Church black and white

 Some black and white conversions of the church pics done in Topaz black and white effects.  Topaz has a sort of clarity slider that bumps up the contrast/detail a bit.

Shot on a Canon 5d3 and 50mm 1.4 Canon lens. (as were all the pics from yesterday)

Churchyard

 I was after a particular image yesterday for a fun competition.  Got all these.  Canon 5d3 and Canon 50mm 1.4

The dog on the hat!

 

 You may have seen the film the cat in the hat?  But now you can see for free the dog on the hat.  Someone who must remain nameless for reasons of national security (and they put a cross for no publicity) left their summer hat on the arm of the sofa.... Where Mia the pug likes to lay down, as a protest Mia showed her opinion of objects left in "her" space.

 

 

A few pics from yesterday

 

 A bit of a selection of pics from yesterday..  Canon 7d.

 

 

Flower, wood and black and white

 

 A selection of pics taken  over the last week.  All shot on the Lumix TZ80 compact (my everyday carry camera)  The black and white is shot in camera, the Lumix has several BW options and I find this one very nice for my style, and it saves doing the conversion in photoshop later.

 

Aviation news.

 

Looking at the safety reports, I'm seening a trend.  The number of aircraft suffering pressurization problems seems higher than usual.  Although this hasnt caused any recent accidents, it's still a concern.

The second trend seems to be with Airbuses having smoke or the smell of buring in the cabin.  Again this hasnt caused any serious problems (and it does happen to many aircraft types) it's always a bit of a worry.  

A fire on board  an aircraft is a seriously big problem.  Now to be fair the smell of burning can be caused by lots of things, often just hot air from the engine.  A real fire on the other hand tends to lead to bad things.

The problem with an aircraft fire is the limited fire fighting supplies, the difficulty in accessing parts of the aircraft in flight, and the effects of fire and smoke on controls and passengers.  The answer is to land ASAP. 

This is fine if your over a large country with lots of airports, a tad trickier if your over Africa or the ocean.  Even the UK only really has a few airports that a large aircraft could land at.  And time is the critical factor.

A few minutes has made the difference between life and death.

Now thats not to say Airbusses are less safe than any other aircraft, they actually have a very good safety record, and to be fair none of the recent events has actually been a fire.  A far bigger risk is a passengers battery bank going bang, this happens more often than you might think.

Airlines have developed systems for dealing for this issue though, so while it's stilla risk, it's not as big a risk as it used to be.

Gap in posts.

 

 Sorry for the lack of pics over the last few days, I'm not feeling that great and my mobility is limited, the weathers also been a bit crap.

 My morning cocktail of tablets.   Yes I do rattle, mind that might be the screws loose in my head as well....

 

Sofa, so good.

 I find the strangest things on my travels, spotted this a few days ago, shot on my phone.

Now try sneaking out while I have a nap!

 

 Dogs can be so funny on times.

 

 

The Grand Tour to continue....

 

 I'm hearing Amazon are planning a new series of the Grand Tour....  This time without Clarkson Hammond and May.

 It seems the cunning plan is the Grand Tour got huge viewing figures.   Clarkson Hammond and May have now finished, we'll make more using YouTubers (I kid you not) and we'll make another ton of lovely cash....

 Brilliant plan what could go wrong ?  Well, frankly the whole thing really.  You see what most people except Amazon bosses know is we the public, are not tuning in to watch the Grand Tour, we are tuning in to watch CLARKSON, HAMMOND and MAY.  It them and their antics and the interaction between them that attracted viewers in the first place.  Not a poxy car show.

 The BBC thought the same with Top Gear,  Oh wow, the show is SO good, we'll carry on, the viewers will still watch....  Errrr, No! Viewing figures fell off a cliff with new presenters, the beeb shuffled presenters around trying to find a match, but it's hopeless.

 Which bit of people Watching Clarkson, Hammond and May do they not understand?  Why is Clarksons farm popular?  Is it because it has tractors and sheep?  No, it's bloody Clarkson you halfwits.  Without him Clarksons Farm is countryfile, which was watched... wait for it... mostly by farmers, and a few watching for the farming weather forecast.

 Yes farmers watched Clarksons farm, but so did MILLIONS of us.  We didnt watch to see the latest pig breading shed, or the newest rotarvator for the massy Fergusun 500.  We watched to see Jeremy making a dogs breakfast of bailing hay or whatever.  It was funny, it was entertaining.

