As I mentioned yesterday I'm currently writing a review of the Tamron AF 11-18mm F/4.5-5.6 Di II LD Aspherical [IF] for Digital SLR User magazine so went up to Fleetwood this afternoon to try it out. It was a glorious afternoon - though rather cold and windy - and I got four shots that I'm happy with.

All the ones I'll be posting are partial HDR's, constructed with FDRTools. This one and tomorrow's were constructed from a three shot bracketed sequence, while the ones I'll be posting on Sunday and Monday were created from a single shot. In all four cases I've used the sky from the original shot (or one of the originals).

Of the four I think that the one I'll be posting on Monday is probably my favourite, followed by this one, then Sunday's, then tomorrow's - but I'm pretty happy with all of them.

Oh, and the only other thing I can tell you about them is that they were all shot with a 400D - which I've borrowed to use with the Tamron lens.

I would be willing to bet that Barcelona has more nice legs than any other city in the world. I may be wrong of course, but it definitely has more than its fair share :-)

I'm back in Barcelona again, for the 2008 Europe Photobloggers meetup which starts this evening. I travelled over yesterday, with Paul Hargreaves, and we took a trip to the Palau Nacional (the home of the National Museum of Catalan Art). I didn't get any particularly good shots, but do like this one – a shot of the waterfall in front of the building.

We have various photo-walks planned for the next couple of days so I should be able to get back to posting a bit more regularly.

I took part in the annual Fleetwood Wreck Trek today, a six mile walk over the sands of Morecambe Bay with guided visits to the Wyre Light (an abandoned lighthouse) and the site of Stella Marie wreckage on North Wharf Sands. When I got back I discovered that most of my shots of the lighthouse were terrible, which didn't surprise me as it was raining when we got there and the sky was dull and flat, but what did surprise me though is how much my legs ached - I obviously need to get off my bum a bit more often :-)

Anyway, my shots of what's left of the Stella Marie wreck were also pretty hopeless, but I did shoot a series of shots of this structure. As with most of my recent HDRs, this one was constructed from a seven shot sequence using Photomatix Pro.

I'll take another look of the shots I took of the Wyre Light, and the wreck, and will post something tomorrow if I can salvage any of them.

Despite the fact that yesterday was the longest day of the year the weather has been quite atrocious, and when we took the kids down to the sea-front this afternoon it was all we could do to stop them blowing away. Harmony (who's now five) just about managed to stay on her feet, but if I hadn't had hold of Finley he would have been blown over on several occasions.

As for this shot: it's a view you've probably seen before on chromasia, and while I'm normally quite happy to suffer for my art, today was not one for hanging about taking photographs :-)

I'm not going to say too much about this one as it was taken with a new lens that I haven't really had the chance to evaluate yet. Once I've used it a bit more thoroughly I'll post some more information, but for the time being at least you'll have to remain curious. What I will say is that it isn't an expensive lens, and certainly isn't the 85mm f/1.2 that I've been talking about recently.

Feel free to guess though ;-)

Anyway, new lens aside, I am happy with this one and would be interested to hear what you make of it, not least because it's quite different from a lot of the stuff I've been posting recently.

All the shots I've posted this week were from the Blackpool Pride 2008 festival, and all were shot on Blackpool's North Pier. This one, on the other hand, was taken from the North Pier, and as you can see, the beach was a lot quieter than the pier.

Update: following a couple of the comments below I re-evaluated the composition and decided that it would look better if the horizon wasn't placed in the centre of the frame. So, I've gone for a 16x9 crop this time instead of the original 2x1. If you're interested, the original crop is here:

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If you flick through the other shots I've taken of Blackpool's Central Pier you will see that this is a vantage point I've used quite often, and its one that I'll probably use again.

I thought it was about time for a change from all the HDR stuff so here's another one to add to the the beachcombing gallery.

I went out for a while this afternoon, but the weather was terrible and I hardly got any shots that I like. In fact, I only got this one – the rest are just grey cold shots of a grey cold landscape.

This one though, I like and, in case you're wondering, it is a straight photograph (with a bit of tweaking here and there).

