Once again, the fine folks from POTN and I set out for a day of photography.  This time the destination was Rochester, Kent.  I don’t recall who selected the destination as it seemed a bit random, but they had a nice cathedral and the lion’s share of a castle remaining to attract some photographic attention.

I did sneak into the crypt of Rochester cathedral for a couple of light orbs as well.  Ok, so it was open to the public and there was no sneaking involved, but it was still a very cool venue.

After the excitement of the castle and cathedral and when I’d felt said excitement had peaked, we headed down to the Medway Festival of Steam.  Honestly.  There were some interesting steam powered contraptions lumbering around, but not really my cup of tea.  It was down at the rivers edge, which gave me a chance to play with some really long exposures and shoot these boats through a bit of welders glass.

You’ll find a few more images from the day here.  There are also images from the other photographers on the POTN site here.

After several screw-ups I managed to create a working orb tool in no small part thanks to the tutorial here.  I made one modification to that design in that I added in the ability to swap out different coloured lights from the base unit.  I’ll post some photos and a bit of a run down/tutorial on exactly what I did later this week.

Anyways, I hopped on the bus out to St. Paul’s on Saturday night and slowly wandered back home taking photos along the way.  My mate Sylvester turned up part way through and helped out with a couple of shots which I couldn’t have done without said assistance, so cheers mate!

As usual, there are a few more in the gallery.

Despite the rain, several hardy POTN members (plus a few guests) made the trek to the Gherkin this past Saturday evening.  The initial plan was just to take a few well intentioned shots of the city; architectural photos of some interesting land marks or bizarre/unique designs.  I had brought some of my lighting gear with the intention of trying a few things out, but quickly learned I hadn’t planned well enough (for uninteresting reasons I won’t bore you with here).

Fortunately, Swaffs was on the ball and had a well working string of Christmas lights that were ideal for what I wanted to try out.  In fact, he had brought it along for the very same reason.  Orbing.

If you’re not familiar with these types of shots, there’s a fairly big assortment of them on Flickr.  There’s a group discussion of orbing here, and Rich was kind enough to make a video of me making one of the orbs here to demystify the process even further.

There’s one or two more orb images in the gallery, plus a few more non-orb images like these two of the Gherkin and Leadenhall Market.