Cottingham Church Looking Great

Cottingham Church was holding a flower festival today so I took along the big camera with the fat lens. And some of the pictures came out quite well.

Beer and Culture

We started off today with a trip to the Rijkmuseum. They have some superb pictures here, including the Night Watch, although it was a bit busy.

After lunch we headed for the Heineken Experience, a somewhat less cultural experience, although it did involve yeast. Fun fact of the day, the text in the Heineken logo was adjusted to create "smiling e's".

This probably doesn't improve the flavour very much, but it makes the brand look a bit happier.

Heading for TechDays via Amsterdam

Thunderbird Three at Humberside Airport. Who knew?

We are having a day or two in Amsterdam before heading off to TechDays in The Hague. So we hopped onto to the plane at Humberside and headed off to Schipol. After a quick train journey we checked into our hotel and then headed out for a walk. Of course I took the camera.

There are a lot of bikes here

Tooltip from Amsterdam...

I really do like it here. 

Rainbow

We get some nice low sun and rain this time of year. Which means rainbows. Almost worth taking the big camera outside and running the risk that the lens might get wet.

Almost. 

Hornsea is Wonderful

I said to Emily yesterday that if the weather is nice on Sunday we'd probably head for Hornsea. 

It is and we did. Of course I took the camera.

Shelf Portrait

I’m not sure that I’ve actually got the hang of this whole “shelfie” thing.

Morning Light

You get some lovely colours during the sunrise at this time of year..

I took these with the Lumia 1020 phone. I’m needing to get my camera out less and less these days.

Evening Skies on a Lumia 1020

We do get some rather good night skies this time of year. I took a picture of this one using the Lumia 1020. It’s another HDR rendering of five different pictures, and I think it looks rather splendid.

Cottingham Lights 2013

Every year around this time they turn on the Christmas Lights in Cottingham where we live. I go out and take some pictures. Some years I just leave the shutter open and wave the camera around a bit. This was one of these years.

They had some folks there selling flashing lights and stuff, which made for some great effects. Not sure if they are art or not. But I like them.

Philadelphia Freedom

Flew back today from “The Best MVP Summit Ever”™. My flight was via Philadelphia, where they had a rather nice sunset (see above). I took the picture with my Lumia 1020 (actually I took 5 and then merged them together to get the rather pleasing result).  I think I’ll print out a really large version of this.

Another surreal favourite moment, hearing Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” being played through the public address system while I was there. Awesome.

A Trip to the Space Needle

I made it to the top of the Space Needle ten minutes before sunset. It had been clear and bright all day (something of a rarity for Seattle) and I thought I might be able to grab some good pictures.

I was right.

I was there for quite a while taking pictures. It was very cold out on the observation deck, but there was a nice warm cafe where I could grab a coffee and wait until I could feel my fingers again.

This was a very fitting end to what has been one of the best MVP Summits I’ve ever attended. The depth of the content, the quality of the engagement and the scale of the developments coming down the tracks were all mightily impressive. I’m never quite sure just what I’ve done to deserve to get an inside track like this, but I’m very pleased that I have. Thanks to all at Microsoft for setting it all up.

All the Fun of Hull Fair 2013

Hull Fair is in town. We didn’t manage to make it last year, what with one thing and another and horrible weather. Today though we thought we’d go for it. I took the big camera and cunningly concealed it underneath my jacket, so that I looked like any other heavily pregnant middle aged tall bloke.

We just went on the big wheel to take pictures and then on Hook a Duck to win a teddy. Then we bought some nougat and headed off for a pie at Fudge just down the road.

Indeed.

Adobe Creative Cloud for Academics

If you are thinking of spending some money on a new camera, then welcome to the club. I’m always thinking of spending some money on a new camera. But before you buy a camera you might want to think about investing in some software to make the best of the camera you already have.

I’m a big fan of Photoshop Lightroom as a way of getting pictures out of the camera, tweaking them a bit and then managing where they are stored. It also has very good integration with Photoshop itself, along with lots of other plugins that can do lovely things with your pictures (for example Photomatix Pro for High Dynamic Range work).

Some time ago (in fact around a month and a day before a new version came out) I bought a copy of Photoshop. I’m proud to be able to say that I know what nearly a quarter of the buttons do now. But I really want the newest version, because that works best with the RAW files (images direct from the sensor) that my cameras produce.

Now you can’t really buy Photoshop any more. Instead you rent it by the month. Up until now I’ve not been that keen on that model, I much prefer owning things. However, in a world where (no – this is not  a movie trailer) new versions of cameras and software come out at least once a year, renting makes quite good sense. Particularly as they have a deal at the moment where students and academics can get pretty much all of Adobe software for around fifteen pounds a month by signing up for a Creative Cloud subscription.

People spend more than that on cigarettes, and for your money you get access to the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, Dreamweaver and lots of other things that would probably be useful if I knew what they did. The offer is open until the 27th of October. Well worth a look.

Hornsea Mere on Sunday

After lunch the weather was lovely, so we thought it might be nice to go out to Hornsea Mere for a walk and take some photographs. So we did.

New students, if you are looking for a nice place to go with mum and dad when they drop round to see you, then I can recommend it. The coffee shop has had an overhaul and does a really nice line in scones and cream. It is around 25 minutes from Cottingham, you can feed the ducks and then go and have a look at the seaside.

You can even hire a boat and splash about a bit.

Jolly Boating Weather

If you are feeling a bit annoyed about my endless parade of photographs of good weather and happy times, please bear in mind that I’m writing this back home on Monday evening and it is cold, dark and raining… But on Saturday it was none of those things, so we went on a little boat trip.

This is the view back up the lake to where we were staying. Torbole is on the right hand side. I bet that bit of rock made a great noise when it fell down.

Nice church

Part of a nice castle

Wind surfers making the most of the excellent conditions.

Lakeside Fun

The bridge has these padlocks all along the railings. Perhaps they symbolise undying love between two people. Perhaps they are from tiny bikes that have been expertly stolen.

Lakeside excavations

Lunchtime macro photography

This is a far better picture than photos taken with a mobile phone have any right to be.

Holiday Hill Climbing

 

Today we took a walk along to Riva del Garda, a town just a couple of kilometres from Torbole. Very nice place. Great museum (I like museums) and a castle thingy half way up the hill at the side of the town. The guide book said it was a 20 minute stroll from the centre of the town. Which it is. For Superman.

For us mortals, arriving a somewhat exhausted forty minutes or so after setting off, it was well worth the trip though. I made the picture above from four shots taken with the Lumia 1020.

I also took a few panoramas while I was there.

Early Hull

One of the, few, good things about being up town at 6:00 am is that you can take some quite nice pictures this time of year. I took these on Tuesday morning and today I got around to fiddling with them a bit.

Our train to London.

Lumia 1020 Lunchtime Photos

So I take my Lumia 1020 for a walk at lunchtime and then, on the way back to the office, I snap 5 pictures at different exposures. Today I blend them using Photoatix and I get this. I’m starting to seriously love the camera in this phone.

Deep Projection

Last night the chaps at C4DI were doing some trials of video projection onto “The Deep”. So a bunch of us went down to take a look. It was a lovely evening when we arrived and so we wandered round taking a few pictures. Today I got them out of the camera and took a look.

This is a slightly processed image of the footbridge over to The Deep.

This is a nice way to brand a building.

And these are jellyfish.

The test was for something big coming in November. Keep an eye on the C4DI website for more details.