As I'm putting up three shots from the Heat the Streets event that took place in Blackpool last night, and as tomorrow's will be called heat the streets #3, I guess this one should have been number two of the series, but I couldn't resist a different title for this one ;-)

And if you're interested, there's a slightly larger version of this image here:

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I doubt there are many more beautiful sights that the sun setting or rising over water but, as I'm almost totally non-functional in the mornings, I'm glad that I live on the west coast ;-)

By the way, this one looks a bit flat in Firefox (on a Mac), but much better in Safari - which correctly reads the colour profile of the image. Firefox, on the other hand, assumes a generic profile which hasn't done this image any favours.

Taking a good photograph is a strange business. Sometimes I can spend hours out on my own, concentrating on getting the best shots possible – and I'll come home with a series of disappointing images that never see the light of day. Yesterday, by comparison, I only went out for a short time, had to take most shots one-handed as I had Finley hanging from the other, and came back with five that I like (including yesterday's portrait of Fin). Of the remaining four, I like this one because it's a bit different, tomorrow's is Libby's favourite, the one after that is possibly the weakest of the four, and I'll post my favourite last (i.e. on Thursday).

As for this one, as you can see, the original is quite flat:

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Normally I try to avoid clipping the highlight or shadow details in an image, but in this instance I think the end result is a lot more interesting. As always, let me know what you think.

One of the things I enjoy the most about post-production is that it allows you to create interpretative photographs rather than literal ones; i.e. it provides an opportunity to explore different ways of looking at or representing the same 'facts'. For example, I've already posted two shots of this boat: the first one was an attempt to capture the drama of the scene, while yesterday's was more literal. Today's and tomorrow's however, take a slightly different approach; i.e. they are both attempts to offer a slightly more surreal view of the same scene. This one does so using colour, while tomorrow's (my favourite of this short series) is more to do with contrast.

For me though, the important thing is that I see all of them as real images, that all express some fragment of the 'truth' about the 'reality' of this stranded ferry.

Like a lot of my recent images, this was processed in LAB Color mode rather than RGB which, in this instance, I used to alter the colour balance. If you take a look at a version without this change you will see that the final image is quite different to the original:

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Well: brim-full of chocolates; rich food; good cheer and a rather annoying cold; it's time to head on out into 2008. So, if you've been waiting for me and Libby to answer your emails or post your books or calendars, we'll be putting our noses to the grindstone first thing tomorrow morning ;-)

Today though, we took the kids to the beach, and from left to right there's: Harmony watching Rhowan and Milly playing off in the distance; Libby armed with her Blackberry, digicam, beach buggy and Tabby; and Finley tearing off in a totally different direction to anyone else :-)

Although this may be a bit lacking in content for some of you I was quite pleased with the way it turned out. It was the last in a sequence of six shots, taken as the gull tracked from the bottom-right to the top-left of the frame.

On a totally different matter: if any of you can read Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish – and have a spare minute or three – I wondered if you'd mind taking a look at the following page:

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In the sidebar (to the right of the screen) there's a ‘translate our site’ box with a dropdown menu. The reason I've added this is that we get a fair amount of traffic from around the world and I thought it might be useful to offer an easy way to translate the content using Google's translation service. The only problem I have is that I have absolutely no understanding of any language other than English so can't evaluate the translations. Any feedback would be gratefully received, even if it is to tell me that I wasted my time because the translations aren't up to much.

This is the coastguard lookout station on Rossal Point near Fleetwood, and though I've never seen it manned, it does have an emergency telephone which you can just make out in this shot.

The post-processing for this one was quite dramatic, despite the rather under-stated end result, so I thought I'd put the original up too:

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As you can see, the major change is to the tone/colour of the image, but I also spent quite a lot of time working on balancing the foreground and the tower/sky areas of the image. Unusually, I reduced the contrast for the sky and tower which has given the image a more painterly feel than it would otherwise have had.

As always, I'd be interested to hear what you think of it.

I took this one when I was in Germany last month, and though it's fairly abstract I'm not going to be offering any prizes for guessing what it is.

