Slideshows

Here's something worth trying.. Picassa Slideshows..All you need is a Picassa Album (they're free at picasa.google.com). Then add some photos to a slideshow and you'll get a bit of code to publish to your website or blog. This took me just 5 minutes to create.

Switching Over

If some of you have seen a glitch in the availability of this blog and my website over the past few days, I do apologise, the hosting for the site has been moved. Hopefully everything has settled down now and normal service can be resumed. Thanks for your patience. Andy

Maxwell's Beer

Meet Maxwell.

One day an abandoned rescue cat living in a cage, the next, living in luxury with us.

Updated website

I have been playing around with an update for far too long and have decided that I just need to go for it, so here's a few screen shots and a link to my new photography website..

Home Page

Gallery

Be Prepared!

If there's a simple starting piece of advice I can give anyone, it's 'be prepared'.

If you're off on an assignment, this'll mean ensuring you have sufficient batteries, memory cards/film, lenses, tripod, backdrops, flash, lights, reflectors, white card etc etc to cover all eventualities on your shoot.

Only once have I rushed out the door without checking and, on site, realised I had a camera with no memory cards. Never has it happened since.

The other part of being prepared is always having a camera to hand. How many times have you seen something that you wished you could photograph? It's less of a problem these days with camera phones but it takes nothing to slip a compact into you briefcase/handbag so that you always have the opportunity to hand - just don't forget to make sure the batteries are charged and the memory card empty!

Change Your Viewpoint

Changing your viewpoint is one of the easiest ways of adding extra interest to your photographs.

You could try getting down low, getting up high, standing on your head, turning on your side experimenting with angles. Just about anything goes. The more common the subject, the more interest and curiosity will be generated by changing your viewpoint...

Snow Photography

Maybe slightly too late for this season's ski-iers but worthwhile noting all the same.

Photographing snow scenes can play havoc with your built-in meters. This is because metering systems 'expect' to see a certain white/grey balance in an average picture. Snow scenes massively distort this balance resulting in images that appear 'grey' compared to the actual scene.

The reasons for this are pretty technical and are due to the fact that metering systems optimise scenes for around 17% grey.

The solution is to over-expose your image by a stop or two. Sounds a bit backwards but it's the correct thing to do. Over exposing your snow scene will ensure that the snow appears white as it should do.



If you have an aim and fire camera, many modern oe have a scene mode that you can set to 'snow' that will do the work for you. If you have a digital SLR (DSLR) you can either set the ssene mode to 'snow' or just manually override the meter radings. Personally, I prefer the manual approach as you can play around with different settings and check the results.