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Archive for June, 2010

15 minutes until the next train

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

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Week 8: Summer

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

and yes, I back-dated this post, as I was late with uploading! Photo was taken within the time limit though ;-)

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Joe Perry

Friday, June 25th, 2010

Last Wednesday, Aerosmith played in the Gelredome XS in Arnhem (Netherlands), and… I was there :-)

Professional cameras aren’t allowed into the venue, but regular point-and-shoots are. My friend had brought her Panasonic to shoot some video, and I borrowed it to take some photos. This is the best result I got, not so bad for a point and shoot I think! I’ve uploaded 5 more to my regular blog.

It does sort of make me want to buy a good point-and-shoot too, so I can pick up my old hobby of photographing bands on stage again. I used to do that very regularly with my old film SLR, sometimes negotiating my way into a regular concert, but mostly just practising in smaller clubs, where the bands are still happy anyone wants to take a picture of them.

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Week 7: Alien alliance

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

These are some of the many aliens that formed an alliance against the doctor, in the latest episode of Doctor Who.

I wanted to try and light them properly, as well as ‘blow out’ the background. However, I have only one flash, and it’s usually on camera, so that didn’t work. In the end I used trickery: I set the shutter speed to 20 seconds, the aperture to 20, and after pressing the shutter button, I’d first manually fire the flash (with the reload button) through a sheet of paper: once from straight above, and once from camera right, and then fire the flash twice against the background from different angles, without the paper. The one from straight above was in an attempt to also blow out the foreground, and the space behind the figures, but that didn’t work, as you can see by the yellow colour directly behind the subjects, which is caused by my regular lamp. Next time I’ll try it without the lamp, and also with the subjects closer to the background, so the light that bounces off the background, can also help blow out the foreground. Curious to see how that turns out :-)

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Nelson’s ship

Monday, June 14th, 2010

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Week 6: Trafalgar shadows

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

I’m a whole day late with this week’s image, but I like to think I’ve got a good excuse. Well, not good maybe, but at least it’s a photographic one :-)
Since Friday night, there’s a photography lighting course going on at http://creativelive.com/live with Zack Arias as the teacher. He’s doing this like 10 hours a day, and I don’t wanna miss anything! Lucky for me, each day is repeated at un-American hours, which happens to be my day time. It’s still 10 hours a day though! Plus they’re cutting out the lunch breaks on the repeats, so .. no breaks! I’ve only missed an hour or two now, as we were watching Doctor Who last night and I didn’t want to wake up at 5am to catch them on the repeat. Even though I’m not (yet) into studio lighting, I learned a lot about light and direction and all kinds of handy stuff, so yes, in about 3 hours I’ll be at the screen again, for day 3 of the course.

Anyway. This photo was taken on my trip to England recently, and what you see here are the stairs next to the fourth plinth on Trafalgar Square. I also took photos of the big ship-in-a-bottle that’s currently on top of that fourth plinth, of which I hope to post one later.