Last Day - no place like home
Last Day - chow time
Last Day - writing on the wall ... Not so much !
Last Day - end of daze
Here is a short video bringing last three years to a close ... A very slow close ... So much so that i had to cut the video short because it was taking too long to shut down.
Last day - my locker, what is it good for
Last day - picture perfect
Last Day - early bird is so over rated
London Marathon - the end
London Marathon - The finish line !!
London Marathon - start of the day
Its a good thing i'm not firing the starting gun .. Though one day i would like to ...
AIG & animal rights?
'Clearly these guys took common sense and tortured it till it screamed' before heading out here ... The line is from this week's apprentice.
Canary wharf
I would've love to take this picture with my SLR.
Photo 101 – Basics (Part I)
Exposure Value (EV) is something we have all ignored at one point or another in our life but when you look at it in the cold light of day there is nothing to it at all.
EV is nothing but a fancy name for a combination of aperture (part II) and shutter speed (Part III) that describe the same exposure.
Let tell this in a story .... Say you are out one day and decide to take a picture. You feel brave enough on this sunny day and set your own aperture and shutter speed, by doing so you have told the camera that I want you to set this combination as EV 0, a benchmark of sorts. (Extremely simplified but should get the point across)
You take a landscape picture and find that the sky is bleached, more white than blue. This means that you are over exposing you picture to light and probably have your aperture to wide or shutter speed too slow.
Now you have two options
a) Change the aperture/shutter speed, giving the camera a new set of benchmark and effectively re-setting the EV 0 value, or
b) Simply lower your EV value to say, -1/3 (normally EV values go up/down in thirds or halves in the range between ±2)
The second option is a quick way of fixing your settings to achieve the same goals. I will revisit this in Parts II & III and hopefully it will put the whole thing into context.
Before I bring this to a close I would like to point out that ISO, the sensitivity of the film, an age old constant of sorts has now joined the ranks of the “variables” and technically should be considered as a component of the EV. (More on this in Part IV)
In summary (at the risk of alienating people by introducing unduly math):
EV is dependent on (or a function of) three variables; aperture [Ap] (Part II), shutter speed[Ss] (Part III) and ISO (Part IV))
" EV = function (Ap, Ss, ISO) "
Photo 101 – The Formula
This is the first in a series of posts through which I will explore the basics of the tool used to capture images. The main purpose of these ‘tutorials’ is for me to get the concepts straight in my head … but if in the process it’s useful to other then why not.
There is no better place to start than at the beginning, that said, wherever I start will be the beginning so that leaves the last point moot but insightful, my personal take on relativity.
I like to think of a camera as an equation (lame, I know, but stick with it) with a set of constants and variables. The elements of the equation, the aforementioned constants and variables, control the final capture. So in my Canon, for instance, the only constant that I can think of at the moment is the size and type of sensor that captures the image and the variables are the shutter speed, aperture, ISO, focal length (aka zoom), metering, focus, flash, file size of the capture amongst others.
The point I am trying to make here is that we have access to all these wonderful ‘variables’ but most of us only limit ourselves to one variable, ‘the zoom’. We don’t worry about the constants, those we have no control over.
Knowing that the general public would like to stay ignorant to these variables the camera manufacturer’s program presets in their hardware, call them all sorts of silly things like sports mode, portrait mode etc. In creating these modes all they have done is pre-set those variables for you so you don’t have to. It’s like Nike making a one-size-fit-all running shoes, ridiculous right.
Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to taking pictures; the more you know about your camera the better your capture. In the next few posts I will log my simplistic, and occasionally twisted, understanding of these variables. There is tons of stuff out there on the web that explains this in detail and I would encourage you to find out more.
Are you ready to get a shoe that fits !!
The BJ experience
There is no need for words ... As I "gulf" down this ice cream .. I'll let the video upload
Ben & Jerry's - Free cone day
Found it
Long way around
Project AP : wip
Cut & Paste
Take the rap battles from “8 miles” (that Eminem movie), suck all the cool out of the contenders/audience preferably with an industrial sucking device of sorts, sprinkle some geek on the stage and the crowd, throw four Macs, a PC and a bunch of projectors on the stage, sprinkle some more geek (you can never have enough geek at one of these things .. never), hand everyone an entry level Canon/ Nikon and you have your self a Cut & Paste event.In a nut shell Cut & Paste is a graphic designer’s version of rap battles where four contenders are thrown on the stage, given a theme and then judged on their output produced in a given time frame. The three categories were 2D, 3D and motion graphics.
I must say it was very interesting for as long as the novelty lasted, which was about an hour for me. Yes that’s right, it took me that long to get used to the whole thing and I consider my self as one of them. I recon it would last three times longer for an outsider.
In the words of Mr. Forest, the contestants were like a box of chocolate only a few were good and despite having read the description on paper for the others it was shocking how bad some of them turned out to be, though I appreciate the pressure that they were under.I suppose its one of those things that you have to do once, and trust you me once is all you’ll need, if not for the competition than for the horde that gathers at the watering hole that is Cut & Paste.
My blog ... a new beginning
I had a go at blogging before and lost interest pretty quickly.
In round 2 however I plan to use it as a sorts of log to keep track of all random thoughts that I have in any given day.
Be prepared to be flabbergasted !!
In round 2 however I plan to use it as a sorts of log to keep track of all random thoughts that I have in any given day.
Be prepared to be flabbergasted !!
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