AdrianWarren's photostream  

© 2010 Adrian J Warren. Unauthorised use prohibited.

It's that time again; it's time for the fireworks! This was taken at the Thames Festival. If you're interested you can find out more about it on their website.

Bumped into a fellow flickr'er, Rob Overcash, whose work is truly excellent; please check out his take on the evening!

Tempus fugit - a Latin term which when literally translated into English means "Time flees", although it's most commonly rendered as "Time flies". You can almost feel time passing here as the clouds scud across the sky, hence the title. Amusingly Wikipedia has a time portal; sadly it only takes you to time related pages, rather than providing a TARDIS like time travelling opportunity; most disappointing.

Taken at Painshill Park last month. You might wonder what the history of the ruin is; and therein lies a tale... It was actually built as a ruin to conceal a brickworks! I know it seems bizarre, but every great landscape garden has to have a ruin; it's the law ;) More on the park here if you're interested.

The observant amongst you may notice a new plaything lurking in the EXIF. I'm *very* happy with the plaything :D

Request: If any of my UK Flickr contacts are using generic photo paper *and* generic inks, I'm after a small favour if I may? Basically I'm looking for someone to print a test file of mine onto one piece of A4 (~letter) paper (or two 6x4 (15cmx20cm) prints) using generic inks and generic paper, and then post it to me, so I can test (not particularly rigourously) for longevity against fading. One 6"x4" from each set is going to be stored in a cool dark cupboard (near ideal conditions), the other's going on a rotating disc in my car, which is parked in the sun, and will probably get filled with a little car exhaust from traffic, and humidity from the rain etc (pretty much the worst conditions for prints). Currently I have Canon Chromalife 100 ink/paper sorted, the previous generation of Canon inks, Canon Selphy dyesub/paper, and soon I'll have some lab prints too; but what I don't have are any generic/generic sets to hand, and buying six new cartridges just to do one print seems a bit silly, so I fall upon your mercy! At this point in time I'm just asking for UK Flickrites as I think the postage costs from elsewhere in the world would be a bit much! I should mention that I'm looking for volunteers, so there's no money I'm afraid. I will post my results freely online, and credit anyone that sends prints to me if they wish though :)

Anyway, with that out of the way, today's image is the beach at Newgale, in Pembrokeshire, south-west Wales. Looking to what I think of as the left hand end of the beach, in a roughly south easterly direction.

Newgale's famous locally for the gorgeous three mile long sandy beach, some of which you can see here. As a kid I spent many happy days (and some cold, wet and thoroughly miserable ones) digging on the beach, trying to dam up the little streams and rivulets that flow out from the shingle bank onto it. As you can tell I was lucky with the weather on the day I took the shot!

Whilst the beach is locally famous, the campsite behind it is locally infamous. There isn't a problem if you pitch your tent on the hillside areas, but when I was a kid the flat (flood) plain area had a tendency to do as the name suggests it might. Did you know that some tents can float? ;)

The long sandy beach is backed by a large shingle bank, which protects the land behind, and sometimes in bad weather washes out and completely covers the road. I'd say you haven't truly experienced Newgale until you've seen the road being cleared by a mechanical digger!

Tech:
1/350 @ f/11 ISO100. RAW converted via Canon DPP 3.6
Canon EOS 400D (XTi), Canon EF-S10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM @ 10mm
Sharpened + cropped square for Flickr. I've uploaded as TIFF today, so please let me know if you see any unusual image artifacts!

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The iconic Hong Kong skyline, taken from the Kowloon foreshore.

A tricky shot to render, this is a four frame panorama shot as a three frame HDR; so in total it's a merge of 12 individual frames.

Vijay was curious about my method, so here's how I went about it. First I converted all 12 individual frames from RAW into TIFF using AdobeCRAW to fix CA, then I used PTgui to stitch those TIFF files as three different versions of the same panorama: light, normal and dark. I could use the same alignment settings for each of the three layers as the originals were shot on a tripod, with fractionally different camera positions things might get messy.

Those three panoramas (dark, mid, bright) were then merged together into a single HDR panorama in Photomatix, where the end result was then tone mapped.

I couldn't stitch directly to HDR, as my version of PTgui (8.0.2) really doesn't like it when you use different exposure settings on the different frames... It also can't fix CA, and HDR tends to exacerbate CA.

The tall building to the right hand side of the island is IFC2.

The tall skyscraper in the middle is HKCEC.

On the very right hand side on this side of the water is the Kowloon Cultural Centre.

There are some very impressive buildings in HK, it's not necessarily the tallest that are the prettiest, I really love IM Pei's China Bank building; it's almost as if a stealth fighter was embedded into the ground ;)

This image is available for licence through Getty Images.

Taken in Dadès Gorge back in 2007. This is a four frame panorama stitched in PTgui.

Dades Gorge is near Boumalne Dadès of Ourzazate Province.

The gorgeous ochre coloured sedimentary rocks remind me of those found in various Pineapple growing regions around the world...

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