After a few days of really struggling to take any decent shots I took two today that I'm quite happy with, this one and another that I'll put up tomorrow. Both of them are straight shots, but this is the more odd of the two.

As a partial aside: there's an interesting discussion going on at blog.photoblogs concerning monitor calibration, and the reason I mention it is that on my machine this picture looks great (IMO) – deep, rich colours, and so on – but on my wife's laptop, on which most of my images normally look ok, this one looks rather flat and lifeless. I'll be interested to hear what you think.

On a more mundane note: I've done some more recoding to this popup to allow you to directly navigate between entries. The '<<<' at the far left of the bar at the top of the screen takes you to the comments for the previous image, and on any other comment popup other than the one for the latest image 'latest' returns you to the most recent comments and '>>>' takes you to the next. I'm not actually sure this has much practical use but thought I'd mention it in case you didn't notice.

And continuing my quest to offer some exposure for those sites outside the Top 100 at photoblogs.org I thought I'd give a mention to momentánea, a photoblog run by Eduardo Arcos in Mexico City. My favourites include timbres rojos, en Barcelona, 6T, and switches. Eduardo also has an easily navigable archive page not too dissimilar from my own thumbnails page. Enjoy.

I did wonder about trying to come up with something a bit more original for this week's Photo Friday challenge – Black and White – but I've not exactly been keeping up with the challenges all that well in recent weeks (my last entry beat the deadline by six hours), so I thought I'd enter this one now, rather than try and take something else.

On another matter: I don't know how many of you read yesterday's somewhat critical comment from Malin, but one of the points he made was that some of lower ranked sites at photoblogs.org don't get the credit they deserve. And I agree wholeheartedly, so I thought I'd work through my favourites that don't have too many votes and give them a mention here.

First up: Coincidences. Strictly speaking this isn't a photoblog, rather it's a site concerned with "discussions on the art and craft of photogpraphy, and other digressions", but it's definitely worth a visit. The latest entry is concerned with various exhibitions in NYC this summer, the one prior to that is about big color C-Prints, and other entries are about particular photographers, websites, and many other photography related topics.

I thought I'd posted all the decent grafitti shots I took a while ago, but I took another look at this one and thought I'd put it up too. It's not quite as interesting as some of the others I've put up, but it does share some of their qualities. And, more importantly, I've run out of stuff to put up – hopefully it won't be raining tomorrow ;-)

On another note: I think the recoding for this site (other than the archives) is now finished (for the time being at least) including some changes to this popup. I'm fairly sure that there aren't any problems with it but if you do come across anything that doesn't work as expected please let me know.

This isn't quite what I was after for this week's Photo Friday challenge – Macro – but I've run out of time. Don't get me wrong, I do like this shot, but I had wanted to come up with something a little more off-the-wall than a shot of a dandelion and one of our daughters; i.e. as Photo Friday entries go this is rather more predictable than I would have liked. That said I haven't even had the time to even think of something off-the-wall, let alone take it, so I suppose I should be glad that I have this one to put up.

On another note: I'm still working through uprgading the way this site is coded but still haven't managed to get around to sorting out the archive pages. And from various emails I've received today it seems as though there might also be a problem with my news feeds (index.xml and index.rdf). Both of these should start with the image's title, underneath which should be the image that appears in this popup (approx. 200x150px), followed by the image description. If you're using a newsreader or online service and the feed looks different (e.g. no image, or just the image but no text), could you let me know which reader/service you're using. Thanks.

I took this a couple of days ago and don't have much to say about it other than that I really like the reflections of the clouds and sky in the lettering (which is part of a sign for a car-dealership which looks as though it's made from polished steel).

On a side note: I recoded my entire site today, mostly to make creating new entries a bit easier, so if you notice anything amiss please let me know. At the moment the main archive page and the monthly and category archives aren't working properly (I'll sort these out later today) but the main pages (including the thumbnails page and comments popup) all seem to be fine in Safari and IE (for Mac) and IE6 (for PC). I'd be really grateful if someone could let me know if everything is working in IE5 for PC as I've had problems in the past and can't check it myself.

