365 Project: Photo 303

Not an especially dazzling photo here but I like the contrast between the necessary regularity of the tiles and the different ways that they have weathered and been patterned by the lichens.

365 Project: Photo 302

It's pretty much Halloween, that most awful of made up nonsense 'holidays', and so it's time to get the pumpkins out. This was my best effort, which wasn't great, but did the job. As you can probably tell I have darkened this somewhat and grunged it up.

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I took this one out of the window of a bus on my phone and then HDR'd it up a bit.

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Tonight was the local fireworks display in Newham. The weather was pretty good so I took the camera and tried to get some decent pictures, this was one of my better attempts. This is a 4 second exposure and I rather liked the blue colours.

365 Project: Photo 300

Tonight I took my girlfriend, Georgiana, to a John Mayer concert at Wembley arena. We had pretty good seats, only about ten rows from the front, which afforded us a good view of the proceedings. I thought it was mostly quite tedious and bland. There was one exciting bit when he banged on about the Blues for five minutes, saying how great it was, I thought that here was something I could finally get behind; but then did a song that was in now way bluesy. Anyway, Georgiana thought it was awesome and I guess that's what counts. This picture is of the stage crew setting up between acts.

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I love my new duvet cover....

365 Project: Photo 297

Sunset in the Olympic village.

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I went for lunch with the Queen today.

365 Project: Photo 295

A night out with workmates inevitably ends with me going for a walk along the river. Conveniently, the theme was Dark. This was taken on my phone, when drunk, from the Millennium bridge. The bright star above the moon is, in fact, Jupiter.

365 Project: Photo 294

Here's one where I actually deliberately set out to match the prompt for the day, a rarity these days. Blades and Bokeh was what I was aiming for. Most people seem to have gone the way of grass but I gravitated towards my magnetic knife rack on the kitchen wall. Blades on the left, bokeh on the right.

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This reflection caught my eye as I entered Stratford underground station today. The theme today, which I generally ignore, was Something Beginning With P; well, there are clearly some pigeons at the bottom of the picture there.

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As I was walking to work today I looked back the way I had come and saw the sunlight behind this tree. I've done a poor job of capturing it but I remember rather liking the look of it in the flesh.

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A brazier.

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I went to see my joint favourite comedian, Micky Flanagan, tonight at the O2. He, as always, was excellent. The first time I saw him was maybe five years ago. I'd never heard of him and was with a group of friends at a local comedy club in Mile End, just a few hundred yards from where Mickey grew up. Our table was butted up against the stage and there was probably less than 200 people there, half of whom were just there to drink and yell abuse at the stage. The second time was about two years ago at the Hammersmith Apollo with a crowd of 3,000 or so; we definitely weren't too near the stage that time. Tonight, there must have been 20,000 people all straining to hear him.

I think he finally made it.

365 Project: Photo 289

Today I am being very lazy, both culinarily and photographically.

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A pleasant sunset stroll along Hampstead Heath, my first visit there in a very long time. Taken on my phone and cropped, hence the graininess.

365 Project: Photo 287

I took this on my phone at about 4am whilst walking down to Angel from Highbury after a good night out with friends. I fear I may have overdone the grunge effect but my judgement was somewhat rum-impaired.

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I was back in my home town visiting family and staying at my youngest brother's place. Both he and his girlfriend are big Beatles fans and so what better way to start off a hungover morning?

365 Project: Photo 285

It's been a while since I pretended my photo is on topic so here goes....

The theme today is Close and, indeed, this is quite a close up picture of a rapidly rotting rose. What I was actually interested in, however, when I put this together was the idea of a triptych. I've had a few ideas for triptychs and over mosaic type images for a long time now but I didn't actually have the expertise required to pull them off - and so I thought I had better educate myself. The web is positively bubbling over with video tutorials that make this sort of thing fairly foolproof and it proved to be none too difficult. Having said that, whenever I use the word foolproof I'm reminded of the witticism: show me a foolproof plan and I'll show you a bigger fool. Still, this wasn't too bad for a first attempt.

365 Project: Photo 284

Yesterday I played around with the tilt shift effect on SnapSeed and today I've been using the new HDR effect they have recently added to it. I'm still undecided about HDR. I think that, in general, people over do it; although I have seen some fantastic examples of the genre I suspect the amount of effort that needs to be put in to do it 'properly' makes it not worth the hassle. Here, I've tried not to overcook it too much. If anything, though, there is a more distracting element to the picture that I can't get passed. To me it looks like the left side is the near side of the Eye and the right one is furthest away, which isn't the case. I find it incredibly distracting.

365 Project: Photo 283

I was waiting about on the steps in front of Stratford Station and remembered that I had been on the look out for somewhere with a bit of height to try out some tilt shift shots. Sadly, I don't actually have a tilt shift lens to properly achieve the effect but most apps these days seem to be able to apply a blur filter in such a way as to give the miniaturising effect for which tilt shift is famous. I did this using SnapSeed, my phone editing app of choice.

365 Project: Photo 282

Not an awful lot to say about this one. I was walking passed Cardiff City Hall and took a snap.

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Mirror Image.

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Repetition.

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I don't often do HDR photos as they can look quite artificial, but every now and then I get a bit curious and give it a shot. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, dynamic range being the breadth of light and dark that an image contains. The human eye is fairly good at being able to simultaneously make out detail in both light and dark areas in any given scene, good but not perfect; sensors in cameras are improving all the time but not as good as us. Yet. A standard photo here would have the strip of girders in the top right as just plain black because, to have the majority of the image properly exposed this area would have to be very dark, but the HDR technique is able to bring out the detail in these otherwise featureless zones. This is normally done by blending two or more separate images together; one that is slightly over exposed and one slightly under exposed. You then take the dark parts from the over exposed image and the light sections from the under exposed image to create one unified picture with more detail (a higher dynamic range). This photo was taken and processed on my phone, which is why it looks a little grainy in places. Still, it's not bad and it's been suggested that, as this is an entirely artificial, man made  scene anyway, it works; which is just as well because I had to hang about on the platform for quarter of an hour to have suitably few people clogging up the platform.

365 Project: Photo(s) 278

A bit of a cheat today; two photos. A few days ago I made a little mobius strip out of paper and mentioned that I was going to try to make two interlocking, double twist mobius strips out of a bagel using one single, continuous cut. Well, here it is. I didn't really have a clue what I was doing to start with so I drew on where I would need to cut. My first attempt was a bit of a mess and ended up in several pieces. This was my second try and worked much better. I would say the two key requirements to pull this off are a sharp knife and lots of patience.

The theme today was Two Become One, which is sort of the opposite of what I've done here where I made one bagel into two; still, I'm pleased with the result. As a reminder, a mobius strip is generally a surface with only one side and one boundary component (edge). This isn't what I've made here as these strips have a double twist. For anyone feeling adventurous there is a handy guide here on how to make your own. And if you really want a challenge then I recommend something like a Klein Flask - that should keep you busy.

365 Project: Photo 277

This is my first attempt at a composition I suspect I will be coming back to several times. I'm not happy with it in its current form; the walkway and the staircase make it feel cluttered and busy. Needs work....

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My third shot of St. Paul's of the week.

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Hopefully this won't be one of the last clear days of the year. Westminster as seen from Lambeth Bridge.

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Another stroll over the Millennium Bridge tonight....