tenthofjune

Ironman UK 2009 was held in Bolton this year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to the swimming or cycing stages, but managed to catch the frontrunners as they made their first pass through Horwich.

This is Philip Graves running through Horwich with almost a seven minute lead in the first part of the marathon section. He went on to win the event.

I recently downloaded the 30-day trial of Apple’s Aperture software and have been impressed enough to buy it. On clicking the ‘buy’ link in the software however, I was presented with the choice of a boxed version shipped to me for £126 or have a serial number emailed to me for exactly the same price. Surely, Apple should be offering a discount for the downloaded version: no box, no DVD, no shipping.
In the end I ordered it from Amazon for over six quid cheaper, and as it is shipped from the UK, as opposed to the ‘Grand European Tour’ that Apple products tend to take, I’ll probably get it quicker anyway.

It was Horwich Carnival Races yesterday. Although the weather wasn’t as good as previous years, it did at least stay dry. I didn’t have time to catch all the races, but here’s a few pictures from the 3:15 women’s cycle race.

 

 

Before digital photography, panoramas involved the use of a guillotine and tape, but now it’s much easier with several photo-stitching software packages available; they may be bundled with your camera or be part of a photo editing package such as Photoshop Elements. The tips for good results, however, are still the same:

1. Keep the camera level. Ideally mount it on a tripod and use one of the many hot-shoe mounted spirit levels available. Failure to do this results in ‘banana’ panoramics.
2. Do not be tempted to use wide-angle lenses ‘to fit more in’, as the distortion makes it harder to marry up the frames. Use either a standard or telephoto lens.
3. Keep foreground objects out of shot. Due to the difference in view between frames, the photo-stitch software will not be able to match up both distant and closer objects.
4. Take all frames at the same exposure settings. This will avoid obvious contrast and colour changes between adjacent frames. If you don’t have a manual mode, then exposure lock can be used. If you are using film, you also need to get them printed with the same settings.
5. Overlap the frames at least 50%. Back in the days of film, this could have seemed expensive, but with digital there is nothing lost and the photo stitching software will have a lot more to work with. Most digital cameras have a stitch assist mode where the current frame is overlaid onto the previous frame on the camera’s screen.
6. Experiment! panoramics can be vertical too.

Just been to the digital photography review site dpreview.com to find that they have been bought out by Amazon. Not sure this is good news. The press release says that dpreview will continue to operate as a standalone operation based in London. Let’s hope Amazon refrain from meddling.

Well after the no-show last time (due to the weather) we got a good view of the lunar eclipse tonight. The following was taken at f5.6 1/4s 1600ASA using a 75-300mm zoom (35mm equiv: 480mm)

This little creature’s built an impressive web in the front garden.
Even managed to catch something.

Added some pictures of Beamish Open Air Museum to our Gallery on pennyandian.com

I regularly get asked how many pictures can you fit on a (insert your own figure) MB flash card. As usual, the answer includes the word ‘depends’, but here is a useful little tool on Crucial’s website which works it out for you.

Update 1st Nov 2007

Crucial have for some reason removed that page and have now only got a static page listing tables.

I recently got a 30″x20″ print done at Photobox while they had a special offer, but now that I’ve come to buy a clip frame for it, I can’t seem to find a 30″x20″ frame. All frames seem to be metric. There is one size close (750 x 500mm), but it would mean trimming an unacceptable amount off the photo and losing part of the border on the print. (30″x20″ is 762 x 508mm)
30″x20″ is a standard photo size, so why does no-one make a frame to suit?