One of the more unusual events to take place in the Union, amateur boxing has taken place in the Union once a year for a few years now. Despite >24kW of light from above (we rigged 24x 1kW CP62’s as well as some other lamps, all directly above the ring so that the fighters wouldn’t be competing with glare or shadows) I still had to shoot at 3200 with the 135mm wide open at f2.8 to stand any chance of getting sharp images. As such, most of the shots suffer from nasty blue/purple fringing, which could probably be removed if any of them were actually worth further working on!

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Some quick photomerges from Celticsoc’s 2010 trip to Pitlochry. I haven’t bothered altering the levels on any of the individual photos before the merges, as I wanted to try & get them up quickly. (Edit: 6 months is quickly, right?) Click for bigger versions. The one above was actually from the 2009 trip, but I don’t have an entry for that so I thought I’d put it here too – scroll down to the bottom to see the 2010 version, though the weather wasn’t so good for that particular shot.

Walking the longer route from Moulin back to Pitlochry.

In stark contrast to last year, there was ice all about.

Down by the loch. The branches at the top sort of ruined this one, but I didn’t notice at the time. Fairly noticable chromatic aberration of the branches against the sky, but I probably had the apeture set to auto instead of stopping down like a sensible person. Possibly a candidate for content-aware fill.

Don’t think we went past this bit last year. Still ice floating out on the loch in places.

Looking back from the dam. Took one looking the other way toward Ben Y Vrackie last year that I’ll dig up some time.

This year’s version of the photo at the top of the page. The light wasn’t quite as nice this year, but I couldn’t really control that!

Totally only 8 months late. Turned out you had to have a pass to get into the quad itself for taking photographs, so I resorted to taking photos of people as they went in & came out. The ones on the way in were all taken with the SMC Pentax M 50mm f1.7 (~77mm equivalent) whilst when they were coming out I was stuck behind the crowd so stood on top of a planter with the Mitsuki 135mm f2.8 (~208mm equivalent). Vertical grip came in so handy, my arms would’ve been dropping off if I didn’t have it!

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This is going right back to October ‘09, literally days after I’d taken delivery of the K20D. All of these were shot on the 18-55mm kit lens whilst trying to get to know the camera.

The Reading Party is an excuse for the entire junior honors year group to go to a lovely old 18-bedroom house on the bank of the river North Esk, to give presentations & drink wine. Lots of wine.

The house sits in 190 acres of beautiful woodland, but unfortunately for us it rained for the entirety of the second day, when we had the afternoon to ourselves & could otherwise have had a nice walk.

Nothing of any particular photographic merit in here, just really shapshots with copious application of the rule-of-thirds when cropping.

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Trying to get bokeh & retain subject sharpness with the kit lens…

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Gorgeous interior decor in most of the house.

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The taps in this bathroom were particularly nice.

I would quite happily have taken some of these home, if they hadn’t been attached quite so firmly…

This is going to be a long post, so apologies for loading times.

12th – 20th February 2010 saw Rag (Raising & Giving) Week return for another highly successful year & amongst the events this year was St Andrews’ very own version of Britain’s Got Talent. Acts ranged from singer-songwriters to dance groups, bands, beat boxers & even a magician. There was a seated audience, so I couldn’t get up close to the stage with a fast prime, so instead I sat to the side with a 135mm f2.8 & turned the sensitivity up a bit.

Singer songwriter to kick the night off.

This is the second time there has been a harpist & I’ve been on the wrong side to get a good photo!

If the competition was judged on trousers, these guys definitely would’ve won.

Some dancing to mix things up.

One of 2 acts that a certain Luke Hodgman performed in.

The magician was rather impressive.

He produced some twenty odd umbrellas from somewhere.

And covered the stage in confetti!

A rather well-practiced band up next.

The fancy-pants band back again, as their microphones weren’t working properly the first time round.

Drum kit abuse at its best.

This guy had one seriously impressive voice.

Scotland’s under 18 beat box champion.

Finally, the Rocksoc band!

Sash doing what he does best.

Then busting out a solo.

Some American rapper who needs to buy a belt.

And his beat box accompaniment.

This guy was certainly brave.

And the audience loved it!

I think these guys were the overall winners, but can’t remember for definite.

Rather cheerful looking pianist/singer.

One last acoustic cover to finish the night.

These are from way back around Halloween, I went to crew the Halloween Bop in Venue 1 & thought I’d try & get some nice light trails from the moving lights.

These were all shot with the kit lens, hand-held with ~2 second exposures so I’m quite surprised any of them came out at all.

Definitely going to take a tripod one day & attempt this properly, maybe leave the body on interval shooting or something.

The venue doesn’t always have the scary face hanging down the back, it was just a Halloween thing.

All of these lights are controlled from the Pearl 2000 you saw in yesterday’s post.

I wanted to try & catch some of the beams in the air with the haze, but because the kit lens is quite slow (3.5-5.6) I had to crank the sensitivity up to 3200. Haven’t tried putting them through Noise Ninja yet, need to find a way to integrate it into Lightroom because opening the image in Photoshop just to use Noise Ninja is a bit long-winded.

U2 Rattle and Hum anybody?

(Expect a proper update about my recently aquired new equipment sometime soon, but want to get this & a few others out the way first otherwise I’ll never get them done!)

Went along to Musfund’s Sunday night event last week, Handmade Music, with the Pentax K20D+D-BG2 & the 50mm f1.7 M. The vertical grip makes portrait shots an awful lot easier, but the manual focusing was a bit hit & miss. Much harder to focus without a split image & because I was shooting wide open at f1.7 with very shallow depth of field I ended up with a lot of blurry shots as the performers moved back & forth.

Most of these were shot with a sensitivity of 800, but I played about a bit & the one beneath was done at 3200 & then put through Noise Ninja. Didn’t really make much of a difference as the focus was still out, but it altered the white balance somewhat.

A bit easier to focus when they were sitting down & not stepping back from the microphone all the time!

Framed this completely wrong with the lighting & the focus assist got confused, lockeding on to the piano in the foreground rather than the performer, but it would be rude to put up a picutre of all the others & omit this guy!

Still getting used to this whole white balance thing, never had that to tweak with film!