16 posts tagged “photo”

I have recently launched a new photoblog at chrisleighphotography.com partly as a way to stimulate me to start posting again and also to allow a shift in emphasis in my posts.  I hope that putting more accent on the photo will allow me to write less but with more focus and that should help me to blog more frequently.  Anyway, why not make the jump and see if you like what I've done so far.

The other weekend I went to a big spring fair at Highnam House just west of Gloucester in aid of Gloucester Cathedral and a charity called Pied Piper.  Pied Piper support all sorts of projects but have just visited my wife's special school and presented them with two minibuses.  There were lots of things going on - morris dancing, brass bands, flower stalls, facer painting - all sorts.  And of course you could go round the extensive grounds which have lots of flowers, lakes and especially lots of wooden sculpture.  I really liked a group of yew trees which had died but instead of chopping them down they had been carved into beautiful sculptures where all the variegation of the wood comes out.  There was also an exhibition of vintage cars along with a few cars like the DeLorean from "Back to the Future".  I took a few photos of the cars, trying to get something slightly more interesting than the usual shot.  In the middle of taking these shots I noticed my reflection was in a lot of the shots, so I decided to deliberately take one where I made sure I was actually looking at the camera.  So I took the shot above with the camera held at waist height.  Hope you like it!

After having shown you some of my flickr photos over the past few posts, I thought I would show you something of what I do at school.  I spend a lot of time taking, collecting and uploading to web galleries photos about all aspects of school.  The school web gallery is at http://deancloseschool.info/photos and you are welcome to go and take a look.  Not all the photos are taken by me - some are taken by students and other staff.  Strictly speaking, it is internal - there is an outward-facing marketing website and photo gallery.  Mine is aimed at students and parents and is more candid and less strictly controlled than the marketing site. 

The website is coded by hand in html and css, but the galleries themselves are created using a Mac program called Galerie, fed from iPhoto and uploaded using an Ftp program called CyberDuck.  I have been using a MacPro since last September and have found it gives me a much more efficient and much faster workflow than I had previously on a PC where I used Photoshop Elements, PicSizer, Picasso and Filezilla.  I do have PhotoShop CS3 on the Mac but mostly I can do everything I need to do using iPhoto - straighten, crop, adjust exposure, contrast and colour - and even remove offending items like car number plates.  And of course, delete all the unsuitable images.  Our parents sign agreements for us to take and use photos but I do try to be careful that photos are appropriate, and we don't identify any of the youngsters. 

Parents and students alike seem very appreciative of the galleries and they are extremely popular with an average of 3000 page views a day and 250 unique visitors a day. There can be 4000 hits an hour and a gigabyte a day download - not bad for a school of some 450 students.  By the way, my hosting company is Siteground who give me 750Gb storage and 7500Gb bandwidth for £3 a month roughly, so I've got plenty of room left. I actually have four websites with them, one for online learning using Moodle with nearly 150 courses; this one for photos and videos, one for backup and testing of Moodle, and a fourth one we use for Drupal (for the school theatre), Wordpress (for a student blog/cms) and Gallery (for a new version of the photo gallery). 

And now for some of my favourites - the ones on land:

Catch some more on my flickr account!  Or look at my "Best" collection which has sets automatically created by dopiaza's set generator.

In previous posts I've shared some of my favourite/most popular photos from my flickr account.  We've had flowers and people.  I think getting good pictures of flowers is relatively easy, people slightly more difficult, but I can't say I feel at all successful taking photos of trains.  The pictures generally don't seem to portray the raw power of the huge beast, or the romantic flavour of the smoking, steaming, hissing creature.  I shall keep trying, but I hope you like some of these I've taken over the past year or so.

The three photos above are 92203 Black Prince at Cheltenham Racecourse station in Gloucestershire; 30777 on the Great Central Railway at Loughborough, and an engine under restoration at Loughborough, England.

Diesel railcars taken at St.Ives in Cornwall, England and at Mayrhofen in the Zillertal, Austrian Tyrol. The next one is an electrically powered inter-city train at Jenbach in Austria.

The next two were taken on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway in England and feature 92203 Black Prince and a prairie tank 5542.

This one was taken in the Zillertal, near Mayrhofen in the Austrian Tyrol.  Most of the trains were diesel but a few trains a day were steam hauled old-fashioned passenger cars.

This is my favourite photo from a trip on the Swiss railways and was taken at Wengen near the famous Eiger mountain.  The train goes up to Kleine Scheidegg where another train goes to up to the Jungfrau Joch, the highest railway station in Europe.
The engine above is 26043, a class 26 diesel I and others have been working on for the past six years, trying to restore it to full operational status.  Last year I did a lot of work painting it (the picture shows it before painting!).  The controls are being finished now, and it is being prepared for a topcoat of paint, ready for action in the summer, working on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway in England.

Couldn't decide which ones to leave out!  Hope you like them!

Recently I've uploaded some flower pictures to my flickr account and had a fair few comments and favourites so I thought I would reproduce a few here.  Hope you like them.

Just had an email from mini-itx.com who do miniature computer motherboards (and micro ones see the nano-itx).  They said that cnet had a photo gallery to celebrate 5 years of mini-itx computer design. 

More detail can be seen here on the mini-itx site - and there are many more projects, definitely worth looking at down the right hand side of the web pages.  Some absolutely brilliant designs - very imaginative.