Several of the folks from POTN and I were up early on Sunday to head out to the Hellingly Lunatic Asylum for a day of photography.

It was tricky to get into the spooky mood as there were about a dozen of us, it was the middle of the day and we had a security guard with us for most of it to make sure we didn’t go where we weren’t supposed too.  We tried are best, so here are a few of the shots and the rest are in the gallery.

I choose to work from home today with the intention of avoiding all of the riots protests going on in the City of London.  Little did I know that the protests would be brought to me.

Around 11 I heard a fair bit of commotion behind my flat so I had a quick look outside to see a few police vehicles in addition to what looked like an armored personnel carrier.  My first assumption was that the police were organizing and getting ready to move into the city.

It turns out, the armored vehicle belonged to a group known as the Space Hijackers (a name I didn’t get until I read their intro page).  The police had pulled them behind my humble little flat to question them, inspect their vehicle, and in the end, arrest them all for impersonating police officers (or simply possessing police gear, I’m not clear on which).

Obviously, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take a few shots from my high vantage point and then a few more from street level.

I’ve wanted to get out and take a few shots of The Gherkin for a while now and finally got off my ass and made it happen.  Unfortunately, I had forgotten how much lighter it is in the evenings and didn’t leave myself enough time to wait for dusk, so there aren’t enough lights on for my liking.  Fortunately, it’s only about a 20 minute walk from home so I can always go back and try again!

Anyways, here are a few photos and the rest are in the gallery.

Robert, Victoria, Min and I left work early Thursday evening to hop on board the Stansted Express (complete with self supplied champagne and mini-cakes) to catch our Ryanair flight to Turin.  From there, it was a sleepy transfer to Valle d’Aosta and the Pila ski resort.  We had some amazing spring skiing on Friday.  Sunny, empty slopes and plenty of runs to keep us all entertained (even if Min & I did get a bit lost at one point).  Day two…well, we got a lot of fresh snow on day two!  The visibility was sub-par however, but at least it kept the runs empty.

As always, the rest of the snap shots are 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.