Beware The Eyes of March

And upon that bad pun, we were working on photographing and manipulating eyes.

 

This image was based around the smudge stick in Photoshop.

New Camera pt2

Another couple of shots with the Canon Ixus 950 IS. After nipping up to Tescos to get a bigger SD card (ooh, play.com doing large giggage for low poundage), I stopped at the Beach Boulevard for some low light shots.

Tower blocks. F/2.8, ISO 250, 1/8seconds, hand-held.

The Beach Boulevard (maplink) - I had to wait a few minutes until I could get an 'empty' shot. F/2.8, ISO 250, 1/8seconds, hand-held.

The only image manipulation that I've done with the images has been the cropping. Everything else is straight from the camera. I've using the rule-of-thirds grid on the LCD monitor. Photos set to 'superfine' JPG quality, and 3264x2448 pixels. Image size varies from 1mb to 4mb, depending on content.

New Camera

I won a competition at work for my use of the VLE and got a digital camera as a prize. It was presented by the Principal, and wasn't just "a digital camera", but a top of the range Canon Ixus 950 IS. Woo hoo. At the end of the day I took a few shots from the top of the Tower Block and then went home to read the manual.

View of the car park above John Lewis' [f/2.8, ISO 80, 6mm], and the same shot with the full zoom on, cropped to show detail [f/5.5, ISO 200, 23mm].

View westward toward North Anderson Drive. I set the scene to beach to play around with the sunlight. I like the softening effect.

Back at base, I checked my outstanding filing. Some of the students may recognise the bees from their "bee story" project with Susan.

Expect more shots during the Easter break. Possibly pushing the image stabilisation to extremes dealing with windy days on hills and low light shots indoors and outdoors.

Wendy Sutherland

Strange coincidence. I was at Dyce airport last Friday, waiting to fly to the Outdoors Show. They had some art on display. I was drawn to the work of one artist. I recognised the work when I  caught up with last week's "Landward" BBC programme. Her name is Wendy Sutherland. Her site is here, and there's a link to the other artists on display at the airport, and here's the link to the BBC page about the outdoor artists featured in the series.

Having walked in rain, mist and low cloud, there is always something to see, hear and feel.

RIP Anthony Minghella

News of the release of the "Nr 1 Ladies Detective Agency" has been hit by the sudden death of director Anthony Minghella today. (news)

I am sure that his final work, due to screen this Easter, will be a tribute to him.

School Report Day

The BBC is at the college using our Multimedia Centre to produce some newsfeeds as past of their School Report Day. Over 40 Aberdeen pupils are here to create news broadcasts that will be shown live across the UK - in this day and age, it's probably available worldwide.

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Great advice from the BBC on their website, for example audio recording tips. The main site is here.

SXSW Interactive Festival

The South by Southwest festivals end today. Along with the music and film festival, there is the festival of interactivity. The blurb on the website is enticing, and it's the sort of event that I'd love to get to just to soak up the atmosphere and see what I could take back to work:

Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

But it isn't in Dumfries, so I'll have to make do with the media from the Texas event. At least there should be lots of interactive media to interact with.

http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/

As a fan of spider-diagrams, I loved the idea of a graphic artist interpreting Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's keynote speech.