Had a wander round Newcastle, then off for a pint or 4 and over to watch Middlesbrough get through to the Quarter Finals of the FA cup. Shame I didn’t have the camera there as we were 3 rows from the front and could have got some awesome shots!
The 5D bug is too much to bear so I’m selling my 350D and the wider lenses that will become redundant. If you are interested, let me know!
Canon 350D + 18-55mm Kit Lens Boxed as new including Jessops reciept - £285
Sigma 30mm EX F/1.4 - In padded pouch + Hood (Awesome lens, really good length on a X1.6 crop) - £175
Sigma 10-20mm EX - In padded pouch + Hood - £185
Canon 28-135mm IS - With the official Canon Hood - £185
Check the EXIF data from my Flickr site as all my pics (bar the 50mm) were taken with one of these lenses and that camera - I hope that doesn’t put you off 
This is the best script I’ve seen in a long time!
1) Download and install to your CS2 plugin folder
2) Point it at a folder with photos you want it to process
3) Upload the directory to your webserver
4) There is no 4
Fantastic! - Example here - http://www.onelouder.co.uk/photo
Yesterday we printed the pictures that we had developed next last week. I’m not sure if you can tell from these scans but the biggest lesson I learned was to keep the spindle away from dust (and cats) as they are quite dusty. About half of them came out underexposed, but I’m fairly happy with the other ones.
One bit of sad news was that our tutor at Highbury has been made redundent effective immediately so it was very good of him to actually turn up to yesterdays lesson. The course is going to continue though and we can now move on to digital photography, although I definately want to carry on with the film stuff.
The rest can be found here.
Gaz’s stag weekend starts in a couple of hours. I may be offline for sometime depending on the internet access at the Betty Ford Clinic.
Last night I was at Highbury for the next class of my photography AS level. Really enjoying to so far and it’s been very hands on with developing film. Homework last week was to shoot a lot of folliage and yesterday we spent developing the negatives. The trickiest bit is getting the roll of film onto the spindle, which has to be done in the dark room, but it pitch black which is a very strange sensory deprevation type feeling. Next week will be the big week of then getting the negatives printed onto photography paper and seeing if they came out ok or not.
Also this week was Joy’s birthday and a group of us went to Zen in Southampton. The original plan was to eat there, but as it came apparent dinner was going to be the liquid variety a couple of people got dishes as “Nibbles” like you would get crisps to share which worked really well. Pictures as ever on my Flickr.
My works parent company Gannett are beginning to realise that the reason for the decline in newspaper sales is due to new media delivery mediums and rather than try and increase profits by cutting expenses (eg sacking everyone), it might be a good idea to invest in technology before all their papers are run into the ground. This resulted in a £300k delivery of nice shiny audio/visual equipment including Sony HVR-A1E broadcast cameras, accessories and top spec PC’s, with one rolled out to each major publication.
Having been “Volunteered” to be the primary techy contact for this stuff (journos struggle with lightswitches ;)) I’ve been on a week course on using the cameras and editing in Avid Xpress Pro. Although it’s been long 14 hour days at times, it’s been totally awesome and has inspired me to dust off my camcorder and get back into it myself. A lot of the techniques are very similar to photography and the editing is very similar to Cubase. I shot a few projects, but as its based on video journalism, they aren’t really what I enjoy and I want to get into much more creative shots. Nevertheless, here is what I came up with after the 4th day.
http://www.onelouder.co.uk/video/magician.wmv
Roger is a real old fasioned gent and a really interesting person. He can be found doing table magic in and around Southampton. I did have an odd “Moment of Clarity” at one point when he was upstairs getting changed into a suit and waistcoat and I realised I was setting up lighting equipment at 9pm in the house of a 75 year old magician that we only met the night before in a curry house in town.
Another great night in the Alex in Southampton. They show a film every fortnight, last week was Scarface, and this week was Sin City. Watching films in pubs is officially ace, and the Alex provide good popcorn, chilli and alcohol.
I took some pictures with the new kit I’ve bought, and I think I’m in the stage where I’m really happy with the kit I’ve got and can concentrate on the pictures rather than hankering over new lenses. All the pictures linked are untouched in Photoshop bar cropping and bought a big grin to my face 
The full set can be found here.
Had a wander round Southampton on Sunday and realised how little interesting things there are to photograph. Here are the only 2 I like. The first is this anchor that I like the perspective of from my new Sigma 10-22mm
Next was this shot showing that even though Southampton sea front is an industrial, grey, cold and windy place, people the proximity of humans to the sea is reflected in the sales of cold lumps of cow juice in dry biscuits.
After a couple of days of the gecko looking a bit poorly, he’s not back with avengence! We’d started him on mealworms rather than crickets, but he’d not been looking top notch at all. After changing his diet back to crickets, he’s looking a lot more spritely and happy
So there you go. Ignore all advice about feeding geckos mealworms and stick with crickets
In other news, Joy is moving into my flat in 5 weeks which will be the first time I’ve lived with a girl since a flatmate at university (didn’t last long) which is great for both of us. If you are in Winchester on thursday night, come and see us play a 2 hour split set at O’Neils for free!
