As happens every year around the 27th of June, Danni’s birthday once again made an appearance and we were fortunate enough to have her mom here to celebrate with us.  In fact, she organized a lovely afternoon of tea & scones at The Ritz.

I’ve had lunch at the Ritz in the past (compliments of Danni actually) so I wasn’t a virgin to the scene, but I always feel slightly awkward in the midst of such opulence.  Fortunately, the staff are more than accustomed to the unrefined  looking to experience a bit of the high culture and nobody ever makes you feel out of place.  Even if the place looks like this…

Having recently had tea at the Langham Hotel, it was inevitable that comparisons were drawn.  While it’s hard to beat the settings of the Ritz, the larger selection of tea and cakes at the Langham win out for me.  I also preferred the scones at the Langham, and I’m something of a scone connoisseur (by that I mean I stuff as many as I can into my face whenever the opportunity presents itself).  The price difference is negligible, so I suppose it depends on what it is you’re looking for. As an experience, the Ritz wins hands down.

We tried to take as many photos inside while still remaining conspicuous, but that’s not always easy to do with a really large camera.  After a few post-tea poses in their reception area, we decided to stroll through the parks in and around Buckingham Palace.  Some of us very much needed to burn off a few scone-induced calories.

Like all touristy destinations, I don’t often go to Buckingham Palace unless we’re acting as tour guides for visiting friends or family.  It’s a lovely area and the surrounding parks are always well kept, perfect for a few photos.  As this June as been impossibly wet, you may have guessed that the sky in the above photo is not 100% authentic.  Well, it’s authentic sky, just taken from my recent trip to the Caribbean and transplanted into a few of the photos in this set to make things a bit cheerier.

After an hour or so of strolling the parks, we headed home to rest up for our dinner at a neighbourhood Thai restaurant that evening.  Hopefully Danni and her mom enjoyed the day as much as  I did.

There are some more photos of the day tucked away in the gallery.

It’s been a busy couple of months for us with all of the traveling and Danni’s mother coming to visit, but Amsterdam was a work fueled trip that I couldn’t miss.  My original plan was to travel to Amsterdam last year for the 2011 Dutch PHP Convention, but due to the UK border agency holding my passport too long (for a bit of paperwork I ultimately didn’t need), I wasn’t able to attend.  The nice folks who ran the convention simply shifted my tickets to the 2012 event and since Danni had her shiny new UK passport it didn’t make sense for her not to join me.

Since I was spending my days at the conference, I didn’t really get a chance to get out and take some proper photos until our last day.  Still, I managed a few snapshots in the evenings here and there but our travel book is going to be a bit thin this time I think. (whenever we go on holiday we get our photos printed in a photo book from a company called Albelli who do a good job at a decent price, and the software is dead easy to use)

Amsterdam was a lot like a Venice you could actually live in.  Where Venice was cramped and overrun with people, Amsterdam had all of the charms of the canals (less the gondoliers) with what actually felt like residential areas.  I’m not saying one place was better than the other, but I certainly know where I’d choose to live given the option.

Danni had the time to do quite a bit more sightseeing than I did and enjoyed most of the museums on offer, in addition to sampling a LOT of free cheese. She even joked about having to come up with a disguise so she could hit all of the spots she’d done already, but I don’t think it came to that.  We did end up bringing back a fair bit of cheese with us, so I think it all balanced out.

We managed to do the Heineken Experience tour one evening which was actually a lot of fun.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from the tour, but it was interesting, slightly informative (especially if you’re unaware of how beer is actually made) and most importantly you get quite a few samples included in the cost of the tour.  Tours that include booze of some sort are always better than tours that don’t.  Fact.

On our last day we had a bit of time once the conference was finished so we headed to a nearby village/museum called Zaanse Schans.  It was a collection of old style Dutch homes along with half a dozen windmills, each designed for a different purpose.  It was a really nice day out, partly due to the great weather we were having, but also because the windmills were exactly what you want to see on your first visit to Holland.  We had lunch in the little village before jumping on the train back to Amsterdam in time to catch our evening flight back home.

I’d love to go back one day and really explore the city and a bit more of the countryside.  There are a lot of other places we both want to visit, so it may be a while till we’re back again.  As always, there are more images in the gallery.

It was hard not to get caught up in this years celebration of the Queen’s 60th year on the throne.  TV ads and transport posters all took on an overtly British flair, buntings and the British flag where everywhere you look and lets not forget about that extra bank holiday.

Unfortunately, the weather also decided to be very British about the whole affair and brought with it lots dark clouds as well as the inevitable rain.  This scuppered our plans to sit out and watch the Jubilee flotilla on the Saturday and just relax at home and watch it on TV.  Much more civilized and we didn’t have to worry about the rain diluting our Pimm’s & Lemonade.

