Not a great photograph, but I did my best from my position on the floor & with no flash. Click the one beneath for a larger version (1920 pixels wide), email me if you want an even bigger version for some reason (full version is 8600 pixels wide).

The UK Garrison hardly count as ‘cosplay’ but hey,  thought I’d post these too.

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Could really have done with a decent flash that day, old Pentax one is rather limiting with no tilt/swivel at all.

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Obviously this wasn’t taken recently, even in Scotland it doesn’t tend to snow in late July!

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!

Went for a jaunt along the coastal path out past Albany Park, but didn’t really get very far as I spent all the remaining sunlight shooting these nice little pink flowers on the other side of the fence. Google-fu tells me they are silene dioica or red campion.

I tried taking some panoramas of the seafront too, but nothing really came out.

Was using my new (secondhand) Tenba tripod for these. Surprisingly irritating shooting with such a shallow depth of field when the breeze causes the subject to move in & out of focus all the time!

Apologies for the lack of updates as of late, University is keeping me exceedingly busy! I’ve been taking a fair few photos, but simply haven’t had the time to post-process & upload anything. The above is a quick crop of something I took today on the way to the lab to print more revision materials, think of it as a sneak peek of stuff to come ;)

A quick shot of the Pearl 2000 lighting desk I use in the Union during Bops, etc.

New Sigma has some ridiculous bokeh when shot wide open at it’s minimum focussing distance! Is taking photos of my revision counted as procrastination?

I never did a post when I got my new dSLR, but today I took delivery of a new lens so I figured it was worth showing you what I shoot with. This here is my Pentax K20D with the Pentax D-BG2 & my brand new Sigma 28mm F1.8 EX DG Aspherical Macro (quite a mouthful I know). I wanted a ’standard’ fast prime like the 50mm f1.7 is on 35mm bodies, but on the K20d with its APS-C sensor the crop/zoom turns it into a 75mm equivalent, which is too long for a standard walkaround lens. The 28mm works out as 43mm, which is just about perfect :)

Don’t really have any time to test it out though, because it’s slap bang in the middle of revision/exam season here. But after exams I’ve got a full 20(!) days before semester 2 teaching starts, so hopefully there will be lots of time to play. From what little I’ve used it, it seems to focus perfectly without the reported front/back focus issues that have supposedly plagued the newer HSM Sigmas (this older model uses the screw focus) & the minimum focussing distance of 20cm is rubbish – the thing focusses so close you can almost have the hood touching the subject!