Merely Hornsea

Now, isn’t this a turn-up for the books? After yesterdays “grey-fest” today has dawned all bright and sunny. Of course, we’ve got to stay at home waiting for a package to be delivered, but once that arrived we headed out to Hornsea Mere, one of my favourite places in all the world. It has a place you can buy cups of tea, and a very old Pike stuck on the wall.

It also has a pitch and putt golf course where I once got a hole in one. Unfortunately it was the wrong hole though. The massive slice I played at hole number 1 somehow ended up in hole number 9. And there are ducks and geese and boats and stuff.

“You lookin’ at my bird?”

Cafe view

If you are lucky enough to be a student at Hull and you are at a loose end later this term, take a trip to the Mere. Just a great place.

More HDR Fun

Yep. Think I’ll buy this program. This is Hull Holy Trinity Church by the way, think I’ll nip back there with a tripod next week and take some proper shots.

High Dynamic Range Photography

I’ve been playing with High Dynamic Range photography. This is where you take a bunch of pictures of a scene at different exposures and then make a single shot which has a greater dynamic range. The picture above is just a snap I took last year. I didn’t have three different exposures, so I did some fiddling with the RAW file to fake the different exposure levels. I then used program called PhotoMatix to combine them and then tone map to get the grungy effect that you see above. If you look closely at the picture you’ll see that it has a Photomatix watermark which means I’ve not paid for the software yet. However, I’m very tempted to, as the results seem quite nice to me. Not particularly photorealistic in this shot, but definitely interesting.

If you are into photography you might find it fun to have a go. The only thing you really need is a tripod to keep your camera steady between the different exposures.

Lightroom Rocks

Last week I sold a MacBook and bought a camera. And got a free copy of Adobe Lightroom. And it is wonderful. Up until now I’ve been muddling through managing my many photographs, keeping them in folders and using Windows explorer to find and look after them. This mostly works, but it is a bit of a pain.

Lightroom provides a really good way to find and then fix your pictures. It works really well with raw files and the noise reduction abilities are awesome. It also has some rather cool picture styles built in. And it will upload directly to Facebook, Flickr and SmugMug, among other places. It also takes care of the importing and has very good tagging and metadata management.

If you are serious about your photography, then I think you should take a good look at it. The trial download runs for 30 days or so, by which time you should be hooked.

New Years Hornsea

For some reason we always try to go and see the sea early in the New Year. This usually means a trip to Hornsea. Today the weather and the tide were very kind to us, and so we had a little walk down the beach and I took some snaps.

The weather was nice, but very chilly in the wind. We sought refuge in an amusement arcade.

They have these “Penny Falls” machines where you try and push pennies off the a ramp. This looks like it is good to drop, but I reckon those coins are super glued into position…

Old Age Gadgets

I was up in the loft today getting down our Christmas tree and found a few things that I thought would be fun to photograph.

Remember this?

I think I’ll print a large version of this to stick on the wall.

My first mobile phone next to my present mobile phone.

Cottingham Lights 2011

Every November they turn on the Christmas lights in the village and I go and take pictures.So this evening we sallied forth.

This year I tried waving the camera around a bit.

.. and even left the shutter open for 30 seconds to see what happens.

I quite like this one too.

Leaves on Cottingham Road

Went for a walk this afternoon. Took the camera. Jolly glad I did too.

Hull Holy Trinity Church

Went up town in Hull today and took some more pictures in Hull Holy Trinity Church. Great place.

Climbing Needles

I’d convinced myself that there was no point in going to Seattle. I’ve been before, it is a half hour bus ride and I had work to do. Then I saw the weather outside, and I went anyway. Monorail – Space Needle – Pike Place Market – wonderful.

This is the tower reflected in the building nearby. Amazing stuff.

Another view from the top of the needle.

I took a bunch of pictures that will no doubt appear on these pages over the years. Then it was time to board the return bus and head back to pick up my luggage and catch the flight home. I’ve been using this rather cunning (I think) trick of getting up around 3:00 am while I’m out here to try and trick the body into not adjusting to the Seattle time zone. In a couple of days I’ll find out if it works…

It’s been a great trip. Very intense, but very rewarding. Great questions and interaction with the audience. Thanks folks.

Foveon Sensor Fun

Ian collects guitars. I seem to collect cameras. I’m playing with a second hand Sigma DP2s that I picked up as a kind of birthday present to myself. This is a neat looking compact that uses a Foveon sensor. This sensor works in a different way to the ones in most cameras which use a “Bayer” design. With this each sensor is covered by a coloured filter that lets the sensor read only that colour. So to get the colour of a particular pixel you need three sensors, for Red, Green and Blue. Actually most cameras use two Green sensors, since that is colour that has the greatest effect on brightness as far as the human eye is concerned.  So that makes four sensors in total.

But anyhoo, this means that to get the colour of a pixel the camera must read the brightness of a bunch of pixels and then combine them using some clever maths. Then the camera does something even cleverer and works out the colour it would be at each of the Red, Green and Blue positions, based on the readings from those around it. This is a bit sneaky, in that it means that your 16 megapixel camera isn’t actually reading 16 million coloured dots. It is actually working a lot fewer colour values and then spreading these back over 16 million points. This can lead to pictuers with artefacts (funny shapes that appear as a result of the averaging process) and noise (because the maths is really only a form of guessing).