Joe made a couple of really good points yesterday when he commented on my previous entry – that I’m often surprised by how other people see my images, and that if I want a discussion about why an image doesn’t quite work, I should just ask. And I suppose, in terms of the latter, that I’ve supposed that people will say if/why they think an image doesn’t work. And I’d much rather have a critical commentary than no comments at all. One of the things that has made the most difference to my photography is the feedback I receive here – what works, what doesn’t, and so on – so please feel free to critique any of my images. I do like positive comments, but I need critical feedback too.

As for this image: I would have preferred a wider angle lens for this shot – I think it would have been more striking (and I could have cut out the wall in the foreground) – but I do think it’s reasonably effective.

I took this shot the day before yesterday, but didn’t look at it straight away. We’d gone to one of our local parks and, as always, I took my camera along and took various snapshots of the kids running around. This one was a bit speculative rather than a carefully studied shot, but I really like the way it turned out. And, more importantly, I think it’s a much better photograph than the last two or three I’ve put up.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether to drop back from posting an image a day – I hate posting stuff I’m not happy with – but unless I totally run out of even half decent stuff I think I’ll stick with it. I just wish I could get to the point where I have a reasonable number of shots in hand. Constantly being only one or two shots ahead of myself is a bit nerve wracking at times ;-)

I have to confess that I’m not pleased with this shot but I’ve almost run out of things to put up. It’s sharp, the composition is ok, and I really like the colours, but it doesn’t really do all that much for me. And if you’re interested, it’s an old building on Blackpool’s seafront that’s now an Indian restaurant.

Occasionaly I have a few days (or a week) where I just don’t seem to be able to take any decent shots. I rarely lack inspiration, and happily go out and take shots that I imagine will be ok, but it’s when I come to look at them I realise that they’re not overly interesting and not up to the standard I’d like. I used to play a lot of pool when I was younger. I was never brilliant but I was reasonably good and used to play for a local team. But some days I just wouldn’t be able to sink a ball. The last few days have been the photographic equivalent – nothing much has changed, I just can’t take anything worth looking at. Oh well, hopefully it will pass ;-)

I’m not normally all that keen on producing nationalistic shots (or, rather, shots that could be construed as nationalistic), but this flag caught my eye. It’s outside the Metropole Hotel in Blackpool (formerly Bailey’s Hotel built in 1785) and this is one of about ten shots – nine of which didn’t work. The others were ok, but it was quite a blustery day and it was difficult to get the flag looking even vaguely flag-like.

On an entirely different tack: I came across a wonderful shot this evening – family portrait 21mm – posted a few days ago on fiftymillimeter. I’ve spent the last ten minutes or so trying to decide what it is I like about this shot, but I can’t really put it into words. It’s definitely worth a look though.

This is the last of my recent graffiti shots and is rather more abstract than the other shots. This one was taken at the intersection between two pieces; i.e. where two different pieces meet and overlap. As with the other shots this one also has quite an unusual luminence and again, this is probably a consequence of the even but bright lighting and the metallic paints used for this piece of art.

On the whole I think I prefer the other four shots to this one, as they were about the art as well as the peculial colour and light, but I do quite like the abstract nature of this image.

When I first looked at this shot I was quite dissapointed with the way it had turned out as what I was after was a very sharp, clear shot of this reflection. But, and this is probably to do with the fact that these sunglasses were only a couple of pounds (piled up in a rack of similarly cheap and tacky ones), the image is dirty, noisy and lacks clarity (and I don’t look too great either ;-). So, while these sunglasses might look ok, they’re probably manufactured from fairly cheap plastic, and the optical quality is clearly somewhat short of spectacular.

But when I thought about it, a dirty imprecise image seemed more fitting for this shot, mainly because it reflects some of the tackiness of the seafront stalls that sell such items – a cheap dirty image reflected in a cheap plastic lens. All that said, I don’ think this is one of my best efforts.

Yesterday I said that I thought I preferred the shot I was going to put up today, but today I’m not so sure. And whenever I’ve posted two similar shots in the past, and said I prefer one of them, invariably everybody else likes the other ;-)

Anyway, I don’t really need to say too much more about this shot, or yesterday’s.

Today, I made two changes to this blog, one hidden (hopefully) and the other a little more visible. The hidden change is that I’ve recoded the main page, individual archives, comment popup, and the various information pages as pure css (rather than a hybrid of tables, divs, and various other clunky bits of disorganised layout). So that’s the first change.

