I was out with a few of the guys from POTN again this past Friday.  The plan was to get a few London Landmark photos for Ian to adorn his walls with, but I ended up spending a lot of my time playing with lights again.  It had been a while since I’d made any orbs and didn’t want to get too out of practice.  Also, I’ve been chatting with quite a few folks on Flickr about making the orb tools so it sort of put me back in the mood.

Neal and I walked from my place along the north bank to St. Paul’s, shooting the standard stuff along the way and trying to stay warm.  After my recent trip to Harbin I figured that the -2 degree weather wouldn’t bother me that much, but given enough time it’s hard to distinguish -2 from -20.

I spent most of the evening playing around with my tilt-shift lens.  I love it for shooting buildings and it’s even fun to play with when light painting.  It’s nice because it’s a slow-to-use lens that makes you take your time and think about what you’re doing, and manual focus always adds to the challenge.

Tide was out so we got down under the millennium bridge for a few of the ‘standard’ photos of it and St. Paul’s.  It’s one of those scenes that’s so often photographed that I just don’t have the creative capacity to shoot something new.  Still, I’m content with the results of the evening.

Also, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen an orb done in this location before so it’s got to count as unique right?

Couple more images in the gallery.

I picked up a JOBO PhotoGPS last week as part of the selection of new kit I’m picking up for my holiday in April (all that remains now is a portable hard drive and a new camera bag, and maybe some new filters…)

The idea behind Geotagging is to record the GPS locaiton into the EXIF information of an image.  You can then link the images to google maps at the (roughly) exact point you were when you clicked the shutter.  I’ve still got a few kinks in my workflow to iron out as well as figuring out how to do the linking, but we’ll get there in the end.

Anyways, as part of my testing I was out last night taking a few images.  Unfortunately, somewhere between photomatix, lightroom and photoshop the gps information was stripped out of the exifs so you’ll just have to take my word for it that these were taken in London.

I think the images will back me up.

These are with my other Tower Bridge HDR images in the gallery.

I’ve been meaning to get a few more shots of Tower Bridge in since it’s so close to home but the cold weather has been holding me up.  Fortunately, things warmed up this weekend so I managed to get out and take a few shots.

As you can probably tell, these are all HDR images.  7 exposures at 1 & 1/3rd stop increments merged in Photomatix and then adjusted in Photoshop.  I pushed these further than I normally would to sort of go for a cartoony feel.  I like them, but I’ve been staring at them all for a few hours now so it’s hard to say how I’ll feel about them in the future.

Just three images so far, so no need to go digging in the gallery for more.

I picked up a new lens as a christmas present to myself at the start of December and I’ve finally had a bit of time to get out shooting with it.  Nothing too exciting so far, just a couple of photos from the neighbourhood.  I plan on going out again this weekend (or possibly even on New Years Day,  hangover depending) with it for some more interesting shots.