11 posts tagged “photography”
As it was such a nice day, I felt that I needed to unwind a bit, and with the usual magic of random driving, I somehow ended up in Golden Acre Park near Leeds. It's a lovely place and I've been there several times before. Luckily, I brought my Canon S70 camera along, so I could take some photographs as well!
The weather was fantastic today, and I'm really glad I didn't spend it all at home slaving away over a Powerpoint presentation!! Here are some of my favourite photographs of the day:
As usual, I've uploaded most of the photos to my Picasa Web Album.
Little did I know that a really nice walk around nature back in April 2007 with my trusty camera would lead to two of my snaps being published in an online guide to Leeds. I'm happy to report that my photographs of Breary Marsh are featured on the online Schmap world travel guides website.
Here they are!
My original blog entry about Breary Marsh is linked below, along with the other photos I took on that trip!
A popular beauty spot, Breary Marsh has been designated a "Site of Special Scientific Interest". As one of the last remaining areas of "carr" - or waterlogged woodland - it is an important habitat for rare insects, shrubs and mosses. A network of footpaths and bridleways allow visitors to explore the full beauty of this reserve, with boardwalks giving visitors access to the perpetually swampy areas. The drier, upper grounds are especially picturesque in the spring, when blankets of bluebells dominate the scene.
As I was walking along, I spotted a rather furtive-looking grey squirrel that was minding its own business and making its merry way up a tree. Now, I've heard that the way to catch one of these creatures was to stand under the tree and act like a nut! (Just kidding.) I don't think I had much of a chance of sneaking up unnoticed, so I walked slowly up to the tree and attempted to get a few photographs of it before it scampered away. As expected, it was a little camera-shy, and wouldn't look into the camera! I only managed a few pictures before it fled completely. Fortunately, I was able to crop and enlarge some shots to get a closer look at our friend.
The weather here has changed over the past few days, so much so that I've put my fan on - it's a little USB one on my computer so don't get too excited. The nice thing is that just a week or so back, I was still using my heater.
This new theme celebrates the sea. The banner is a crop of a picture I took of a rescue boat on North Avoca Beach in November 2005.
One of the great things about living near the sea is that you can go to the beach pretty much on a whim! I used to find it really peaceful just sitting lazily on the beach, listening to the sounds of the waves crashing onto the rocks, and feeling the cool sea breeze carry away the stifling heat. There's something really soothing about that, and even if you go there with problems on your mind, they just get washed away with the tides.
I didn't really go into the water all that much, and as you might tell from the photographs some of those waves looked pretty rough! So it's a good job there's a rescue boat!
This is just a quick additional to the post I made from my Treo when I stayed at Tulip Inn in Gateshead. I managed to bring my other camera along and took some additional photos, so you can now have the Tulip Inn Hotel Room Experience for free!
I was given a rather impressive-looking Easter Egg not too long ago. It's one made out of Belgian Milk Chocolate, and it looks quite nice in its packaging too. I managed to get its consent to pose for a few photographs for me before the inevitable happens! My sister has her eye on it, so I'm afraid the egg will not last long!
Happy Easter Holidays!
I just thought I'd post some pictures of Sheffield (South Yorkshire, England) that I happened to take while I was there for a job interview!
The interview went relatively well, and since I don't get a chance to travel too much, I decided to stick around for a couple of hours and have a look around. I forgot to bring my Canon Powershot S70, so had to settle for my Treo 680. It was a bright day, so made taking pictures easier!
I visited a rather large shopping mall called Meadowhall and had a very nice Fish and Chips at Harry Ramsden's there! Yum!
There were some opportunities to travel around the area in the glorious sunshine, which is a good thing about the job. And there were many places where you'd just wish you could stop for a while and take in the breathtaking scenery.
One of the amazing things about Australia is the quality of the light there. It's fantastic for photography. I have a Canon S70 compact digital camera and really wanted to carry it everywhere with me. Alas, even though it's a compact camera, I wasn't able to. It has heaps of features - Aperture control, Shutter timing control, Manual control, and the various scene features you can get on digital cameras these days. It also has a 28mm wide-angle lens (35mm equivalent) which makes it great for landscape photography. It is built rather solidly and has a gun-black metal body, so it isn't very lightweight! I tended to only bring it when I consciously decided to go out and take pictures!
These pictures were taken at around 8.30am on a winter's day after a night shift. I'd stopped my car on the way home after seeing what a great morning it was. The temperature wasn't too bad for winter (just above 10 degrees Celcius), and the air was very clear. It was one of those times when it's really invigorating just taking a deep breath. There weren't many people up that early, which was good because The Entrance is a popular tourist area, and luckily for me, I had my camera with me.
It's incredibly rewarding getting photos that you are pleased with, because you tend to be your own greatest critic and I find that photography is rather subjective. I feel that photographs can also be very personal too, bringing you back to the time when you took them, especially if you made some effort to set up the shot to get it the way you wanted.
In fact, I think this has inspired me to take some more photographs!
It was a bit of a mammoth day yesterday: big, woolly and a little scary. I got a lift down to Birmingham for my exam the night before and stayed at a hotel overnight. The hotel was mediocre at best, so I didn't bother taking any pictures of it!
The exam started at 9.15am and consisted of 4 papers. Luckily they let us go out on a lunch break in the middle, so we had time to recuperate from the morning. The whole examination experience ended at 5pm, whereupon everybody stumbled out in dazed fashion, and looking a little exhausted!
I received a call to say that the motorway back to Leeds was clogged, so we decided to stay in Birmingham for a while and wait until the rush hour traffic calmed a little. I explored the city centre with a couple of friends, because we desperately needed a place to sit down, and have a cup of coffee. Eventually, we happened upon a Starbucks, the headquarters of Evil.
It's somewhat inevitable that people talk about exams after the ordeal as a kind of debrief. I'm not a great fan of these 'post-mortems', because there's not much you can do about things after an exam, and although it's great to confirm that I've answered questions correctly, the actual act makes me worry about the answers that I got wrong. So I tend to avoid doing it at all!
I've got to admit that I don't rate Birmingham as the prettiest city in the world. However, we were impressed by some of the developments going on in the city centre. I took a few snapshots from my Treo, but the light was running away and without timing or aperture control, or a flash, it was difficult to get anything spectacular.
All in all, I personally found it a good experience. I said in a post some time back that I wanted opportunities to travel more and take more photographs. I guess I did a bit of that!
I'm used to having the ability to add personalised banners in my previous blog, so it wasn't really such a big task for me. Even so, Vox has made it painless and I was able to alter the entire appearance of this page in a matter of minutes! Fantastic.
I decided to go for the green look and uploaded part of a macro picture I took in 2005 of a spiky branch from a plant when I visited Golden Acre Park in Leeds. I daresay it's turned out quite nicely. All it needed was a bit of a tweak with the colour scheme! Thanks Vox!
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