Hornsea Mere on Sunday

After lunch the weather was lovely, so we thought it might be nice to go out to Hornsea Mere for a walk and take some photographs. So we did.

New students, if you are looking for a nice place to go with mum and dad when they drop round to see you, then I can recommend it. The coffee shop has had an overhaul and does a really nice line in scones and cream. It is around 25 minutes from Cottingham, you can feed the ducks and then go and have a look at the seaside.

You can even hire a boat and splash about a bit.

Jolly Boating Weather

If you are feeling a bit annoyed about my endless parade of photographs of good weather and happy times, please bear in mind that I’m writing this back home on Monday evening and it is cold, dark and raining… But on Saturday it was none of those things, so we went on a little boat trip.

This is the view back up the lake to where we were staying. Torbole is on the right hand side. I bet that bit of rock made a great noise when it fell down.

Nice church

Part of a nice castle

Wind surfers making the most of the excellent conditions.

Lakeside Fun

The bridge has these padlocks all along the railings. Perhaps they symbolise undying love between two people. Perhaps they are from tiny bikes that have been expertly stolen.

Lakeside excavations

Lunchtime macro photography

This is a far better picture than photos taken with a mobile phone have any right to be.

Holiday Hill Climbing

 

Today we took a walk along to Riva del Garda, a town just a couple of kilometres from Torbole. Very nice place. Great museum (I like museums) and a castle thingy half way up the hill at the side of the town. The guide book said it was a 20 minute stroll from the centre of the town. Which it is. For Superman.

For us mortals, arriving a somewhat exhausted forty minutes or so after setting off, it was well worth the trip though. I made the picture above from four shots taken with the Lumia 1020.

I also took a few panoramas while I was there.

Early Hull

One of the, few, good things about being up town at 6:00 am is that you can take some quite nice pictures this time of year. I took these on Tuesday morning and today I got around to fiddling with them a bit.

Our train to London.

Lumia 1020 Lunchtime Photos

So I take my Lumia 1020 for a walk at lunchtime and then, on the way back to the office, I snap 5 pictures at different exposures. Today I blend them using Photoatix and I get this. I’m starting to seriously love the camera in this phone.

Deep Projection

Last night the chaps at C4DI were doing some trials of video projection onto “The Deep”. So a bunch of us went down to take a look. It was a lovely evening when we arrived and so we wandered round taking a few pictures. Today I got them out of the camera and took a look.

This is a slightly processed image of the footbridge over to The Deep.

This is a nice way to brand a building.

And these are jellyfish.

The test was for something big coming in November. Keep an eye on the C4DI website for more details.

High Dynamic Range Photography with the Nokia Lumia 1020

 

I really wanted to try some High Dynamic Range photography with the Lumia 1020 so today I took a walk around Cottingham and took some shots. High Dynamic Range photography is where you take multiple pictures of the same scene at different exposures. Then you use software to merge the images, taking the best exposed bits of the different shots and making one “perfect” pictures. 

You can see the effect in the photograph above. In a picture taken at normal exposure the dark shadow in the foreground would be completely black. This bit was taken from some of the overexposed shots, with the bright bits of the church being taken from the underexposed ones.

The Lumia 1020 is a good bet for this because it will automatically shoot the “bracketed” shots. In fact you can get it to take five pictures over a range of up to 3 EV (exposure values) each side. This means that you just press the button and the phone takes all the shots for you.

There are a couple of problems with this though. The first is the obvious one, in that shots take a lot longer to complete. The phone does a good job at shunting the enormous amounts of image data from the sensor into storage, but you still have to hold the phone up for 30 seconds or so while all five pictures are taken. Actually, I’ve not found the results of using 5 exposures to be much greater than 3, and so I’d just take 3 in the future.

The other problem with the Lumia 1020 HDR photography is that you have to select this “bracketing” mode before each shot. This is probably sensible, in that you don’t want the camera get stuck taking normal snaps five times, but it is a pain when you forget.

This is a single “ordinary” shot taken from the camera and just cropped slightly. You can compare it with the shot at the top of the post, which was made from five separate exposures.

I used Adobe Lightroom to import the pictures from the phone and this works fine. I plugged the phone into my laptop and then uses the normal Lightroom Import command to bring the pictures in to my collection. Then I used Photomatix to combine the different pictures. Photomatix also does all the tone mapping to get either a fairly natural result as in the top picture or a more artistic one like the one below:

This was taken from five images and then tone mapped using a “Painterly” pre-set that gives quite a nice effect. I’d be quite happy to print an A3 version of this, and from the look of the pixels, it would print out great too. Amazing.

In short I’m very impressed with the Lumia for HDR photography. I’d like to have the camera grip to make it a bit easier to hold the phone steady though. This also has a tripod fitting that would also be useful for longer exposures.

If you are into photography but bored with carrying your camera around, then you should take a look at this phone. The results really are impressive.

Cottingham Day in Good Weather

Today was that rarest of coincidences. We were in the country, the weather was great, and it was “Cottingham Day” in the village. They had all kinds of stuff going on, including some vintage cars that were parked all around the village. This is a close up of one of them. I so wanted a car like this when I was a bit younger. A “non-price” to anyone who tells me what kind of car it is, and for bonus kudos, the car it was based on.

I took a whole bunch of other pictures which I’m sure will appear on these pages over time. It was a great day

Thwaite Gardens Open Day

We’ve been to Thwaite Gardens Open Day a few years in a row. We had the best weather a couple of years ago, last year was a bit iffy and we weren’t too hopeful about this year. But in the end it was nice and bright, and the sun even made a guest appearance.  The Friends of Thwaite Gardens spend all year making the place look lovely and then we come along, take photographs and have tea and scones.

Thwaite Student Hall. If you live here you get all this loveliness thrown in.

