Not really sure whether this one works or not.

Had a pile of change laying around, so thought I’d point the camera at it.

This one is called “Looking After The Pennies”

I saw this boat and strong reflection the other day when I was walking down to the Car Hire firm to pick up a car.

When I got home today, the sun was out, so I thought that I would go and shoot todays photograph.

Image has been cropped to Panoramic format and contrast and saturation tweaked when processing the raw file.

Had a fantastic day.  It got off to a shaky start as the birds didn’t want to do what the falconers wanted, but they eventually settled down and I got some good shots.

The in-flight shots are a bit shaky, but not too bad considering that it was my first attempt at taking shots of birds flying.  I’m much happier with my portrait shots though.

The album can be found below.

[jalbum_album_short:/Albums/hawk_conservancy/album,4]

I’ve had a great day today. I had the day off work to go to a photography day at the Hawk Conservancy Trust at Weyhill just outside of Andover.

I struggled a bit with the birds in flight, but when I got home found that the images were sharper than I though they were going to be, so I’m quite pleased.

I managed to get some really nice portraits of some of the birds, and this tawny owl was one of my favourites.

I highly recommend the photography days here, as you get access to the site which the public do not enjoy, and the falconers are extremely helpful in positioning the birds so that they look natural.

I had decided what I was going to post as todays photo whilst still at work, and nipped out before the shops closed to get the dice and green felt.

It proved slightly harder than I thought, but after much perserverence got an image that I was happy with.

This was taken using a desk lamp as secondary illumination and a speedlite 430ex on second curtain sync to freeze the dice near the end of their path. Shutter speed was 1/6s and aperture set at f16 to try and get the dice sharp.

Unlike last night, I had a firm idea of what I wanted to post as my image for today.

The photo was taken by dropping blue food colouring into a flat sided Gold Blend coffee jar which had white sheets of A4 paper as a backdrop.

My flash was aimed at the paper with its diffuser attached, and the resulting image was rotated by 180 degrees.

I cloned out a load of unwanted mess before tweaking the levels in Photoshop to turn the background near white instead of the muddy grey that it started out as.

Today, I was struggling for inspiration after I completely failed to get a sharp close-up image of my eye.

I tried a self portrait in the mirror with was also a failure before I tried aiming the camera at a few CD albums that were askew on the shelf.

The image is not brilliant, but to quote Monty Python “I’ve had worse”.

As I haven’t been out with the camera too much lately, I’ve decided to force myself to get out and take a photo a day for the next month starting today.

Due to personal circumstances, I’m not that motivated, but I hope that this will keep my mind off things for a while at least.

I decided to keep today’s photo seasonal by cutting some of the horribly invasive hops from the bottom of the garden.

These were photographed using a homemade snoot made of Funky Foam attached to the flashgun. This forms a narrow beam of light with a strongly defined edge, which resulted in the background being completely black even though the room was nowhere near dark.