I snuck out of work a bit early last Thursday for an evening flight to Milan to visit some friends.  From there, it was a short drive from the airport to their home in Varese where I had some really yummy pizza (and a terrible margarita).

Apart from the weather, it was a great weekend with good food and great friends!  I had the camera in tow but due to the overcast skies and low fog it wasn’t ideal for taking photos, but I did get a few.  Going back again is definitely in the cards!

There are a few more images in the gallery.

Just a few shots from fencing last night.  I think I’m getting pickier (is that a word?) as to which shots are keepers so the culling process is fairly extreme.  Just three decent ones this time round.

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 spent my Sunday afternoon wandering around the Covent Garden area with Mitesh, Neal and Tyla taking a few photos. I don’t think it was a particularily inspired day, but there were a few good shots to be had.

We ran into some tripod police at Sommerset House, but he was actually really nice and let me take a couple of shots before moving us along. Then while taking some shots of the ice skaters we were approached by another security guard and requested to fill out some waivers stating we wouldn’t sell any of the photos we’d taken there. Not that we could without several dozen model releases from the people there, but we signed anyways to keep them happy (and the girl was a Canon shooter herself, so we chatted for a bit).

The most important lesson I learned from the day was that I can NEVER move back to Canada. It was hovering around 0°C and I was freezing! Toque, gloves and warm socks couldn’t keep my extremities from going numb so I can’t see how I could ever cope with the regular -20 weather of home.

Anyways, a couple of photos from the day and the rest are in the gallery.