10-02-10 Have I ever mentioned how much of a fan of brual modernist architecture I am? No? Well I have now. This pic is of one of my favoutite bits of concrete Sheffield. Its the bottom of the ramp that leads to the Atkinson's car park. There are a number of interesting angles on this ramp and I will be posting some more of them in the future. I dont know why I like concrete so much in many ways it can be a blot on the landscape but sometimes it can just be beautiful. This pic was processed only in lightroom its not a HDR but it kind of looks like it. I boosted the black levels in the image and this began to bring out some amazing tones. A little tweak of the saturation and vibrancy and the tones were there in full effect. I hope you like this one as much as I do. Oh wow! I just looked out the window and we have a blizzard! Damn, I have to go to work in that!

Manual Page Read: Pages 9-11 - Table of contents. (Yes I have decided to start at the begginging, the scattershot approach was getting sketchy).

Images Viewed: Added a new blog to my RSS reader. BEGINBEING. Which describes itself as "curated inspiration". Could be interesting!

Other Inspiration: Met with my project supervisor today who helped steer me further down the path to getting my dissertation done. I need to start planning experiments now. It's getting scary.

View On Black

On Twitter.

My 365 blog - greg365.mcmull.in

28-01-10 Believe it or not this is practically straight out of the camera. All I did was add a little contrast and sharpen it. What is it though? Well its a bottle of shower gel.For some reason my wife bought me a lot of shower gel for Christmas. She must think I smell. Anyway when I woke up (late) this morning the sun was streaming into my flat again. I noticed the tiny bubbles in the bottle a few weeks ago and I thought it would make for an interesting macro, I grabbed the bottle placed it in the direct sunlight and started shooting through it. About 85 shots later I finally had something usable. Hope you like it!

Manual Page Read: Page 48 - Shooting with the automatic setting.

Images Viewed: I went to a flickr meetup last night! So I'll be taking a look to see if any photos were posted today. Hi to Nick, Paul, Alicia, Martin, Hugo and all the other people who's names I didn't catch.

Other Inspiration: I watched the apple presentation of the iPad last night. Anyone got any thoughts on that? I wasn't impressed.

On Twitter.

My 365 blog - greg365.mcmull.in

I thought I would plop down my predictions for Apples big event reveal today. So here ate my top 15 predictions for what is surely to be a most exiting or disappointing presentation.

1. The iPad/Slate/Tablet/whatever will be released. It will have a 10.1 inch colour screen (NOT AMOLED too expensive).
2. It will run a version of the iPhone OS with a different interface.
3. Apple will announce Comic/Magazine/newspaper subscriptions as downloads from iTunes. With a host of famous titles at launch.
4. The device will come with a 3G connection and will be subsidised by one of the major carriers.
5. OR the device will have a 3G connection that is restricted in some way. i.e. only iTunes downloads.
6. The device will primarily be marketed as a ereader that does "so much more"
7. 16-128Gig of storage.
8. ARM chip (Maybe of apples own design).
9. Front facing camera for Video iChat.
10. There will be at least one feature that will surprise everyone.
11. Enough RAM to enable backgrounding of apps. This may spread to the iPhone too in a limited fashion.
12. iPhone OS 4? Im thinking no. They will probably give a sneak peak but this will drop in June with the next gen iPhone 4G.
13. iLife 10 will be released today.
14. No new Macbooks today.
15. Over all It will be a bit disappointing.

Ok i have gone out on enough limbs there. Come back at 8pm and see how wrong I was. Take it away Steve...

Not sure why I didn't cross post this earlier. This shot is by far my most popular 365 photo on flickr so far.

18-01-10 I got 82% in my exam! Which was rather unexpected. I went into the room feeling the worst I have ever felt about an exam and came out of the room feeling the best I have ever felt about an exam! Happy days! Todays photo is of the Cheese-Grater Carpark in Sheffield. Its a bit of a photographic cliché around these parts, as you can see, but as I walked past it today It was bathed in lovely sunlight so I thought I would get a shot. I used this single image HDR technique to process it but I skipped the final two steps as I liked it in colour.

Manual Page Read: Page 85 - Using brightness compensation for the entire image (exposure compensation)

Images Viewed: On my way home from the exam I finally made it to the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition at The Graves Gallery. I am so glad I did, lots of inspiration there.

Other Inspiration: I have been listening to Kraftwerk and Fella Kuti all morning. Thats inspiration enough.

View On Black

On Twitter.

My 365 blog - greg365.mcmull.in

23-01-10 The lemsips are still flowing, my manflu is still debilitating me. Had to call in sick to work today. Still I managed to venture out onto my balcony for a second texture shot. This one had a fair bit of processing. I used Colour Efex Pro, the "Pro Contrast" setting. There were various tweaks to the clarity and the saturation in Lightroom and I used a square crop. I have included the straight out of camera shot as well.

Manual Page Read: Page 118 - Changing the noise reduction setting.

Images Viewed: I found a new photoblog yesterday. www.ilovethatphoto.net/ it's quite awesome. Check it out.

