I bought cheap Ikea flower seeds which I have sown around Easter. That surely paid off.
Tag: photography
Moon Eclipse, 15th of June
I was lucky enough to be able to spot yesterday’s moon eclipse through some holes in the cloud deck. I managed to take some photos.
Did you see the eclipse too?
Southwold, Norfolk and painting with light
As promised here are some photos I took when we were in Southwold last weekend. It was a lovely day, with a lighthouse, and a pier where they served perfect cream tea.
Southwold has a nice atmosphere, at this time of the year it is not crowded by tourists, and when the weather is like this it is a perfect place to be. (The UK just has the most wonderful coast).
And here is another light painting experiment. Here is what we (me and my mum) did: a camera with a slow shutterspeed (15 seconds), a tripod, two small torches, and a room as dark as possible. Start drawing and be surprised at how much fun it is. This is a slideshow of a couple of our drawings. I liked the second last one best, it’s one my mum made, I don’t know how she fiddles the red colour in as the light was yellow, but it looks cool. And yes the girl is in there somewhere too
I had a nice weekend in the Netherlands, we had a nice meal with with my grandparents, we saw Paul the Leeuw which was entertaining, we cycled one of my favourite trips in my home area and I ate boerenkool with worst for dinner. What more could you want?
I hope your weekend was as good.
Los Angeles Day 0
Here is a slide show of the first day in Los Angeles see the images here.
(Please let me know if you still have problems viewing it!)
All well here! :)
Painting with light in London
Yesterday the evening weather in London was so nice that I took my camera and positioned myself on Piccadilly Circus for a while. I took loads of photos but only found a couple of them worthy enough to go on display.
I tried ghost people before in New York, but you can do that in London too, look at these Ghost legs in front of the bus!
There are car stripes and the real London Painting with Light one. (I did try the same experiment in New York, on Times Square.)
And there is the brave bicycle lady (without helmet mind you!) who claims Piccadilly circus for herself for a moment right in the middle of the cars, buses and cabs madness, wonderful.
And there is bus number 19 in motion and I love, love, love this photograph. You can just about recognize the shape of a cab coming around the corner.
I probably don’t follow any of the how-to-take-a-photograph rules, but sometimes you just need to take your camera and play. You can be surprised with the results.
Hastings and what you find in a typical British sea town
I went for a photography meetup on Sunday and the trip went to Hasting. Hasting is a about 2 hours from London by train and while it is an ok place with cliffs, fishing boats and of course the sea, I still prefer Eastbourne (Beachy Head) and Brighton.
The weather was perfect (my face is still red) but somehow I wasn’t 100% motivated to take photos so they are not all great. But I am very happy with the above young seagull photo. I love the colours.
I think in the end the theme for me became taking photos of typical things on a British beach.
So we have seagulls, women in bikini (and I will leave it up to you if that is a good thing or not …), men putting up windscreens, deck chairs, swan water bikes and families with fish and chips (and the man wearing a t-shirt saying – “If found – return to the pub” ).
Surprisingly enough Hastings also has two Funiculars.
Weirdest photo of the day must be this bear:
It looks incredibly sad and depressed. Understandable if you have a hole in your belly and are attached to a red tractor.
A first timelapse experiment – and how to do it
After my Adobe Premiere course last week I really needed to go and use it for something. I have long been wanting to experiment with time-lapse photography, so I took a couple of test shots around Trafalgar Square and glued them together into a time-lapse sequence.
Just a couple of notes:
1. It feels good to make something again, even if it is just a simple thing like this.
2. The photos
The camera I used for this is my small pocket camera (Panasonic Lumix TZ4). It was handheld so there is some shaking. It also doesn’t have a built in timer so I used the “burst” option in stead. Also – not all photos are sharp.
If you want to do this properly you will have to use a tripod, and to make things easier for yourself, a good camera with a timer.
I am going to try it again with my Nikon D80. This camera should take better pictures. It doesn’t have a timer either, but I bought an external timer which can be connected to the camera. This sort-of remote control will then take pictures every x seconds. (where x is the interval you have set it to).
But basically what you need to do it to take lots of pictures with very short intervals of the same subject. (And that subject should, obviously be moving/changing etc.)
3. Editing
It was really easy to turn this into a video clip in Premiere. It was a breeze to add a bit of music to it and adding some titles is very easy too.
I set the duration for each photograph at 0.2 seconds. (one fifth of a second, 5 photos per second)
(Note: you don’t need Premiere for this, you could probably do the same thing in Windows Movie maker.)
And I can hear you think – why did you not just shoot a video clip in stead?
Well I kind of like the quirky way in which people or things seem to move in time lapse videos, there is an odd look and feel to it. So I want to experiment with it a bit more.
To do some more practising with the editing – next weekend I am going to visit those two lovely dogs again and I will try to shoot some video clips of them to cut together some sort of “A day in the life of …” clip. Stay tuned.
Update: Uploaded a new version. It is slightly longer with some more footage of people on Trafalgar Square. And I put in transitions between the different sections. And it is slighly better quality.
The small things in life
When my head started to feel a little bit less dizzy, I started to make some small walks in my hometown IJsselstein, and noticed that the small things in life are very worth noticing.
I am slowly getting better every day and I am back in London now. I am still having some trouble reading a book, or staring at a computer screen for too long, but I am sure that will all get better too. On Monday (1st of June) they will remove the dressing from my ear and have a look. But even with the dressing still in, sounds are coming through already, which is a good sign.
My brothers dog – not at all pleased with his outfit and waiting to bite someones nose for revenge.
Photography
It started like this yesterday on the photography course:
Hello, my name is Ingrid, I have a Nikon D80 and I shoot in fully automatic mode. (because I am too stupid to understand how to use my camera properly)
In other words I have this great camera with an amazing range of possibilities but I am using it as a point and shoot camera. I am an Anonymous Automaticmode shooter, an AA. Luckily I wasn’t the only one, the whole class was filled with AA’s. People with all possible types of digital SLR camera’s and we were only using 5% of our camera’s capabilities.
Were. Because those days are over.
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