There was a nice view from the bottom of my road last night. I snapped this shot with my Casio Z3 en route to the pub having played golf with Jim, Fletch and Tim.
Magna Steel Works
The car is back from the garage, so I took a quick trip out to Magna this afternoon. Photos here
Flickr coincidence
No new photos today, so here's a tale of coincidence from Flickr instead.
Crookes Valley Park
It was a much more rewarding day with my camera today. I spent a couple of hours in Crookes Valley Park. Lots to photograph there; ducks, and the dereliction, and graffiti of Dam House.
I've also experimented a bit, some of the photos I've linked to in this post and the one below have been de-saturated in Photoshop and then had the colour re-added selectiveley. This can help highlight certain elements in the image, or just improve the overall tone.
Another thing I tried was this impressionistic shot of Dam House by shooting the reflection and then rotating the image 180 degreed in Photoshop.
Damp Rivelin
What with one thing and another (one being lazyness, the other being extreme lazyness) I've not done any photography this last week. However, I'm on holiday right now so hope to get out and about a bit. I'm limited to places within walking distance though, as my car is the garage having its yearly checkup and jabs. The weather really sucks right now. Really sucks. Really sucky sucking weather. and it is going to be like this all week apparantly, which, sucks. So I switched my camera to all weather mode (i.e. tied a clear plastic bag around it with an elastic band) and trecked off down into the Rivelin Valley.
I found one vagually interesting spot. This bridge was sufficiently small, and my umbrella sufficiently big enough to be able to construct a make shift tent under which to work...
From there I shot the Rivelin snaking its way down the valley...
I also shot the swamp on the other side, but Flickr has over compessed the result, and I can't really be bothered to upload another, sorry.
Burbage Brook - Longshaw Estate
When I go up yesterday there was a clear blue sky, so I got in my car and pointed it in the direction of Monsal head in the White Peak, an attractive area of the Peaks punctuated by the Monsal Viaduct. However, clear blue sudddenly turned to solid grey with barely any warning, so I decided to stick closer to home and headed to the Longshaw Estate instead.
It's really the wrong time of year for this patch of the Burbage Brook, but I managed a couple of shots. In doing so, I have discovered a defect in my polarising filter. Right in the middle of the shot is an area of dark blue discolouration. Buggeration. That's what you get when you buy "cheap" filters I guess.
Beauchief Golf
Had a round of golf at Beauchief yesterday with Nick and Tim. Sadly had to cut it short to 16 holes due to failing light (and ability). I played like a retard of course, but it was fun none the less.
I'm a commie
You may have seen this logo next to my photos on Flickr...
This is a link to my Creative Commons license that tells you that you are free to do whatever you want with my photos so long as you attribute the work to me where applicable, and that your usage is non-commercial. I also state that high res version are freely available on request.
So, I'm giving my "intellectual property" away for free. That's fair enough isn't it? Well not according to Bill Gates, to him free content advocates like Creative Commons are some kind of modern day communist...
"There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
Imagine being so depraved that the only possible reward you can see in life is money. Imagine being so devoid of a soul that art is nothing to you but a means to profit. People like Gates are the pathetic children of turbo capitalism. Now, I strongly believe that capitalism is the fairest economic system man has yet come up with, but people like Gates are so determined to push the system to extremes that it is being warped to benefit the few, and not the many. It's like a kind of stealth fascism where what we believe and what we buy and how we think is dictated by a small band of conglomerated corporations rather than a centralised government, which rely on "talking points" to try and sway popular opinion.
Gates can suck my balls.
/end rant
Bring in the Clones
The thing is, I'm really incredibly lazy, so I have had to clone myself in order to get things done. There's the me that has a job "in computers", the me that takes photos (not pictured, obviously), the me that likes to go running. All I have to do is make tea occasionally to keep everyme happy. More of mes are planned over the coming year.
Ladybower & Rivelin Valley
The was just enough sun around today to convince me to head on down to the Ladybower Reservoir and try and get some landscape shots in. Ladybower can be a deceptively hard place to shoot. The huge volumes of water and slithers of land are attractive enough to the naked eye, but not so much to the camera lens. So you have to work hard and walk a long way to find a decent spot to compose a shot. Today, my heart wasn't in it. I was being buffeted about by a very cold and very very strong wind. Plus, the sun spent 99% of the time behind cloud, meaning that once I'd composed a shot, I'd have to wait ten minutes for the right light to break through.
So it wasn't long before I decided to get in my car and head home, though I did stop off and get some shots in the Rivelin Valley en route...
Roche Abbey
One of today's offerings to the Flickr god - Roche Abbey - taken last year some time. Sadly the actual ruins are roped off, so the photographic options were fewer than I'd hoped for. Still a nice location though.
I didn't go to London today
I was supposed to be spending the day in London today taking photos, but was struck down by my third bad headache of the week instead. I started to give up caffeine on New Year's Day which hasn't helped, but it will be worth it in the long run. I decided to cut down on the stuff because it does me more harm than good, and I'd also become addicted to green and herbal teas which have little or no caffeine and so I though I may as well go the whole hog. (Nick & Rach - I can heartily recommend Dr Stuart's "Detox" tea).
So in the absence of any fresh photos taken in London, here's one I took a couple of years ago...
Flickr
I'm loving Flickr. I can't believe it has taken me this long to start using it. I've spent the best part of this afternoon sifting through photos to upload to it, and it's all so quick and easy to use, and free. Plus, by upgrading to a pro account (around £20 a year), you can upload up to 1 gig of photos a month, with unlimited download bandwidth. Plus there's the whole auto post to Blogger thing, which I used to post the picture of Tim playing golf below.
One of the nicest things is the way you categorise your photos with keywords. This means it is easy to find one of your own photos from the keywords, and you can do things like create slide shows of anyone's public photos by searching through the catalogue of tags.
I've barely touched the surface, but would recommed this to anyone that has pictures to publish on the web, even if you have your own web space.
Here's one of the photos I've uploaded today, taken last spring at Dale Dyke Reservoir...
Boxing Day Golf
I had a cracking round of golf on Boxing Day morning. Here's a
shot of Tim negotiating the third hole.
Mini Blog
I come across a number of interesting, fun, clever, stupid links on my travels around the internet, but can never be arsed to blog them as it's too much effort. However, Friend Feed has aleviated nearly all of that hassle. So, subscribe to this feed and you'll get all the links that I think worthy of your attention. It will be just like old times, when this blog was nothing but a repository of links to other sites. Anything else I post on the internet, like new photos will also show up in the feed.
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Link Blog
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Ken Lee...
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