The second is that I’ve made the site skinnable. There are three new links in the navigation bar, light, default, and dark. ‘Default’ is the scheme you’re used to, ‘light’ is a mostly white scheme, and ‘dark’ (unsurprisingly) is a dark grey scheme (which, IMO, suits today’s shot better than the other two). Let me know what you think. Also, if you come across any layout problems please let me know. I’ve tested it in a few browsers, and it seem ok, but there’s a good chance that it might not work for everyone.

Oh, and both changes only apply to the pages I mentioned above. The various archives (other than the thumbnails page, which I have changed) will have to wait.

I took this on Saturday outside the house where my last two shots were taken. It’s the first of two shots (of which I prefer the other which I’ll post tomorrow) of an old wall mounted lamp. It’s clearly seen better days and, judging by the state of the filament, I don’t imagine that it works all that well at the moment :-)

This shot, and tomorrow’s, were both much as they’ll appear here; i.e. there wasn’t too much that needed to be done to them other than a basic Curves adjustment and an increase in saturation. What I particularly like about both these shots is the rich, warm evening colours. While such lighting can be emulated in Photoshop, somehow that isn’t quite the same and it’s much more rewarding to take a straight shot of something that’s inherently beautiful than to generate a contrived version of the same look and feel.

What I was attempting with this shot was to capture the feel of this room rather than just the turntable itself. It was taken in the music room at my friend’s house and features the turntable that blurrily appears in yesterday’s shot. Around the walls of the room are several thousand LP's, several hundred CD's, and various bits of audio equipment – pre-amp, power-amp, and some other bits that I can visualise but am not entirely sure I know quite what they do. Suffice to say that my friend is a person who takes his music seriously ;-)

I took around 20 shots of this turntable, the majority of which were flash illuminated (bounced off the ceiling), but none of them worked. As for this one: it was hand-held with a shutter speed of one third of a second, but I have no idea how I managed to keep the camera steady. The image isn’t pin-sharp, but it’s ok.

For those with an interest, this is a remote volume control for a Michell Orca pre-amp (approx. 2" in diameter). The item to the right is a Michell Gyro Dec, and the speaker is a Tannoy Definition D700 Series 2; various components/parts of a good friend’s audio system; all of which prompted me to enter this shot for this week’s Photo Friday challenge – Parts.

This is a reasonably straight shot and the only significant PS change was to remove a distracting shadow from the wall. Other than that the only other modifications were a bump in contrast and saturation and a minor bit of sharpening. The shot was lit with a 420EX Speedlite bounced off the ceiling.

This is a section of Blackpool’s North Pier, shot from the south, and was taken a little while after yesterday’s shot. As with the previous shot, this was PS'd but only to increase the contrast (a fair amount) and the saturation (a little). For some reason I seem to have neglected what could be called panoramic shots such as this, focusing instead (at least recently) on macro images or shots with a much smaller scale. Part of my reason, I think, is that the Canon G5 does struggle a bit with resolution and when I look at other people’s architectural/landscape work (often produced with DSLR's) I often feel quite dissatisfied with my own attempts.

That said, I do quite like this one though suspect the composition could have been a little better; i.e. the pier is a little higher in the frame than it would be if I took this shot again.

And I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Caitriona, of the wonderful catriona.net, for fixing my css so that it will work properly with IE5 for PC. For reasons that I couldn’t work out the css I’d used failed to display the main image in IE5 – which was a bit disasterous. All being well, this is now fixed (though please leave a comment if it still isn’t working – I don’t have IE5 so can’t check), and the 6.4% of people visiting my site who use this browser will now be able to see something other than a blank grey page :-)

All being well, we’ll be moving to Blackpool in a couple of months, so we took a trip over there today. Mostly so we could have a look round the area, but also to take the kids to the beach. This sign was at the top of one of the many flights of stone stairs leading down to the beach and looked as though it were made from a car number plate.

As far as post-processing goes, all I did to this image was to darken the sky a little. I was using a polarizer but the sun was at the wrong angle for it to make much difference. Had we had longer I probably would have gone back later in the day as I imagine that the late afternoon sun would have provided a much better shot.

I’m not normally drawn to phone boxes, but this one caught my eye.

