I was first to post my B picture - because I wasn’t supposed to yet. Still, go check it out. I think it’s quite pretty.

You can check the first shots here. Hurry up, you slackers! I wanna see more!

As Crumpet has more free time than I do (because she’s lazy), you should go to her blog post and sign up for the astounding Alphabet Shoot competition!

Stay tuned to the blog tomorrow to get involved in a competition that Crumpet and I will be running! You’ll need a camera and an imagination…

There are advantages to living under a flightpath with a big-arsed zoom lens.

One day I’ll have decent clouds to shoot against, too.

I’ve been seeing plenty of HDR pics on Flickr, and hearing about them on podcasts, so today I downloaded the demo of Photomatix Pro and churned out the following test shot:

I finally finished Headspace for ya, matey.

And for everybody else, I have other songs very close to completion… pester me to finish ‘Pockets’ if you don’t see it in a week or so!

My 24-105mm lens has image stabilisation, but it doesn’t have the very funky Mode 2 stabilisation, which allows you to do shots like this one I took with my new 100-400mm:

Image stabilisation uses tiny gyroscopes within the lens to detect movement and compensate for it, allowing you to take shots with a much slower shutter speed than you normally could. This might allow you to shoot from a moving vehicle or on a bridge that has people walking on it and shaking your tripod. Or, it could allow you to hand-hold with set a very slow shutter speed such as 1/50sec; this is virtually impossible on all but the shortest lenses.

What Mode 2 does is turn off one of the gyroscopes, so the lens still compensates for up/down motion, but ignores side-to-side movement, allowing you to pan with an object and blur the background. It’s extremely fun to do!

Introducing the last lens we’ll need (okay, the last that I wanted) to shoot in the Northern Territory.

And here’s one of the better shots I took with it today in the spare 15 minutes I found:

The ‘free’ (read: so cheap that Photobuff threw it in for free) UV filter that came with the lens is doing weird things to the bokeh - at least, that’s what has happened to others using cheap filters on this lens. I should have time to test my theory tomorrow in the backyard. The UV filter on my 24-105mm lens cost about three times the cost of the freebie and hasn’t given me any problems, so I’ll have to buy another of similar quality if it works on the 100-400mm.

edit: No bokeh problems with the quality UV filter! The cheap tripod, however…

Thanks to the ever-excellent Cartoon Brew for this Purple and Brown link. It’s something new from Aardman, and I like it. It reminds me of the old Red and Blue claymation videos, except with one of my silly voices over the top of it…