Family Christmas

Finally we got to the end of the year! A very busy year for us both, also our first year of marriage.

Christmas day was spent at Caroline’s father’s house, together with Declan, Alison and Ethan. Ethan had lots of fun opening all his toys.

For Boxing day we all had a trip to Angela’s and Martin’s. All the Turner/Marrows clan descended, filling the house with noise.

Tom and Alex spent there time programming their new mobile phones. Richard was most jealous of Alex’s as he has the new Symbian 9.1 OS on his phone. Ethan told everyone about his Dinosaures, and everyone else spent there time trying to avoid Richard’s camera and get hold of Hannah’s Nintendo Dogz!

An old hobby – A new Joy

This year has been a transition year for me. My real joy in photography is black and white, Studio Glamour Photography and Architecture. As with most people I do not have room for a full time darkroom. In the last few years I have done very little photography except for a little landscape and a few friends weddings, but this year I really got back into my main three photographic loves. What spurred me on was my introduction to digital.

Over the last few years I have occasionally tried digital cameras and been generally less then impressed. Slow, poor battery life and hard to use. Then last year I had the opportunity to use a Cannon EOS 1D (the latest model). I finally thought that digital had arrived, it was fast responsive and produced fine quality images. Of course going digital is a big step and you need to make a number of adjustments. Are you going to shoot RAW, JPeg (JPG), how are you going to handle your storage requirements, backup, Image processing and work flow.

I decided on two approaches, first read all I could and talk to photographers who had made the jump. Second buy a small digital compact and try different things. So for the past year I have been shooting film on my SLR’s and digital on my small Nikon S3 compact. Its been a lot of fun and really inspired me to take more pictures this year then I have for the last three. A few months ago, I made the jump and bought myself my first digital SLR. I look forward to the next year and many more photographs.

A lunchtime Photo Walk

Many times people have said they don’t have time for their photography.
Or they are unable to get to that exotic location. Today was the last
day at work and as every other day this week it was thick freezing fog.
But today I took my camera bag and in the half an hour walk round the
Brayford Pool in my lunch break I took 43 photographs. Most of them are
not very good, but sometimes you just have to go out and shoot!

A winter lunchtime walk, Brayford Pool, Hedgerow next to carpark

Nikon D200 SLR
Nikor 17-70mm F3.5 ISO 100
40mm, 1/90 Sec at f5.6
Nikor 17-70mm F3.5
70mm, 1/60 Sec at f5.6 ISO 100
Processed in Adobe Lighroom Beta 4.1
On a Mac Powerbook, OS-X 10.4.8