As with a lot of my recent shots, I have no idea what this is about – it’s an image that takes up most of the back wall – and I assume that it’s an advertisment for something. But I was so caught up in taking the shot that I didn’t really pay any attention to what it might be about. And I find this happening more and more frequently; i.e. I forget the context, and just remember what I saw through the viewfinder at the time.

And in some ways this is quite disturbing; I can wander around taking shots and become almost oblivious to everything else. Which is quite therapeutic, I suppose, but it does seem rather odd at times.

Hopefully, this entry will post itself as I’ve implemented an MT hack – mt-publish-on – that allows you to post-date entries; i.e. you can specify that they’ll be published at some point in the future. While I don’t intend to use this all the time, it will prove useful over the summer. There are a few times that I’ll be away, and I’ve wondered what to do about posting images. So, assuming I can manage to keep taking enough images for my image-a-day aim, I should be able to keep posting on a daily basis.

All of which, of course, assumes that this hack works ;-)

As for this image: this is a shot of a council building near to where I work. On the whole, it’s a rather brash building, that has little going for it other than it’s a pleasant shade of red, but this grill(?) caught my attention.

And finally, if you’re interested in implementing this hack, drop me an email. There appear to be some errors in the documentation; i.e. there are some changes you need to make before it will work. You also need to be able to run cron jobs on your server.

I don’t have too much to say about this shot, but I do have a request today.

I’ve been thinking about the way this blog is organised, and wondered how people use the various pages (particularly the archives) to view these images. I have my server logs, but they don’t really tell me who looks at what, they just give me the total figures for any particular page. So, when you visit Chromasia, which pages do you look at? I have my main archive page, which gives access to the monthly and category archives, and there’s the thumbnails page. Which of these do you regularly use?

Also, I’ve been wondering whether I should include thumbnails of recent images on my main page. This is a fairly standard thing to do (see groundglass for an example) but I’ve resisted it because I prefer to focus on the main image. So, would anyone prefer that I did and/or think it would add something to the site? A compromise would be to have dual index and individual entry archive pages, one without the clutter (as now) and one with (incorporating thumbnails, and maybe the comments and the image description - rather than have them appear as a pop-up). Anyway, let me know what you think. I don’t have time for a major redesign at the moment, but I am pondering some changes at some point.

This is another of my recent graffiti shots (I have one final image after this one) and I thought I’d put it up today as a) I much prefer posting recent stuff so don’t want to sit on these shots for too much longer, and b) until I can find a bit of time to actually go out and take something else I don’t have too many shots left anyway.

Of the five shots I think this one may well be my favourite – there’s something quite wonderful about the light in this shot. The day I took them it was overcast, but very bright, and the smooth flat light has given this shot an almost luminous feel. I would have expected that strong lighting would have worked better, but I suspect that the metallic paint photographs much better under a gentler light. Anyway, let me know what you think.

With four children this week’s Photo Friday challenge – Play – should have been easy, but I hadn’t realised just how slow the autofocus is on the Canon G5. Our kids tend to move around at a speed that the human eye can barely comprehend, and my camera just isn’t up to it. Over the last couple of days I must have taken dozen’s of shots that have no children in them at all (by the time the camera had focussed, the children had long gone ;-)

For this shot though the movement was a bit more predictable and I quite like how it turned out. I did want to take something of them playing together, as we’re really fortunate that our kids all seem to like one another, but none of them were worth putting up so I gave up trying :-)

I don’t have anything much to say today.

When I first worked on this image I quite liked it, both in terms of the colours, particularly the contrast between the jade and the creams and reds, and the vaguely abstract nature of the composition. But the more I look at it the less sure I am about it. The problem, I think, is that it’s difficult to work out quite what you’re looking at. The shadowed text, for example, appears on the seating within this coffee shop, but it isn’t particularly easy to realise that that is the case.

One of my previous shots was similarly confusing, and Joe’s comment on that one was that it wasn’t an abstract but nor was there sufficient information for the viewer to feel oriented to the content. I suspect that this shot suffers from the same problem.

This is another of the grafitti shots I took last week (I have two, maybe three left that I’ll put up at some point) and is the only one of all of them that displays an entire piece. What I like about all of these shots is the vibrancy of the colour, which is mostly a consequence of the artists using metallic paint for portions of their work. But what I like about this one is the grass and weeds at the bottom of the image. For the rest of the shots I focussed much more sharply on the work itself, this one contains a bit of the surrounding scene. And I guess that the reason I like it is to do with the contrast between the sharp industrial feel of the graffiti and the contrasting softness and delicacy of the foliage.

Alternatively, it may just be that the greenery provides a bit of balance ot the orange/red/yellow of this piece of work ;-)

I prepared this image at the same time as yesterday’s entry, and at the time I far preferred it, mostly I think because it includes our 15 month old playing in the grass; i.e. it isn’t just another flower shot. But now I’m not so sure.

Often, when preparing an image, I’ll spend five or ten minutes playing around with Photoshop’s Curves tool, and at some point during that relatively short space of time I’ll hit on a setting that I’m happy with. With this shot though that didn’t happen, and at various points this evening I’ve ended up with a version that looks ok one minute and unbalanced the next; either too bright, too dark, lacking in contrast, or having too much. So I really don’t know what to make of it now.

This is the first of a couple of macro shots that I took in our local park, both of which started out as more as experiments than anything else. Much as I like my camera, like all digital compacts it has a massive depth of field compared to an SLR, and while this is great for some shots, it’s irritating when you want to isolate a subject by using a shallow DOF. That said, the macro mode does a much better job of limiting the DOF as this shot testifies.

As for this shot: while I prefer the one I’m going to put up tomorrow, I like the vibrancy and composition of this one though do think it would probably have been more appealing had it been less cluttered.

It was a lovely bank holiday Monday yesterday – the sun was shining, and it really felt like summer. This was taken in our local park and is another shot of our youngest asleep in her buggy. The DOF is slightly off, but I do think that it captures something of the beauty of this time of year.

Also, Brandon Stone, founder of photoblogs.org has set up a new site – blog.photoblogs.org. The site has a number of functions, including drawing attention to noteworthy photos, providing a forum for the discussion of photography related matters, and so on. The blog’s about page includes a fuller description of what the site is about – it’s definitely worth a visit, and should prove to be a useful resource. If you’re interested, I’ve added a brief review of Radio Uruguay to the site’s Photo Spotlights section.

As promised (albeit a day later than advertised), here’s the larger version of this “piece” (see the day before yesterday’s comments for a definition). I don’t have a great deal to say about this other than that I like the vibrancy and the composition – other than that though, I think it speaks for itself.

On a largely unrelated note: I don’t know how many of you used the thumbnails page (the one with 75x75px versions of all my images) but, for the time being at least, I’ve disabled it. Over the last few weeks traffic to this site has increased to the point where I’m in danger of exceeding my 16GB monthly bandwidth (I’m getting around 800-1000 visits per day). So, on the basis that the thumbnails page probably accounted for around 2.5GB of traffic last month, I thought I’d get rid of it for the time being. Hopefully that wont inconvenience anyone too much, but I can’t really justify another hosting package at the moment :-/

As Photo Friday entries go, this isn’t the best interpretation of this week’s theme – Natural – but I know I’m not likely to have a great deal of time this week so I thought I’d put this up now before I change my mind :-)

As for it’s relevance: this is taken from underneath the slide in our local park, and the distorted reflection is of the “natural” bark that carpets the floor … and a child playing on a roundabout seems like a fairly “natural” thing too ;-)

In terms of colour and visual interest, I like this, but I’m not convinced that the composition works all that well. I’d be interested to hear what you think.

Oh, and I know I said yesterday that I’d put up the second X:04 shot today – I’ll put it up tomorrow instead.

After a week of really struggling to take anything decent I ended up taking six shots yesterday that I’ll put up over the next couple of weeks – various shots of some graffiti reasonably close by to where we live. Normally, graffiti in the North of England is of the “fuck off”, “daz luvs sharon”, or “I woz ere” variety, so I don’t often come across any that’s worth photographing. On this occasion though I found what seemed to be a partially demolished building – three walls, open to the sky – painted on both sides, … and some of it was really well done.

This shot is a close-up (not a crop ;-) of the one I’m going to put up tomorrow, and is a part of the tag of a larger piece of work. Incidentally, I suspect that there’s probably a word to describe an individual piece of graffiti … I just don’t know what it is ;-)