From yesterday’s walk at Wandlebury.
I met this fellow on a walk today. Isn’t he magnificent?
He seemed very placid, but I was grateful that there was a fence between us, unlike the time when I met one of his cousins a few years back.
I’m not quite sure if I’m allowed to have this. But we could have a fun chasing game if you wanted to take it away from me….
A rainy night at Gog Magog Hills farm shop – one of my favourite local haunts.
In a box in the loft I found my old Olympus OM30, which I purchased a little over a quarter of a century ago: an OK, but never great, camera. With it, however, were a couple of Olympus OM-series Zuiko lenses, which were pretty good for the price. And I was delighted to find that you can get adapters to connect them to a micro-4/3 body like my Panasonic Lumix GH2. You can buy the adapter from Olympus for £143 or from Fotodiox for £29. I chose the latter.
My first few experiments with the combination are here.
Had a delightful if decidedly foggy walk on and around the Torpel Way near Peterborough at the weekend.
Very pretty villages round here. Thought this was a rather impressive house, in Ufford:
More pictures on Flickr. Pleasing 8-mile route on Everytrail.
We love the Cawston Press drinks; Our local Waitrose sells several, but our favourite tipple is the Apple & Rhubarb juice. Actually, ‘tipple’ is probably the wrong word: we consume gallons of this stuff! Recommended.
However, the real reason for this photo is simply that I’m playing with a nice Voigtlander 35mm/f1.4 lens lent to me by John, which gives my Lumix a pleasingly quirky ancient-and-modern appearance.
It’s a nice challenge to go back to a fully-manual lens for a bit; rather more so, though, without the aid of a focus prism, and using an LCD viewfinder…
A view from the top of BBC Television Centre yesterday, cobbled together from a couple of quick iPhone snaps.
The Television Centre building itself, one of the earliest and still one of the largest purpose-built TV production buildings in the world, is being sold off as part of funding cuts, and its residents gradually dispersed to other parts of London, Salford and elsewhere over the next 18 months, so there won’t be many more opportunities for pictures like this, at least not with the BBC logo visible!
Seldom has such an ugly building inspired such fond memories. This is the home of the Blue Peter garden, for example. Much of Fawlty Towers and Monty Python was filmed here. And under that canopy on the bottom left you can find a Doctor Who telephone box…
Autumn colours at Coton. And Tilly demonstrating that gates are intended for humans and not for spaniels.
(Another iPhone shot)
I tried out the HDR mode on the iPhone yesterday, deep in the walls of Orford Castle.
I’m still getting used to having a phone that can take such images easily. What was more shocking was that I also snapped quite a few shots with my (much more expensive and less convenient) micro-four-thirds camera, and when I got them home onto the big iMac, I had to look quite hard to tell the difference.
I did notice it when it came to making some adjustments, because the Lumix captures RAW images where the iPhone just does JPEG.
Come on Apple, prove that it’s a real photographer’s phone by offering RAW output too!…
(That’s a small photography pun)
I’ve been having a quick play with an iOS photo-manipulation tool called Snapseed. It makes pretty effective use of the touch screen as a way to select and apply effects, and the effects are rather good. I discovered the app just before bedtime, so haven’t done much with it yet, but here’s a quick demo:
This photo of the basin in our bathroom was just taken with the (pretty crummy) camera in my iPad while I was sitting on… well, never mind where I was sitting, but I could instantly apply and adjust a couple of effects before uploading it to Flickr.
Snapseed is certainly not the first app to do this kind of thing, but it’s the best I’ve used so far. There are a few intro video clips on their website to show you how it works. There are few quicker ways of turning your photo into an arty photo, even if, like this, it wasn’t a particularly good photo to start with.
So is it just too easy now to flick the ‘artiness’ switch? it feels a bit like cheating. In the past, such effects would have taken long hours of practice and years of experience in the dark room. (Or sometimes they were just mistakes which looked good.). Is it still art without the struggle? Is a book still a masterpiece if it is written with a word processor rather than a quill? Why do we take photographs and try to make them look like non-photographs? Is it guilt over the fact they’re not paintings?
Mmmm. Too late. Bedtime.
I know that several people have been buying iPhones recently, but I wonder how many bought two in one day?
I have. Well, to be fair, I did have to take one back. I initially purchased the iPhone 4S from Three. But unfortunately, the Three network has almost no coverage in my home, as I discovered when I got it back there. (The moral of this story is to make sure that you haven’t transferred your previous phone number to your new network until you’ve tested aspects of it that are important to you. Fortunately, I hadn’t.) Here’s the Three coverage map of Cambridge:
You see that little light-coloured hole in the bottom left corner with no coverage? That’s where I live. Which is a bummer, because Three’s bandwidth, customer support, and prices are all really quite good.
However, I’m working at home now, and so being able to receive calls on my mobile while at home is really quite important.
And so I took my phone back into town, sorted out all the refunds and cancellation of contracts, and got another one. I was actually quite amazed that two shops in the centre of Cambridge both had availability of the iPhone I wanted. But sure enough, there was another 64GB 4S in black at Vodafone. And Vodafone, I did know, had good coverage at my home. Their data plans suck. At least, in comparison to Three or some of the other carriers. But, when I got it home, the coverage was fine.
And with Vodafone, there is an interesting twist, which is that if the coverage hadn’t been good, I could have bought a femtocell to improve it. I gather that these are not really very good, but since, if you have a contract, you can get the box from Vodafone for only £20, it seems as if ‘not very good’ might be much better than ‘nothing at all’ which is what some of the other carriers were able to give me.
Anyway, I’m loving this new phone. The camera is excellent, though I’ve only just started playing with it. Here’s a quick low-light shot from my kitchen:
But the Siri voice recognition system also seems to be splendid. In fact, this entire post was dictated into my iPhone, with only very minor corrections, and the insertion of links and images, afterwards. Writing something of this length, using a small phone keyboard, would have been a real pain. I am exceedingly impressed, especially considering the problems I’ve had with speech recognition systems in the past. The only downside is that it will only work when you have a good network signal because it relies on cloud-based services. But otherwise the implementation is great: there is a little microphone key next to the on the keyboard, and so almost anywhere the keyboard pops up, you can decide to dictate rather than type.
And so this has just been dictated into my WordPress blog page and I’m now going to hit save.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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