Photography

Edinburgh at Night

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Edinburgh Castle

Yesterday I had a job interview with the University of Edinburgh, and due to Edinburgh being somewhat distant from Bradford I travelled up the day before and stayed the night. This gave me ample opportunity to play around with my new camera. Hence, I bring you various night-time shots of places and buildings in Edinburgh.

I was surprised at how few buildings in the city were illuminated at night – the Scott Monument on Princes’ Street being one of the more notable structures that were shrouded in darkness. Still, I managed to get a reasonable set of pictures, although I actually took many more which ended up being deleted for blurriness (next time, must remember tripod) or lack of light.

Also, here’s a daytime shot of where I may be working if I get the job. This picture is also notable for being the 1500th image that I’ve uploaded to Flickr.

Canon EOS 300D

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Me and my EOS 300D

One of my Christmas presents was a “new” camera – a Canon EOS 300D. Those of you who know about cameras will know that the 300D is not exactly a new model – in fact, it was launched over 5 years ago. This specific camera was in fact my dad’s camera, but he’s since acquired a Canon EOS 450D, so his old camera was passed down to me.

It’s my first SLR camera and I’m still getting used to it, but I used a trip to the coastal town of Scarborough today to get a bit of practice. The photos will look dull because of the weather – which was dull all day.

You can see them in this Flickr set.

New Camera

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Kirkgate Centre Lift

This is (one of) the first photos I took with my new camera. I settled on the Samsung Digimax A6 – £150 from Argos – 6 megapixels, 3x optical zoom, 32MB onboard memory with an SD slot, movie recording mode and lots of other stuff. Seems to be an alright camera – the 4 photos I’ve taken so far have only needed a little bit of touching up in Picasa. It’s also smaller than my last one and has a microphone – in fact, so far about the only thing it doesn’t do that my old one did was output to a TV or external screen. But then I used that feature exactly once on my old camera so that’s not a major issue.

I looked at the Nikon Coolpix 5900 – the camera that I previously said I wanted – but to buy it locally would be nearly £300 – well beyond my budget. Buying online simply is not an option right now as I’m not going to be home much and really I wanted to have something to use tonight. Tim Westwood is playing – not into that kind of music but I’ll go anyway, because it’s rare that we get big names here.

I’ve also uploaded some photos from my old camera taken last night on the pub crawl – here they are. I may upload more later.

By the way, does anyone know of any tool – preferably free – that works like Picasa on Mac OS X? iPhoto just doesn’t seem to cut it for me – not enough options and its ‘enhance’ button often makes my photos look worse.

Good things come to those who wait

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PICT1418

It’s taken me almost two weeks but my photos from Edinburgh are finally up. Not all of them are very well annotated or tagged though since I’ve not really had an awful lot of time lately nor been near enough to an internet connection.

I also have photos taken at Diggerland from last Saturday as well as some from central Durham which we popped into on the way back since we had some time and it was a nice day.

A few weekends ago I also went out and took some photos around Little Horton Green, a road in Bradford that seems to have got stuck in an 18th century time-warp. It’s really nice down there, actually.

I’m now only 155 images away from my 1000th photo on Flickr – not bad for less than a year.