The Foveon sensor doesn’t do any of this. It uses a cunning silicon sensor that reads all the colour values at each pixel position. The bad news with a Foveon sensor is that it doesn’t have quite many pixels as most “Bayer” designs, so the ultimate resolution is a bit lower than what you get from other cameras. However, all the dots are “real” dots, and I think this counts for quite a lot in terms of picture quality, as you can see above.

If you want a camera that is quite a challenge to use (the sensor and lenses on the Sigma camera are very good but the electronics and user interface are a bit of a pain when compared to more popular offerings) then you should take a look at the DP1 and DP2 devices. They are also a good way to learn how photography really works, in that to get the best from them you have to take things like exposure and focus very seriously.

You can pick them up second hand from ebay at reasonable prices, and they are great fun to use.

Hull University in 3D

I’ve been playing around with a 3D camera and I think it sort of works. these are the left and right pairs that I took on the way into the office. I’ve found this really useful program that can convert the stereo MPO files produced by the camera into twin jpegs. If you want to see exactly what I saw as I walked past the library you just need to print these out and stick them on the inside of your 3D glasses. 

Lord Mayor’s Parade

Today was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Parade through Hull. I was in town at the time, and had the little camera with me. Unfortunately I also had a enormous suitcase that I’d just bought, which made moving around the crowd a little tricky, but I did manage to take a few shots of the fun and festivities.

This is as the procession went past. Note that there are some people in this picture who are even taller than me.

Only a really skilled photographer can manage to get a traffic light to grow out of the Lord Mayor’s head…

May Day Bank Holiday Happiness

Rob’s recipe for May Day Bank Holiday Happiness

1. Drive to Whitby.
2. Enter “The Magpie Cafe”
3. Order “Magpie Fish Pie” and a pot of tea
4. Eat and drink same
5. Go for walk on pier and beach
6. Take loads of pictures

Oh, and stop off in Bainton at the Wolds Village for a cream tea on the way back.

Dalby and Ducks

Went to Dalby Forest today. (having a tiny holiday) Great place. Once we arrived we had a coffee at the Purple Mountain Cafe. If you like riding bikes at great speed down steep hills you should go there. They arrange all kinds of races and stuff (including truly scary sounding 12 hour ones). Find out more here:

http://www.purplemountain.co.uk/

“Excuse me, can you hire these bikes?”
"Certainly sir, they have a small adjustment at the back”

Note – this joke completely breaks if you write it down….

Then we went for a walk around, and I took the big camera.

Look! Blue Sky!

We rounded off the trip with a visit to Thornton-Le-Dale, which has a lake and ducks.

Nobody mention oranges.

Scarborough Fair

Scarborough Castle

Went to Scarborough today. Good weather, good food, great pinball machine.

Name the TV show…

Bronte Country

The six Bronte children had a pretty raw deal in many respects.  Their father, Patrick, lived long enough to see every one of them die, along with his wife and, from the look of the church graveyard, loads of the local population.  Haworth in the nineteenth century was a world apart from the neat town it is now, with squalor and disease running rampant.

The three Bronte sisters grew up watching loved ones die around them, starting with their mother and two sisters. That they chose to escape into a made up world of stories is not terribly surprising. When they grew up they took this story telling into the wider world and produced a collection of books that was like nothing before.

I’m not a great fan of their writing, but I do like going to the Parsonage in Haworth where they grew up and wrote their greatest works. There are only a handful  of  rooms in the small building, but actually being in the room where Charlotte wrote “Reader, I married him” is pretty darned cool, although I did rather spoil things for number one wife when we were in the shop on the way out and I pointed at a row of paperbacks saying, in tone hushed with awe, “Hey, they wrote books as well!”.

I also insisted on buying a genuine Bronte Parsonage combination spirit level, torch and screwdriver tool. Apparently Emily used to use one just like it it to change the batteries in her digital watch.  Or something.

Getting to Haworth was made much more interesting by the unexpected arrival of a large amount of snow overnight. This made driving great fun and meant the first thing we had to do in Haworth was find somewhere that sold wellington boots.  On the other hand, it did make the pictures nice. And I was lucky to see a steam train arrive at Haworth station. (although of course you know that Haworth was not actually connected to the railway network until some time after the death of the sisters, who had to travel to the station at Keighley when they wanted to go to London to meet their publisher).

Of course I took a camera, and a bunch of pictures.

Genuine bona-fide steam train

Platform

Haworth rooftops

Fairly quiet for a Saturday..

Haworth graveyard

Train home

Cheese Clipart

You wouldn’t believe how much pictures cost for games. I can get a picture of a piece of cheese for a pound I can use in a web page. If I want to put it into a game I’m going to have to spend an awful lot more than that. More than the price of a piece of cheese…..

So today I was in the conservatory photographing cheese for use in my next cheese based XNA game project.  And next I’m going to eat it all.

Rob Miles–Tastes Like Chicken

Thanks for that Christophe…..

Cheap Ring Light

Some time ago I bought a ring light for my camera. This puts a bunch of super bright LEDs around the lens for illumination with no shadows. Works very well and wasn’t that expensive.  It is great for taking pictures of small items. I’ve just discovered that you can get something very similar for well under a fiver.

The Wilko Multi-purpose LED light is actually a very good light. We are going to use one to light up our summerhouse in these dark winter nights. However, it also has a hole in the middle where you can put a small camera lens, and so it also makes a rather good ring light. At less than a fiver it is well worth a look.

Worth tracking down, whether you are after lighting up underneath the stairs or taking interesting close-ups.