31/365

Yay - I've completed the first month of my 365!

30/365

Pitcher on a Woodchip Wall for todays's Daily Shoot - very much a point and shoot this one, and possibly one to revisit later and reshoot slightly differently.

29/365

Smile x

Nothing technically wonderful about this image - but a record of a wonderful day with my better half.

28/365

Late Afternoon Reeds

It's nice being able to walk home in the daylight, so this evening I took a detour via Brickfield Pond. Had a lovely view of a Kingfisher, and then headed past some of the reedbeds. Grabbed a few shots before heading home, beneath huge murmurations of starlings.

27/365

Painting with light - a bit of an extension of last night's picture, but this time indoors as outside is bitter!

Pleased with this, if only for the reason that this image is (other than being resized down) straight out of the camera, wih no processing.

Manual Mode, 15 seconds @f8.0 ISO 200 and custom white balance
2 pen torches suspended form the ceiling.

26/365

Another late night 365 tonight. Getting home in the dark is a real pain for photography, and tonight it was a quick tea and out again - so even less time. I've been wanting to try light painting for a while, no time tonight, but thought I'd experiment with a few different camera setting to help start formulating ideas - quite pleased with this first attempt.

25/365

Smashing Pumpkins - another shot for The Daily Shoot, this time 'Attraction'. Having done a St Dwynwen's image yesterday, some failed experimentation led to today's image.

24/365

Tomorrow is Dydd Santes Dwynwen or 'Day of Saint Dwynwen', the Welsh equivalent of St. Valentine's Day, so I thought I'd do an image of Llwg Curu Cymreig, 'A Welsh Lovespoon'. Not the greatest image, as it is a little rushed, but also enabled me to do my Daily Shoot assignment.

23/365

Sodium Sky

A very early morning 365 this time - 2:30am in the morning after I got carried away on the Playstation! I was initially going to bin this picture, as I had the window in the shot, but when I looked at it I actually found it gave the image location. I love the way the stars seem to provide an escape through the closed veil of clouds and light pollution.

Manual Mode 15 seconds @f2.8 ISO400

22/365

I was struggling for inspiration (again) today, but luckily this find from last week saved the day, and I must admit I had great fun creating the shot. The highly technical set up is shown below!

21/365

#TGIF

A quick tour of some of some of the Celtic countries represented by the top of my cupboard. If you look at the Flickr page it should display the notes about which is which (as long as you don't have an old version of IE (sorry work)).

20/365

'Love is in the Air' (or at least on the water).



With St Dwynwen's Day fast approaching, these two coots treated me to a lovely courtship display on Brickfield Pond. The birds would separate by about twenty feet, and then swim rapidly towards each other, with heads lowered, similar to last week's fights, but when they met they would give a faint call to each other and preen each other as they turned. The male would then dive, and a minute later re-appear bearing a "gift" of weed for the female. I found the display suprisingly tender for what normally appears a slightly brusque bird, and it was done for each others benefit rather than an overt display to other coots. I could have watched all afternoon if I hadn't run out of time!

19/365

At this point I'm supposed to concoct some erudite and witty prose about spoon-petaled Chrysanthemums and it's link to the Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio; however at this precise moment my brain is completely fried after dealing with group after group of teenagers bouncing off the walls today - so time for a cider, and please enjoy the pretty flower picture :P

18/365

Yes, "another" picture of Common Reeds! Regular viewers to my Flickr page will spot quite a few images of Common Reeds. Every day I try to find time to walk around Brickfield Pond. Some days it takes an hour, and I can take 200 pictures, other days I struggle to find inspiration for 1. Today was closer to the latter (Tuesday is a tough day for me), and today I took 11 images. Five were immediately edited into the bin, leaving just four to choose from for today's blog - I'm glad one just came up to scratch.

Anyway - enjoy the 'un'common.

17/365

Feel the Power


I see this pylon pretty much every day, and usually regard it as a real eyesore - I feel they ruin so many beatiful views, especially within Snowdonia and the Carneddau, however the light on today's lunchtime walk made the pylon quite eyecatching today.

Other than resizing, this is straight out of the camera.
Aperture Priority 1/1250seconad and f8 @ISO80

16/365

A bit brighter than yesterday's image - a cockle on Horton's Nose, a local Nature Reserve on the estuary of the River Clwyd.

15/365

A bleak January day, even by Welsh standards, as 100mm of rain fell today. Strangely not a day for outdoor photography, but did dash to the paper shop for a read.

14/365

The Best View...



The end of work for another week, and the conclusion of the second week of my 365! I thought I'd take the opportunity to have a quick look at the blog stats, and I must admit I'm amazed how many views I've had over the last fortnight!

277 views from the following 8 different countries (in order: UK, USA, France, Russia, Ireland, Switzerland, Spain and Thailand). So thank you to all those visitors and nationalities : )

13/365

The Belly of the Beast


Quite a bit of my working week is spent looking after these things - laser printers. The college has at least 12 different types, and well over 40 printers, and they all need cartridges - its a slightly strange job keeping track of all the supplies!

The Flickr page has a breakdown of the parts (for those printer geeks!!)

12/365

I don't normally do candid pictures, but as I walked past the classroom this evening I couldn't help notice Helen putting together one of her new toys.

Happy Birthday Helen :D

11/365

A Late night Moodle.


Thought I better take a quick (HDR) snap (and that is all it is) as I try desperately to get tomorrow's lessons prepared and uploaded to Moodle.

[If you look carefully, you'll notice my Day 5/365 picture sitting on top of my screen!]

10/365

Feel the Rhythm

9/365

Explosion!

Not overly impressed with this picture - far too messy, but I needed an image for my 365, and have been struggling today.

After months of seemingly doing nothing at all, one of our bromeliads decided to explode into a profusion of seeds - similar to dandelion seeds but much much finer.

8/365

A Book at Bedtime

Taken in the early hours of this morning, my current bed-time book, and a night cap ;)

7/365

Waiting for the Weekend

The spirit of Plato dies hard. We have been unable to escape the
philosophical tradition that what we can see and measure in the world
is merely the superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying
reality.

-- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
07/01/2011
Aperture Priority 1/30 sec @ f2.8 and 1 stop under exposed
ISO800 on a Canon G11
Handheld

6/365

Shake that tail!


I forgot my pen drive today, and had to nip home at lunch to pick it up. Caught in the act of raiding the bird feeder, I managed to grab a couple of shots of the Grey Squirrel before he spotted me and retreated to the roof, squeaking and tail shaking in alarm.

5/365

Feel like celebrating this evening, not for any special reason, other than I've met my two new classes today, and I've managed to fix a "Microsoft Teredo Tunneling Adapter" problem - and it only took 7 forums, several reboots and 4 hours. Now I can start on my homework!!!

4/365

Cold, hungry and miserable - and that's just me!

The gull was perched on the ice on Brickfield Pond, I was tromping round the pond in the freezing wind trying to bring my blood sugar reading down - first day back at work too - great : P

04/01/2011
Aperture Priority 1/125 sec @ f8
ISO 200 on a Canon G11
Handheld

3/365

This week's MacroMonday theme was "Transformation". I often enjoy the challenge, but for some reason today I just couldn't get into the right frame of mind to create a picture I was happy with. After much procrastinating I finally came up with this.

Certainly nothing I'm particularly pleased with but I did manage number 3 of the 365, and a MM picture, so all is not yet lost :P

2/365

It's All just words...

Went round to the Crumblies' today for a fantastic lunch, and afterwards, for the first time in many years, a game of scrabble!

1/365

Well, my first New Year's resolution for 2011 was to create a blog, and the second to have a go at a 365 (more about that later).

This is my first blog - so a bit of a learning curve : ? - here goes!!!

Our New Year usually starts with a walk, and this year, despite the grey skies, we had decided to visit Flint Castle. Despite being only 20 miles away, we had never visited. The castle was locked up due to the "extreme weather", so we had an amble along the foreshore, on the way back to the car, this picture was one of a few taken. I hadn't been that inspired by it, and only when I got home did I spot the shots potential.


01/01/2011
Aperture Priority 1/8 sec @ f8
ISO 80 on a Canon G11

Post processing:
Levels equalized to give grain effect.
Gradient applied to sky.