So far I've posted some of the portraits I took during my trip to Germany, but over the next few days I thought I'd put up some landscapes. This one was taken about a mile north of Wiltingen, facing south towards a tight bend in the river Saar. As you can see, it was a beautiful location.

I don't have too much to say about this one other than that I enjoyed producing it. As always though, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

Update: my apologies for not updating today (2nd October). I'll get something up tomorrow.

This is the first of four shots that I took today on a family trip to Lytham, a small town about seven miles south of Blackpool. This one was taken facing south towards Southport.

As promised, here's something a bit different, and I don't have much to say about this one other than that I hope that it tells its own story.

Camilla (our 11 year old) and I went up to Fleetwood today. I had the 5D (with my new 16-35mm zoom) and Camilla had the 20D with the 17-40, and having previewed her shots it looks like she probably got some good ones.

Oh, and I should also add that this one was processed entirely within Camera Raw v4.1, which seems to be a big improvement over earlier versions.

I've been struggling for inspiration recently, so rather than attempt something new I revisited one of my favourite haunts today – the pier at St. Annes.

I don't have much to say about this one other than that, for me at least, it's one of those shots where everything seems to come together – the light, the boat, the waves and the sand.

I went up to Fleetwood this afternoon and met up with Richard (www.oipixs.com) who's come over to the UK to visit his brother. We spent a hour or so strolling along the beach in less than pleasant weather, took various photographs, and ended the afternoon with a "frothy coffee" in the café on Rossal Point. It was a good afternoon. Well, socially it was good, but photographically speaking it was a bit of a wash-out and I didn't really get anything I was especially happy with. This one's the best of a bad bunch. Hopefully Richard had more luck than me.

On a related matter: I finish work at the University on Wednesday, so have a busy few days ahead, and as I currently don't have anything else to post I may not put anything up until later in the week. If I do get some time, I'll try and take something worth posting, but I'm not sure it's going to be possible. We'll see.

This is the third and final image in this small series, and in many ways I think this is probably the most dramatic, not least because of the lone figure. And I don't think he was in any immediate danger, other than in terms of getting quite wet, but he's probably got steadier nerves than me :-)

As for the post-processing: though this one looks quite unnatural the redness in the centre of the eruption (for want of a better term) is present in the original; i.e. it's the sand in the water rather than anything I've added to the shot. Clearly, it didn't look quite this red on the day, but nor is it a figment of my post-processing imagination ;-)

Let me know which of the three you preferred.

Here's one of John taken on our recent trip to Fleetwood.

Update: my apologies for not posting for a few days, but the run up to Christmas has been rather hectic and I haven't had time to get my camera out of its bag, let alone take any photographs. Anyway, all being well I'll be back to the image-a-day thing fairly shortly, but in the meanwhile I hope you have a great time over Christmas and the New Year :-)

Update #2: it's ages since I posted anything, and I don't have anything to post now (having been struck down by a festive cold/cough of epic proportions), but I just wanted to wish you all a happy New Year. Have a good one :-)

This isn't one of my most striking shots, but I do like it; for two reasons.

First: it's a shot of the couple that I put up two days ago. When I titled the first shot I did so on the basis that the woman looked very purposeful; despite what must have been a 30mph wind (or more) she was striding directly towards the sea. In this shot, taken a couple of minutes later, she's increased the distance between herself and her partner, and has reached her destination. I guess the reason I'm pleased is that my title, in this instance, was right (at least to an extent).

My second reason for posting it is that I'm intrigued by the apparent degredation of the image, particularly noticeable in the waves. Initially, I almost didn't process it because it looked noisy, but it isn't. I think it's a combination of the 1/20th shutter speed, a relatively shallow depth-of-field, and the general murkiness of the day; but in the end I decided that I really liked the way the detail broke down in the image.

Oh, and I probably wont be posting anything tomorrow as I'm not sure that I've got anything else worth putting up and I'm stuck at work until around 9pm. If I don't manage to sort something out I'll definitely get something up on Friday.