MarkE_T's photostream  

So I've been away for ages, moving house and generally not been using the camera much. hopefully that is about to change. Anyway, here is a shot that I took on the way back home after Christmas when we stopped for lunch on top of the Sugar Loaf. It's the first time I have tried to use my ND Grads in anger, there is still some work to do! Still it didn't help that it was close to mid-day and the winter sun was close to it's highest in the sky.

Been away for ages due to lack of internet at Christmas, a conference which stared on the 4th January and then needing to pack to move house. Things should start to settle down again next week, and I'll be back more regularly to uploading and looking around.

Anyway just a quick one relitivly longer than envisaged discription tonight before hitting the sack. This is the first time I used my Polaroid 62mm Fader Variable ND Filter, even though I bought it quite a few months ago. I bought it because it was relatively cheap compared to the big stopper etc. and thought I'd give it a go. It had mixed reviews, but most of them sounded as if they were written by people with no patients, so for under £30 there wasn't much to lose. It's true that using it is a bit of guess work, but there is a scale marked up on the front element, and after some testing in a controlled light environment I now know exactly where each stop is on that scale and I can get a total of 9.5 stops difference on it. The quality is great and there is almost no colour cast, so all in all a success!
This was taken on Christmas eve, so no new toys used, but I’ve uploaded it using the publishing service on my new copy of Lightroom 3.4 :-), great idea, but it’s a shame I couldn’t have written this description there and also geotagged it before publishing, oh well, it’s on my wish list of updates.

Taken form here, like this Llanelli beach does not look that bad!

So earlier this evening I set off to a spot I have meticulously scouted previously driven past in the car to take a pre-planned shot only to find out that when I got there that there were too many trees in the way, I couldn’t see what I thought I could and that it actually wasn’t a view worth shooting anyway.

Still it was cold and I had made the effort to get out there with my camera, something I’ve been slack at lately so I thought I’d not waste the heat I'd lost and try some light trails in the lane while I was out. This was the best of the bunch I managed (by my eye anyway). There was a cracking one with a bus, but for some unknown reason the driver practically stopped the bus in the middle of the shot, and they only run once an hour, so I wasn’t hanging around.

The Donaupark is one of the largest Viennese parks covering an area of 800,000 square metres, but the best bit (for me anyway) is the Donauturm, it was constructed in 1964 along with the park. The views from the top of the 252m tower over Vienna are stunning, but for somthing completly different from that, this is a veiw of it from the ground!

Ages ago on a day trip to Skipton I stumbled upon Craven Court Shopping Centre, and as its website proclaims, it is quite unique, a vast difference from the hustle and bustle of the shopping centres in Leeds. The cafe upstairs sold the most amazing meringue/cream/jam thing ever, and if only the person who owned the blue cart had placed it centrally it would be prefect