You wouldn’t believe this was right in the middle of suburbia.

Some plant or other (gardening was never my strong point).

We bought some plants for our garden, and we’ll be back next year. If you live in the area you really should go along.

Lensbaby Bendy Lens

The LensBaby composer is a lens mounted on a ball and socket arrangement which you can twist to change the way that it focuses the light onto the camera sensor.

I bought one a while back and every now and then I get it out and have a play. It is quite fun. Very old school, in that it is basically a single lens in a sliding tube. There is no auto focus and you adjust the aperture (the size of the hole the light comes through) by dropping in and out little metal masks that are held in place with magnets. A bit fiddly to use, but the lens itself is pretty darned sharp, and you can get results that would be very difficult to get any other way.

If you have a digital SLR and you fancy spending some time doing things the hard way, and never being quite sure how the pictures will come out, they are kind of fun.

Spring is starting to spring

After a lot of trying, and frosts all over the place at the wrong time, we are finally starting to see signs of spring. The daffodils have actually been flowering.

Which is rather nice.

Fun with HDR Photography

I’m getting quite into this HDR photography lark. It doesn’t always result in photographs which are lifelike, see above, but I quite like the effect and anyway, it’s my blog…

This picture was produced by the Photomatix program which you can get from HDRsoft for less than the price of a video game. The only real pain is having to take three copies of each photograph, an underexposed one and an overexposed one which are then combined with the software. If you are into photography and you haven’t had a go at it, then I’d recommend that you give it a whirl. It transforms quite dull scenes into much more interesting ones.

Whitby Again

..and so to Whitby. Love the place. And the Fish Pie served at the Magpie Cafe. Actually I like the cafe as much for its technology and business approach as its food. They have large screens showing you what fish is available on the day. All the attentive and hard working waitresses enter your order into a PDA (and have done for quite a while now). The cafe is on Twitter, and they are continuously updating what they do. In these respects they are very like Fudge in Hull, working to improve and extend that their reach while still remaining very good at their core business, serving really good food.

We were blessed with some of the best weather I’ve seen for, well, months, and so I took some more pictures of the place.

We didn’t take a trip on the boat, but these folks seemed to enjoy it.

Last time we came the sea was so bad that we weren’t allowed this far out on the pier.

Hull Pictures

One of the great things about going up town first thing in the morning to review the papers for Radio Humberside is that you can get some great pictures.

Just to the right of the centre of the frame you can see the BBC offices.

Hull centre Looking good.

Hull University on a Lumia 920

Take a look at the original sized image on Flickr. And then reflect that I took this with a phone camera.

Snow Show

Say what you like about the snowy weather, it does make for some nice photo opportunities. Although it also means I’m presently wearing two pairs of socks, two jumpers and a bright red nose.

You get what you pay for

Some years ago we were helping dad move house. Having loaded up we headed onto the road. As we rounded our first corner we heard a horrible sliding noise from the contents of the van followed by an enormous crash. Tim, who was riding shotgun next to me, said “Ah well. You get the help you pay for”. Of course none of us were professional house movers, we were just helping dad out. And it turned out that the enormous crash was caused by a box of cutlery, so no harm was done. But the remark has stuck with me.

I was reminded of it when the terms and conditions for Instragram were changed recently, and people suddenly found that things they thought they owned (i.e. the pictures they had taken) were now ripe for exploitation by the company that was storing them. Instagram decided that they could use any of the pictures held on their servers for profit and advertising. There has been something of a backlash against this, and as a result some back tracking on the part of the company, but I think it has opened up a useful debate. Perhaps, as a result of it, paying for things will come back into fashion.

I’ve always been deeply suspicious of free services. For a start they can vanish or change at any moment, taking with them stuff that might be important to you. And of course, as the saying goes, if you are not paying for the service, you are the product. Facebook sells its ability to target you with custom ads. Google surrounds your Gmail inbox with links to “related services”. And if you ever search for anything (for example my quest for an oven) you will find yourself haunted by matching adverts in every web page you visit for a while.

If something is important to me I’ll pay for it. I put my pictures on Flickr and have done for ages. It costs me around 24 dollars a year to do this, but I can now complain to the site if they ever get lost, and Flickr don’t have to sell my photographs to stay in business.

Maybe in the long term the price of service provision will drop to the point where companies will be able to provide the service for a small fee, rather than have to hawk around personal data for profit. Flickr are obviously keen to cash in on this, and have just launched an offer of three months free hosting to try and tempt people away from “free” sites.

Christmas Wrapping

I took this picture with my Lumia 920, fiddled with it a bit and then posted it onto Flickr, all from the phone. Not bad eh?

I spent a reasonable sized chunk of today wrapping presents. I’m rubbish at this. Firebox used to have this “crap-wrap” service where they’d wrap something badly for you, to save you working at being awful. I could give them tips. My Auntie Julie once spent a while working in a store in York wrapping presents for customers. She got really good at it. You could always spot her presents because of the neat edges and perfect corners.

I notice that some wrapping paper you can buy has a grid printed on the back so that you can cut things squarely. Of course the stuff I got didn’t have that. However, after spending the morning sticking tape to myself and cutting things the wrong size I have learnt one thing from the whole experience:

“Always start wrapping the biggest thing first. Then, when it turns out that you have cut the paper too small for it, you can use the resulting piece to wrap the next one down in size”.

Face Lens for Windows Phone

I’ve been playing with some of the Lens programs that you can get for Windows Phone 8. These application sit on the front of the camera application (a bit like a lens does I suppose) and do things with the image. The Face Lens program puts things onto the faces that it sees. The application is free, but you can buy extra bits and bobs to add to images. Above you can see what it does to the face of a well known local newsreader. Quite fun.