Why Dont You Blog?

After my last rant, I realised I had been ranting (on and off line) about this topic a bit too much so I have decided to post some nice, pleasant, pictures with a summer feel to try and cheer myself up. I blame the near constant rain and cold for my SAD out look (yes, I need a holiday)

All these pictures were taken at National Trust properties, if you live in the UK and enjoy going round stunning landscapes, houses and castles at the weekend (or mid week), then you really should consider joining the National Trust and / or English Heritage.

The first photo was taken with a Nokia N73 Cameraphone, the rest with a Kodak Z650 digital camera. All were untouched in photoshop (unusual for me now) but resized to 600px wide by Advanced Batch Converter. I have finally given in and gone for Adobe Lightroom so I may end up playing with that a lot more over the weekend.

Obviously, if people feel willing to donate towards my purchase of a real digital SLR (Nikon D80 appeals to me) then, I am never too proud to accept handouts .

[tags]adobe, holiday, national-trust, photographs, photography, photos, photoshop, phone camera, nokia-n73, nokia, n73, lightroom, kodak-z650, technology, SAD, Sunshine, Happy[/tags]

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 34% [?]

Taking some snapshots today led me to thinking about the “value” of using the on-camera processing options to take pictures as Black and White or Sepia (or even low colour), rather than taking every shot as high colour and doing any processing in Photoshop. Now for clarification purposes, I do not have a “real” DSLR (Kodak Z650) so taking the pictures in RAW is not an option and therefore some camera processing is inevitable.

Today, as I was snapping some pictures of country houses and landscapes, I realised I was often switching between Black and White, Sepia and High Colour. Not a massively difficult task but time consuming - in some instances I was taking three pictures of each “shot” rather than a single high colour one.

Common sense was screaming out to me that I should just take the high colour, but the residual technophobe in me seems to distrust Photoshop, so I had to experiment a little. I took three shots of a fairly neutral landscape scene, black and white, sepia and high colour, then passed the high colour JPEG through photoshop and made copies in black and white and sepia. The only other PC processing these images have had is a pass through Advanced Batch Converter to resize them into something which can be shown here.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 34% [?]

As mentioned previously, I have taken a few photos of Bodiam Castle (National Trust site in Sussex) and have been pushing them through Photoshop.

The wonders of Photoshop filters can never, ever, be overstated. Here you can see the results of a ten second experiment with a single picture. The first image is the basic image which was then passed through the mosaic filter, the texturizer and desaturated. All of these produce some interesting effects which radically change the impact of the original photograph.

All this strikes me as pretty impressive for what took up about 5 minutes of my life. In fact, it took longer to write this post about the effects (and upload the images) than it did to create them. I really do like photoshop

Popularity: 51% [?]

Popularity: 51% [?]

Well, despite the massively predictable bank holiday weekend weather here in the UK, a visit to Bodiam Castle was well worth it.

Bodiam castle is a National Trust property located in Sussex (not far from Hastings). It was built in the late 13th century as a “fortified home” for an English adventurer returning from France. It could well be argued that it isn’t really a castle, as it was more of a “manor house” with a moat and crenelations… This picture shows the front entrance of the castle - if there is interest / time, I will upload more pictures in the future.

One other odd thing, was a strange looking duck. Being a City Dweller, I am not really up to speed on what water fowl look like, so this one caught my eye. Can anyone confirm what it is please?

As always, feedback welcome.

Popularity: 89% [?]

Popularity: 89% [?]

Sorry about the variable quality of these photos. I did my best with the tools to hand (nothing strong enough to act as a tripod). Sorry.

Now, I am going to avoid making any references to the mad things going on during the eclipse before I get accused of Woo…

[tags]Photographs, Photos, Pictures, Eclipse, Woo, Lunar, Red Moon, Kodak Z650[/tags]

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]