We ventured out of the house on the last of the 4 day celebration to wander down to Buckingham Palace where the Queen would be traversing the length of The Mall following a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral.  There where lots of people around and the weather was co-operating for once so we spent a bit of time amongst the revelers before deciding that sticking around would only result in being overrun and made our way out of the area.

We wandered up to an abnormally empty Piccadilly Circus and took a few photos along the well decorated Regent Street.  It was nice to be able to walk around these usually crowded streets knowing that most people in the area where packed in hoping to catch a glimpse of her Royal Highness.

And since we were in the area, we headed to our favourite restaurant in China Town for some Dim Sum.

We had a lot of fun even apart from the crowds, and if nothing else the event helped me finally learn how to spell jubilee, so a resounding success says I.  There are more images in the gallery, but it was a predominantly a family portrait day.  You’ve been forewarned.

I’ve been spending a lot of my free time lately trying to move my Photoshop skills forward. Part of that is picking up some additional reading material in the form of Photoshop magazines.  A couple of months ago, one of them had a fairly detailed tutorial on how to modify a portrait to make it look like a Japanese animation character.

Being a fan and really liking the look of the end result in the article, I thought I’d give it a try.  My initial intention was to get a shot of Jo in a standard, well lit portrait position and try to work on that, but I completely forgot during our shoot. Fortunately for me, I have a lovely, understanding and best of all: photogenic wife who was willing to step in.

I spent about 20 minutes getting the lighting set up and just right for the look I wanted. It was fairly standard lighting, but made tricky by the fact that I wanted a large light slightly overhead for the catch lights in the eyes and I don’t have much room in our low ceiling flat. We managed just by getting Danni to sit fairly low.

My intention was to show the before & after image as it’s quite a transformation, but the before image was kiboshed by my (at the time) non-make-up wearing wife.  Anyway, that’s a fairly long preamble for a single image so here it is.

It’s very possibly the longest amount of time I’ve spent processing a single image, but I’m quite happy with the result. There are still a couple of minor things I want to fix before I post it to my 500px account (namely some patchy skin), and I’ll re-upload the fix here when I’m finished but I was getting too impatient to post the image to wait any longer.

The idea was to do an additional image of myself, but after the amount of time it took to complete this one that may not happen.  We’ll see.

Thanks again to my lovely wife for modeling, as well as providing feedback on the image as I was working on it. I don’t usually like having a back seat Photoshopper, but in this case her opinions proved invaluable and contributed greatly to the final image. Xie Xie Lao Po!

Update – I’ve finished the changes and uploaded the final copy to my 500px portfolio.

After a lot of planning and a few models falling through, Rob and I finally managed to arrange a springtime photo shoot.  We had a loose idea of a few images we wanted to do and after a quick scout of the area (near Ashdown Forest) we met up with our model for the day, Jo.

Our first stop was Chidingstone Castle, which had some lovely grounds and lots of early blooming flowers. It was rather open to the elements and the day was cold and windy, so we fired off a few ‘standard’ shots here and moved on to the next location in fairly short order.

I’d had a couple of ideas for images I wanted to do on this shoot which is a bit unusual for me.  Generally speaking, when we go out shooting photos with models I just kind of wing it as each location is different as are the models.  Since we’ve been talking about this outing for a while, I had some time to envision a few images that were slightly more staged.  I even drew up some prototype sketches (which are embarrassing and won’t be shown here) of what I wanted to try.

This first is this image.  It’s fairly close to what I’d had in mind, with a couple of exceptions.  I’d hoped to have the ‘axe man’ smaller in the image so he appeared to be further away.  Unfortunately, even really stopped down he was blown away by normally welcome bokeh to the point where he just appeared to be a dark blob.  Also, my radio triggers were having issues with the distance for some reason even though we were well within their stated ranges.  The other issue I had was I was hoping for a brighter backlight, but this was down to just having a single flashgun firing off in the middle of the day.  I just didn’t think that one through enough.

This second planned image turned out ok, but looked quite different in my head. The clouds are a bit too dense to look realistic and I’m not 100% happy with how the light turned out.  It’s alright though as the whole thing was sort of a learning experience and anything that pushes my photoshop mojo (or lack thereof) is a good thing.

These four shots are all of the images from the day, so no need for the usual gallery link.  We’re hoping to get out again before the end of the month to get some images in the bluebell fields.  I’ve been saying every year for the past five years that I’ll get out and shoot some bluebells, so fingers crossed for this year!