2013 365-29

Way late this week partly due to being very busy, very tired (I blame the heat) and having too much bloody photography to do. I never get backlogs of photo stuff - until this past few days. It's been an interesting week on the old photography front, not just because I was forced to spend part of it with no camera.

15/07/13

Thanks to good old King Billy defeating King James at the Battle of the Boyne, today was a public holiday and being a public servant, I got the day off. I decided to make another attempt to get to Cloughan Point and photograph the jetty there. I got there and got some shots, but I had foolishly attempted to clean my camera sensor myself before heading out. I made a complete mess of it and ended up with hundreds of streaks across the sensor and managed to convince myself that I had fatally ruined the damn thing. Anyway, Cloughan Point is an amazing spot for photos and today was just the right day - plenty of nice clouds. This was a quickly processed pano of the jetty from the railway tracks and as you'll notice, the streaks are running vertically because its made up of shots taken in portrait mode.

16/07/13

First job for this morning was to book the D800 into my local Calumet store in the hope that it could be cleaned and wasn't, in fact a total write-off. That done, I spent some time this evening working on this shot from yesterday. It's basically an HDR shot with three bracketed shots at +/- 1 EV and then converted into black and white. I spent a lot of time in Photoshop dodging and burning parts of the image and even more time cloning out streaks and spots on the sensor. It's Ok at this resolution but any bigger and it's still a mess. particularly the sky. However, having found how to get there, I intend returning some evening and doing some more long exposure shots.

17/07/13

I admit to owning three cameras. With my D800 in to be rescued I had foolishly lent out my other two cameras to other people and was left camera-less. How to take pictures with no camera - there was the challenge. Of course I still had my iphone, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became with the idea of using my flatbed scanner to try some shots. This is the first of the baby courgettes to be harvested from my greenhouse this evening before they got cooked for dinner. Courgette went on scanner, black cloth went over the top and there you have it. Nice enough detail and an interesting depth of field.

18/07/13

This is a pretty dreadful shot of my hand pressed onto the scanner. I think I was either getting desperate or very quickly ran out of ideas.

19/07/13

Good news all round. Camera cleaned with no permanent damage and I found a second hand Samyang fisheye lens for sale. Its an 8mm and is totally manual but with a bit of research got it working on the D800 with some metering. This was taken while walking up North Street, past Keats and Chapman bookshop. Maybe not the best example of fisheye photography but nice to be able to get a well exposed shot right away. I can assure you, there's more to come.

20/07/13

Saturday night meant one thing and one thing only - roller derby. The first ever international bout on Northern Irish soil as the Belfast Banshees took on the Bad Seeds from Stuttgart. This was a great bout with loads of excitement, lead changing hands several time, hard hits and a few laughs. So much so I might just do my own wee write-up for the blog if I get some time this evening or tomorrow. I picked this shot out of the 120 I ended up with; Ra-Ra Rasputina jamming - I've had the pleasure of watching this skater since her early days with the Banshees and she has blossomed over the past two years. Seeing this shot made me think that her style and technique sits pretty well alongside the many top rank American skaters I get to see shots of.

21/07/13

It wasn't a good idea to drink beer before going to the roller derby bout yesterday and then (after sobering up to take photos) going for a couple of more pints at the after party. Those last two pints were quite tasty. Up early with a muggy head and started processing and posting photos from last night. I eventually decided that I needed some fresh air and took a walk across the road to Civil Service Sports Club to watch a bit of cricket. Armed with my 70-200 I soon realised that this lens was just not long enough, shooting in full frame on the D800. Then I had an idea - bump the D800 into DX crop mode which should (in theory) increase the range of my zoom to something closer to 300mm. This worked, but at the cost of losing some sensor space and pixels - I think in DX crop mode the D800 knocks out around 16 megapixels. It worked out pretty well all things considered, but I think that a 400mm telephoto lens would be the minimum for shooting cricket.