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  • Richmond Park

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    Back in March Alison, her cousin Lucy and I got up at 4am to take four London buses and reach Richmond Park before sunrise. My excellent sense of orientation got us there at 6.30 or so, a few minutes after the sun kissed the horizon.
    It was good fun, albeit a bit cold. (Since lithium-ion batteries don’t like the cold very much, it’s a good idea to keep them warm and close to your body.) Richmond Park belongs to the royal family, and it’s a massive park (for my humble circumstances) in which deer can roam about freely. No fences between them and you. I remember that last time I went there with some photogs from DPChallenge we got a bit too close for the animal’s taste and one or two young bucks decided to attack us. No close encounters this time though.
    I was a bit annoyed at someone else however: we had sneaked up to the group which you can see in the first picture and stayed at a distance (70-200 lens on the long end with 2x multiplier and crop sensor = 640mm effective focal distance) so as not to disturb the animals. Halfway through the two bucks fighting some random guy just walked right up to them with his camcorder and scared them away. Well done.
    It was a really nice day in the end, and I didn’t fall into any of the lakes or rivers which is always a bonus.
    [Update:] Here are some photos which show what happened to me last time I went to Richmond – and why it’s a good idea to keep your distance. One by Alan Jager and one by Manic.

  • 180 Megapixel Westgate Panorama

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    At the end of February I lugged my camera and tripod up to the flagtower of Canterbury’s Westgate. The tower isn’t accessible to the public and it took a while to get permission to shoot from this wonderful vantage point, which offers one of the best views of the cathedral and the city centre. So I climbed the metal steps past an owl statuette that’s meant to scare away the pigeons and got my tripod set up next to the flagpole. It’s not hard to tell why Westgate’s highest tower isn’t open for the average Canterbury tourist: there’s only about half a metre of space on any side of the flagpole and the wall surrounding it wasn’t very high either.
    First off I took the above panorama looking south with the 70-200. It consists of 48 individual photos that were stitched together in PTgui. The resulting panorama had 180 Megapixel – with over 50’000 pixel length it was beyond the limitations of either JPEG or PSD files and I had to save it in Adobe’s large file format (PSB). The version above has been resized to just over 27000px wide.
    After that I got out my trusted Peleng 8mm Fisheye lens to create a 360/180° QTVR image looking north onto St Dunstan’s Road, which you can see below. These panoramas are taken in the same way as other panoramas, except that the camera makes a full 360° rotation looking down, then straight ahead, then up. Unfortunately I don’t (yet) have a QTVR panorama head in my camera bag, which is necessary to match the camera’s nodal point with the axis of rotation. That’s why the panorama below has some rather ugly glitches – have a look at the stairs, for instance.
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  • Fashion Shoot: Unique

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    For this week’s edition of inQuire’s fashion section we photographed clothes from Kent Union’s clothes outlet, Unique, situated on the University of Kent campus. Since the clothes are intrinsically linked to the student experience here at Kent campus itself seemed a suitable location for the shoot. We were lucky to have sunshine and tolerable temperatures for our outdoor shoot.
    In technical terms, one comes closer to the limitations of flash photography with these bright conditions though. I wanted to shoot with a wide open aperture, but if I wanted to use flash without moving into Canon’s HSS system, in which a good deal of flash power is lost, I had to stick to the 1/250th sync speed of my 40D. Solution: I popped a .9 ND filter onto my lens. That way I could shoot wide open without having to reduce the shutter speed beyond the x-sync.
    For some of the photos I also used a single reflector as a fill light source instead of flashes. Since we were shooting with more than one model, one of the others could easily hold the reflector for me.