USB hard drive only to discover the last backup had failed, has good things to say about the freeware PC INSPECTOR File Recovery.

Hursley fireworks

Monday, November 6th, 2006

Friday night was fireworks night at IBM Hursley. There was a good mix of new fireworks and old favourites and some nice long combinations. Having watched most of last year’s display through a viewfinder I was banned from taking a camera but Adrian has some good shots.