fatminky's photostream

Me, Me, Me!

I'm a professional IT nobbin and hobby photographer. I love pottering around with my digital camera snapping at anything and everything. I used to enjoy manipulating my pictures into little works of art, but since I bought some decent equipment, my macro lens works it's bokeh magic and I've started posting my pictures fresh off the camera (well, almost).



Here's a blog of my photographic history...

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20 Mar 2010 - Remembered to update my profile

Spent the last 3 years taking thousands of flower macro pics, slowly learning that the lower I get to the ground the easier it is to brace my arms and take a steady sharp shot, until I am now rolling in the mud like a mad thing, but managing to get some quite nice shots.

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13 July 2007 - Bought Nikon 60mm Macro Lens

I'm really getting into macro photography, so I thought the best present I could get myself to go with my new Nikon D80 would be a really good macro lens. The 60mm enables me to get in really close, is small enough to hand hold and produces amazing dof. In one day my macro pictures have leapt several rungs up the evolutionary ladder.

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12 July 2007 - Bought New Nikon D80 Camera

Finally treated myself to a proper digital SLR camera. I was going to get the Cannon 400D EOS as I'd seen so many great pictures taken with it on flickr. But then I found that it was actually too small to hold comfortably with my long spindly fingers, so after much additional deliberation I went for the Nikon D80 instead which is more comfortable to hold and comes with a more useful 18-135mm kit lens.

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20 Jan 2007 - Discovered The Lowes Effect

I've discovered a new effect. It's called the Lowes effect. It works best with objects. People go a bit funny and don't look like people any more. But macro shots containing simple shapes work very well, eg flowers or objects from around the house.

Here's the recipe. I'm using Paintshop Pro, but I'm sure you can do all this in Photoshop. Apply a Gaussian Blur at about radius 10, to soften the whole image up. Then apply the Chrome effect, keeping the original colour, with Brightness set at 0. Vary the Flaws setting between 2 and 8 to see which works best. Then brighten and saturate the colours as required to get it looking perfect. That's it, easy peasy.

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1 Dec 2007 - Bought New Fuji F30 Digital Camera

Treated myself to a new camera, as I'd finally had enough of the poor quality pictures taken by my Olympus Mini Mju. The Fuji is much better and copes really well with low light situations, without adding much noise. Hopefully you will all notice an improvement in my picture quality.

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11 Oct 2006 - Joined Flickr

Joined Flickr and started adding my back catalogue of pictures. Got addicted very quickly. I love getting comments and discovering amazing pictures that other people have taken. I hate the disappointment you get when you add a new picture and then sit back waiting for the world to turn up, but nobody does, awwww!

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LBF - Life Before Flickr

I used to only take pictures of people with my old Cannon AE1 SLR camera - mostly my nieces and nephews. Then I bought my first digital camera in 2005, an Olympus Mini Mju, and was photographically liberated. Not having to worry about the cost of each shot enabled me to start taking pictures of all sorts of new things - flowers, buildings, junk around the house, night shots, etc.

Unfortunately I soon realised that although the Olympus Mju is a very small and sexy camera, the picture quality was not very good. So I started to fiddle with my pictures in PSP to improve them, and then I got addicted to the fiddling, and now I can't stop. Help!