Other Inspiration: Its hard to be inspired when you are ill. I have a lot of love for the guy who invented Lemsips though ;)

View On Black

On Twitter.

My 365 blog - greg365.mcmull.in

15-01-10 It's raining out there. Rain really sucks. I was woken up by the drops hitting the window at about 6am but the sheer drepessingness (is that even a word) of it all made me turn right back over and sleep I eventually got up at 9am, mad at myself for not getting up early. The upside of this rain is that my balcony door window is covered in tiny little beads of water and thats what I set out to capture today. The shot above was processed entirely in Lightroom. All I did was do some split toning of the highlights to give the image a bluish tinge. I was also pretty heavy handed on the clarity slider. Hope you like it as much as my last water drops image.

Manual Page Read: Page 97 - Selecting the drive mode.

Images Viewed: Petapixel had an interview with a guy called David Baker yesterday. I checked out his site and was very impressed.

Other Inspiration: My good friend Pete is leaving town today. Very sad. Pete is partially responsible to my renewed interest in photography. He came round last night and we sat and geeked out about cameras and film for a couple of hours. See ya Pete! Don't be a stranger...

View On Black

On Twitter.

My 365 blog - greg365.mcmull.in

After yesterdays lack of inspiration came a flood of new ideas! Well more of a trickle really. Today's shot was inspired this picture which posted on Reddit yesterday so I can not take responsibility for the Idea. I picked up my camera manual this morning to read my daily page and my eyes fell upon the above sentence. You know in cartoons when a light-bulb suddenly appears above the head of the protagonist? Ding! Anyway I clicked on the macro lens and snapped a few frames off. Processing wise I ended up using Silver Efex Pro to convert to black and white with a +1ev bias. Then I messed with the curves, added a slight graduated filter to the bottom of the image and gave it a vignette in Lightroom. I'm quite pleased how it turned out.

Manual Page Read: Page 57 - Shooting with the program Auto (Obviously!)

Images Viewed: Thanks to strobist for introducing me to the work of Kevin Cooley. .

Other Inspiration: Getting up early! I've got up at 7:30am (early for me!) two days straight. It leaves me time to Study, put effort into the 365 and be able to get to work and train staff.

View On Black

On Twitter.

My 365 blog - greg365.mcmull.in

How annoying are spam comments? How annoying is it that if I set the drupal commenting system to moderate all comments there's no option for it to email me when I get a new one? How annoying is it to have to log in and screen my comments each week? How annoying is it when I forget to do that and discover an important comment has got missed?

Ok it's not really all that annoying. This isn't what you would call a high traffic blog.

I found a nifty solution though. Outsource your comments to Disqus. They will look after it all for you and provide a foolproof user friendly interface! They also provide MANY different ways of logging in you can connect with facebook, twitter open ID and even Yahoo!! Most importantly you can be emailed whenever you get a comment, which is important for me. I discovered them when I was setting up my 365 blog and when I discovered there was a third party drupal module for it I thought I would give it a go.

Install was plain sailing, but then I realised I still had all the comments on the old system. So I started looking for an import solution. This method by Daniel Maclaren looked promising so I gave it a go. I should have read the comments first. As it stands there does not look to be any way of importing drupal comments into Disqus, which is depressing. So the old comments are still visible, but arent merged into Disqus yet.

I am pestering Disqus on twitter so I am hoping they will get back to me and provide some sort of support, but its a free service so I'm not holding my breath. This guy looks like he works for them too so I may as well pester him as well!

Happy new year! And welcome to my 356 project. I have had this image planned for a while as my first photo. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take this picture at precisely one minute past midnight, I was in the pub getting drunk with my friends! This image, taken a little later, will have to do! It was shot with my 50mm Minolta Macro lens at f2.8 and 1/100. Cropped and straightened in Adobe Lightroom.

Page of manual read: Page 56 - Shooting an image the way you want it (exposure mode)

Images looked at: Browsed flickr and checked out the photos displayed at The Washington in Sheffield.

Other Inspiration: Listened to a lot of music tonight with my friends. Midlake stood out as my favourite. Check them out.

What the fudge is a 365? I hear you scream! Well a 365 project is when you take a photo a day for a whole year and post them on-line. There are a number of different types of 365 project, some are concerned with taking a self portrait every day, others demand you must take a picture of the same object every day but in a different setting. Both of these have their merits but I don't think I am vein enough to want to post pictures of myself! Instead I'll be posting photographs of whatever catches my eye on that particular day.

I'll be starting my project on 1st of January and I'll be posting the photos on flickr and on my new 365 photoblog which can be found at:

http://greg365.mcmull.in

Many 365 projects also include other daily tasks. Such as reading a page from your cameras manual each day and checking out other sources of photographs. I will try and incorporate both these into my project but I will also try to include other sources of inspiration which will no doubt present themselves.

I wont be neglecting this blog though, any pics that I feel are super-awesome I will no doubt cross post to here but the majority of my photos will be posted over at the Greg365 site.

I hope you will join me in this project and get involved by leaving some comments be they good or bad! Wish me luck!