It will, obviously, be a while before I have scans of the shots I took with the 166B (there's still some frames to be used on the film), but I have uploaded the photos I took with the 400D:
Sleaford - 2009-01-24
You'll note that they're all shot with the Lensbaby Muse. I've actually made a point of taking it off the camera now and putting it away for a while — it was starting to get a little too addictive. ;-)
So far, I'm still having fun with it and I'm very happy with the purchase. There's little doubt that it can be frustrating at times. Often shooting with it can be a bit hit-and-miss. But there's no question that it's a lot of fun and a very different approach to doing things. It also slows you down, which is no bad thing.
So, anyway, here's my Lensbaby Muse Test. All the shots were taken with the double glass optic and the f/4.0 aperture disk.
I've been on and off the idea for some time now but, last week, using some Christmas money that turned up after Christmas, I decided to treat myself to a Lensbaby Muse. After a bit of looking around I decided to order from Bristol Cameras (I'm happy to report that the whole process of ordering to delivery was fast and without any fuss or bother — I'd use them again).
So, here it is, in its little box:
A few weeks back I ran into Poladroid. The idea sounded like fun, and possibly even handy at times: take an image and make it look a little like (what most people think of as) a Polaroid. Sadly (for me), the software was only available for the Mac, but I did notice that a Windows version was coming soon (I run Windows and GNU/Linux here).
Checking today I noticed that the Windows version was finally available, so I had to have a quick play:
My friendly Scottish Landscape photographer mentioned to me the other day that he'd been having a play with Tumblr. As normally happens when one of us tries something out, the other has to go have a play too. So, in no time, I created my own Tumblr account.
I've decided to use it as somewhere to "showcase" some of my photographs. Think of it as a mini-blog of personal favourites.
The nice thing about messing with this is that it gave me another reason to make use of the ruby library I wrote a while back for querying my published photographs. Tumblr has a simple API for writing entries so it made sense to write a little command line tool that would post a photograph to the blog. All the command does is it takes the filename of a photograph on the command line, finds it amongst the collection of published photographs, and then publishes an entry for it using nothing more than this code:Net::HTTP.post_form( URI.parse( BASE_URL ),
{
"email" => EMAIL,
"password" => PASSWORD,
"type" => "photo",
"source" => image.jpeg_url,
"caption" => caption( image ),
"click-through-url" => image.url,
"tags" => image.tags.join( ',' ),
"generator" => "org.davep.tumblphoto"
} )
A little earlier on today I needed to pop to the shop. Despite the fact that it's a pretty dark and dank day I thought I'd quickly take the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II for a spin. I came back with the following shots:
Last Saturday the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II that I ordered a few days back arrived.
This evening I was processing some photographs I'd taken with my Canon EOS 400D earlier today and, while doing so, I noticed for the first time that it appeared to have a rather prominent red stuck pixel. I looked back through some of my earlier (although still pretty recent) photographs and could see it there too, although it did appear to be fainter.
Assuming that it was just "one of those things" (it's not like it's something that isn't easily fixed in Photoshop) I didn't think too much of it for a while but then I got curious and did a little bit of searching on Google. In doing so I found this page. Given that there was nothing to lose I decided to give it a go. Here's what I did:
Almost a year after I last went shopping for a lens I've gone shopping for another. That last time it was a choice between the Tamron AF 55-200mm f4.5-5.6 Di II LD and the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II and, in the end, the Tamron won (mainly because it extended my focal length range rather than double it up as the 50mm would have when compared to the 400D's kit lens). This time I've decided that the 50mm is just too nice a lens, at too good a price, to ignore.
Hopefully it'll turn up in the next couple of days and I'll be able to have a play and post some results.
With less than an hour's work (a lot less really, it took longer to set the colours than it did to sort out the code on my site) I had a social networking, rating and commenting system added to my site. The only minor issue that slowed me down a little was the fact that the rate/comment gadget, when set to "per page" scope, doesn't appear to take URL parameters into account when deciding that something is a "page" (in my case this meant that a comment left on one photograph was left on every photograph on my site). Because of that I had to switch to the ID scope system and add a little bit of PHP to generate a unique ID per page.
See here for my main photography membership page and here for an example of a page with the ability to rate and comment.
Last Saturday night I wandered out into the garden and had a sudden urge to do something with the light on our house wall. This is what happened:
Despite the very low light levels I managed to get some shots for a small set: November Walk.
I guess the main reason I really like this shot is that it reminds me so much of my photograph Communication.
I've just uploaded a new version of my RedBubble art manager application (this is v1.7.0.0). You can get it from here.
This release makes a change to the work promotion dialog that lets you specify where you want the promotion code to link to. Before it would only link to the normal view page for a work. Now, as an option, you can link directly to the purchase page for the work:
