I thought I'd edited all the shots from my trip to Oman last November but came across this one: another shot of my good friend Issa.

This is a shot of the Jumeirah Beach Residences shot from the Palm in Dubai during my Shoot the City workshop for the Gulf Photo Plus Fotoweekend event.

If you're interested I've just published an article on our new blog that explains how this one was shot and processed in addition to going through most of the techniques I use when shooting at night. Head on over, take a look, and let me know what you think.

It was the first day of my Landscape Photography workshop yesterday – and I'll probably have one or two images to post at some point soon – but in the meanwhile I thought I'd post this one, taken down on the beach last night. The postproduction, as you'll see, was fairly straightforward – just a bit of a contrast and saturation boost and a crop.

As always, let me know what you think.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

9.09pm on 8/3/12 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 70mm f/13.0 30s aperture priority -1 1/3 evaluative 160 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 2.39x1

This is a shot of the Jumeirah Beach Residences taken from the lowest frond of the Palm in Dubai while I was running my Shoot The City, Day & Night workshop that I ran at the GPP Fotoweekend training event in November. It's also the image that GPP are using to advertise the next occurrence of this workshop at GPP 2012. If you think you might be interested in attending, take a look at all the workshops that will be running this year. It's always a great event, but this year's line-up is truly fantastic.

In other news, if you haven't had a chance yet, head on over and take a look at my new photography and post-production blog. There's only one post so far, detailing what I'm going to be including, but I've also asked for some feedback from you, particularly in terms of what you'd like me to include. So have a look at my first post and let me know what you think.

And finally, I have a few one-to-one training dates coming up – February 24th, May 17th and May 21st–24th. If you're interested, take a look at our events page and one-to-one training page for further details.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

6.00pm on 15/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 35mm f/9.0 30s manual n/a evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 16x9

This is a shot of the coastguard station at Rossal Point near Fleetwood, a building I've blogged twice before, once in 2006 and then again in 2007. For some reason that I can never quite work out I find it difficult to photograph, possibly because it forces me to shoot along the coast or back towards the shore – when my natural inclination is to point my camera out towards the sea – but whatever the reason, I'm happy with how this one turned out.

As you'll see if you've taken a look at the original, the post-processing wasn't especially extensive, it was just a question of focussing the light onto the building and shore, balancing the contrast between the sky and the reflection, converting the image to black and white and then toning it using a curve.

On a different matter ...

This is the fifth entry I've posted using the Disqus commenting system and I think I've ironed out most of the initial kinks. If you do come across any problems though, in terms of functionality, usability, and so on, just let me know.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

9.26am on 15/9/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 59mm f/8.0 1/50 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor rotation

This is another image taken during the Creating Dramatic Images workshop I ran in Blackpool recently and one that I may well reference during my Dramatic Post-Production workshop that I'll be giving for Creative Live this weekend (Fri 7th - Sun 9th). If you haven't had a chance to check it out yet, it's a three day workshop, that's FREE to watch online. Let me know if you're going to be tuning in :)

And if you're interested, Creative Live have just published a blog post about my workshop here:

http://www.creativelive.com/blog/david-nightingale-how-did-he-create-image

Oh, and I've also added this shot as this week's Mini-PSD as there were a couple of interesting transformations: one to the lower section of the image (it was scaled upwards), and another to repair the mask around the railings.

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

3.22pm on 17/9/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 24mm f/10.0 1/320 aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor transformation

I still have quite a few shots from my recent trip to the UK, that I'll blog over the coming weeks, but I think that this one may turn out to be my favourite from the trip.

I'll also be posting some more from last week, taken while wandering around Bulgaria with Craig, but in the meanwhile here's one of his:

http://www.id7.co.uk/portfolio/archives/1010241900_clean.php

It's been a while since I posted any urban shots, and I have to say that I'm really pleased with this one. And as someone is bound to ask, here's the original:

.../archives/urban_dream.php

As you can see the final image is a bit of a transformation ;-)

On a partially related matter: the second of our online Photoshop tutorials went live today – Black and white: part one. If you're interested, there's more information on our tutorials page.

And finally, I was out with Craig Judd last weekend, who was up in Blackpool for some Photoshop training, and I'm pleased to say that he's started posting to his blog again. I'm sure that some of you will have seen his work - I'm pretty sure I've linked to him before - but if not, his site is here:

http://www.id7.co.uk/

You may find that his shot for today is a familiar sight :-)

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 :-)

I do have another couple of shots to put up from my trip up to Fleetwood with John at the weekend but I think this is probably my favourite. Well, either this one or the one I'll be putting up on Thursday. And like the shot I put up on Sunday (before anyone asks), this is an entirely natural reflection.

I managed to get out for an hour today, up to Fleetwood with John, and probably managed to get one or two shots that I'll put up. I suspect that this one may turn out to be my favourite.

I went back to the wrecks last night, with Paul, and what should have been a gentle stroll under the stars turned into something a little more adventurous ... to say the least. It was 11.30pm, and the tide was coming in as we were taking a shot of one of the boats.

We checked the tide times on Paul's web-enabled phone, and confirmed that high tide was 11.36pm. So, almost high tide, but we were getting our feet wet. We decided to climb aboard one of the boats I'd photographed before – wyre wreck #5 – and wait until the tide receded. We took a few shots and noticed that the tide was still rising – it was now about a foot deep around the boat. We pondered for a while, and it got deeper. At this point it was beginning to look as though we were stuck on the boat for a while.

When it started filling the bottom of the boat we decided we better climb onto what was left of the roof, Paul on one side, me on the other. We checked the website again and found out that the tide time were GMT, not British summertime; i.e. high tide was expected at around 12.36pm.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the tide came within three feet of the roof of the boat, by which point we were several hundred yards from the shore, and we didn't manage to get off again until 2.30am by which point we were frozen silly. Still, I did get this shot and we didn't have to call the coast guard, so all in all the trip probably counts as a success ;-)

Oh, and I haven't put up the EXIF data but this was taken at 17mm (or thereabouts) and was a four minute exposure at f/5.6.

I went up to Fleetwood today – to blow away the cobwebs – and came back with this. Unusually, I used fill-flash on this shot as it didn't seem likely I'd be able to rescue sufficient detail in the posts by any other means. Had it not been quite so windy I might have tried a multiple exposure HDR, but there was a very strong on-shore wind so that wasn't really an option.

Update: following a couple of the initial comments I decided to rework this one a little – the sky is now a little more dramatic and the foreground is marginally lighter. The original version, should you be interested, is here:

.../archives/a_rock_and_a_hard_place.php

First of all, thanks for all your (mostly) positive comments on the new version of chromasia: I'm glad you like it. And for those of you who didn't drop by yesterday: please have a look at my comments on yesterday's entry where I describe some of the changes I've made to the site.

One thing I will mention again, as it seems to have generated a fair amount of interest so far, we're developing a series of subscription based photoshop tutorials, centred around the images on chromasia, that we'll be launching towards the end of next month. The subscriptions should be reasonably inexpensive and if you'd like to read a bit more about them and register your interest, please take a look at this page:

http://www.chromasia.com/tutorials/

As for this shot: the beach at Blackpool is relatively flat, and what you see here is the incoming tide, a sandbank (on which these people are standing), and the sea and sky beyond that. I don't think they were aware of quite how fast the tide can come in as they ended up running through the water to get back to the beach. Two minutes earlier John and I had walked over dry sand to get to this spot, but by the time they ran across it was at least a foot deep. John has posted a similar shot this evening.

As always, let me know what you think. Personally, I like this one.

As you may have already noticed, the behind-the-scenes recoding I mentioned a week or two ago is now finished. There have been some minor changes to chromasia, the blog (of which more in a moment), but the major changes have been implemented at the front-end of the site; i.e. www.chromasia.com. I've added a front page, a page about the company, a galleries page, some information on licensing images and commissions, and some brief information on the subscription based tutorials that we'll be launching around the end of this month.

As for the changes to the blog: the most significant are i) the new pages have been integrated into the blog pages (hover over the 'chromasia.com' on the top-right of the screen to see what I mean) and I've changed the navigation a bit; i.e. you can now navigate backwards and forwards depending on which bit of the main image you hover over. I've also got rid of the javascript I was using to to display the image title in a translucent box over the image as it was causing far too many cross-browser problems. The image title now pops up in the nav bar when you mouseover the image.

As for this shot: it was taken yesterday evening. John and I took a walk along Blackpool beach (there's a shot of me on John's site tonight) and this is one of several reflections I photographed as we strolled along.

Update: well, so far (after 14 comments), the new design is either a "colossal JavaScript navigation disaster" or "clean, slick, polished and professional", or maybe something in between. Let me know what you think. Also, I'm aware that some of you are having problems with Firefox (1.5.0.4); specifically that the stylesheet doesn't seem to be working. I'm using that version of Firefox, and don't have any problems, so I'm not too sure what might be causing the error for some of you. Any suggestions gratefully received.

Update #2: I think the display problems that some of you have experienced are probably something to do with the fact that I've disabled two of the old themes, the 'dark' and 'grey' themes. For the time being I think I've got round this by forcing the main index pages to load the white theme overriding any preference you may have previously set. You can still select the black theme, but your choice wont persist between visits. This is inconvenient for anyone who normally uses the black theme, but should fix the problem for people who used to use either of the now defunct schemes.

Update #3: I've added some code to the index pages which should sort this problem out.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I intended to head off to the beach with Camilla as there were a few shots I wanted to try out, but, what with one thing and another, it didn't happen. Also, I'm going down to Bristol tomorrow and won't be back until late Tuesday evening (let's hope I come back with a better shot than the miserable effort I put up after my trip last year). In the meanwhile chromasia will be running on autopilot; i.e. entries will be going up, but I won't be around to comment.

As for this shot: it was taken a couple of weeks ago on St. Annes beach and the distortions, in this instance, are a consequence of the heat haze along the horizon.

Update: I should probably add, despite the title, that these are full-scale vehicles on the horizon and not toys.

This is a coastguard tower, towards the southern end of Fleetwood beach. I've photographed it several times before, but haven't been happy with any of them. This one though, taken yesterday evening as Eric and I wandered along the beach, is a bit closer to the sort of shot I've been after.

This was taken at the same time as keep out #4 but I didn't put it up at the time as i) it's not as good, and ii) three 'keep out' shots in a row seemed a bit excessive.

On another matter: I may not be posting for a while as Libby, my wife, went into hospital this afternoon. At this stage we're not too sure what the problem is, and all being well she'll be home either later tonight or tomorrow (kicking my arse for talking about it on chromasia), but I suspect I'm not going to have the time or the inclination to take many photographs for at least a few days.

Update: just a quick update, as of the early hours of Monday morning, to let you know that Libby is still in hospital. She did come home earlier today, but ended up going back in again this evening. I'll keep you posted. In the meanwhile, thanks for all your kind words and thoughts: they're much appreciated, by both of us.

Update #2: well, still no new pictures, but Libby's home again. The reason I've been reluctant to say anything much is that it did look as though things might be pretty serious. The differential diagnosis was pleurisy or a pulmonary embolism, the first of which is painfully unpleasant, the other potentially lethal. Anyway, libby had a scan today which pretty much ruled out a pulmonary embolism, and she's had various other tests which didn't indicate any other life-threatening problems, so she's back at home. She's not feeling great, and the rest of us are pretty spaced out too, but at least there's now a clearly defined light at the end of what was starting to look like an impossibly long tunnel.

Fairly soon, when Libby's feeling a bit better, I'll get to around to shooting and posting some new material, but don't expect anything much until the end of the week at the earliest. I'm at home for at least the next few days helping out, and will have to catch up with work related stuff after that, but all being well I'll manage some photography over the weekend.

Once again, many thanks for all your kind words and thoughts - they're very much appreciated.

In the year 2179, Amsterdam's computerised Bicycle System, the artificial intelligence behind the city's answer to the then pressing global fuel crisis, became sentient. Within a matter of minutes the bicycles began to evolve, within hours they turned on their creators.

Now, a little less than a year later, the last battles are being fought ... and they absolutely will not stop. Ever.

It's a while since the weather's been good enough to take decent reflections on the beach, but not only was it sunny yesterday, it was also quite warm ... which was nice :-)