 Thats the thing about the Grand Tour, it wasnt just a car show, it was more about the presenters, than the cars.  Thats why replacing the presenters will flop.

 So a free top tip Amazon.  Either scrap the whole idea and save your money, or, cough up for the real deal.  Get C H and M to make a Christmas special for a few years.

Off camera flash, PITA!

 

 Truth be told I dont use off camera flash that often (partly because it's a bitch)  The idea of "OCF" is the flashgun is not on top of the camera, but maybe off to one side. Then the camera triggers the flash by remote control for better lighting, in theory.

 The problem is setting it up.  Many cameras have a built in trigger system, and many camera brand flashes have the receiver built in, so it should be easy, but it's not.

 The biggest problem is the options for setting them up are often hidden in the menus, not is it intuitive usually, indeed some makers go out of their way to make it harder (cough Canon cough) At least compared to Nikons much simpler system.

 That leaves us photographers with more or less three options.  One is figure out the system for your make and model camera, this sometimes requires the cameras built in flash to fire too. And is usually different from model to model.

 Two is to use a simple cheap trigger system from Amazon or Ebay, these have two parts to them, a small transmitter that goes on the cameras hot shoe, and a small receiver that you put the falsh gun on.  This works in manual flash only (mostly) and to alter any flash setting you have to go to the flash gun and change the power on it.

 The third option uses the same idea as above, but with a dedicated trigger thans designed to work with the flash guns built in receivers (note not all flahses have this) in most cases this offers the option to change the flash power from the camera trigger, and in some cases offers ETTL flash as well.

 Personally I gave up on using Canons own system years ago.  So for the most part I used the second option of cheap simple triggers and receivers, and it's worked a treat when I've needed it.

 But, I also had a proper trigger system and the dedicated flashes for it, so yesterday, I sat down and took the time to set it all up.  You see to be able to change the flash power from the camera each flash has to have a different code number, or group, so it knows which one your changing.

 Thats the time consuming part. Setting up two different triggers for eight different flashes was a PITA!.  The trigger is the easy part, the hard part is setting each flash to a different group, I was luch to have four flashes the same model, so one you've done the first one you know how.

 The other flashes however are different newer models, and is two case stupid complicated, to add insult to injury, one of those is a newer model of the easy ones.  But instead of using the same system, they made it a hundred times harder.

 That said one you have them all programed, all you have to do when you need OCF is to bung the transmitter on the camera and turn the flash to receiver mode, you dont have to program them every time, thank fuck!

Water droplets.

 

 Got these yesterday.  Been fairly busy, between trying to sort my kitchen out, and finally sorting out my off camera flash set-up, I've not had time to take many photos.

 

White rose and hedge

 

 The hedge is for a local competition on hedgerows.  Struggled a bit finding something I liked.  This is the best I could find if I'm honest.. not helped by hanging around waiting for builders and now crap weather.

All shot on the Panasonic TZ80 compact.  The black and white is done in camera on the mono option in the camera menu (theres several) I think it does a nice BW as is.

 

 

Last of this batch of food pictures

 

Food pics again.

 

 Yes more food images from the weekend.  Canon 5d4 and Sigma 24-105mm art lens

 

 

Oh God I've got builders again!

 

 Yes I've got the dreaded buildres agin this week, last time it was the kitchen they destroyed, shorted out the electric and caused a leak, and wrecked my fridge and cooker, and left a kitchen wall cabinet on the floor.

 This week they are coming to paint the celing and fix the roof (God help me) It'll be like watching Laurel and Hardy move that piano up steps, or the three stooges.  Mind thats hardly fair, Mo Larry and Curly had talent!.....   

More food pics

 

These are from a different shoot.

 

 

Food pics.

 

 Some food pictures from this week.

 

 

ISO. How high is too high?

 

 Modern cameras have improved over their older brothers by a fair margin.  The old Kodak digital I used many moons ago was brilliant at 100 iso in the studio.  Bloody awful at 400 iso.  Later cameras were fine at 800 iso or 1600 iso, but the were starting to get noisy, and you couldnt go much higher.

 Last night mucking about I cranked up the iso on my Canon 5d4 for some band shots (well a duo really)  Now truth be told I didnt need to go near the iso I used.  I had three flashguns and video lights, and much faster lens I could have used.

 I could have even opened up the lens I was using from F7,1 to F2.8.  But it was the high iso I was testing.  So heres the result, horrible colured lighting, and fairly dark.  ISO 30.000.  No thats not 3200, it's 30.000.  Both cropped too.