St Pancras Renaissance

For a friend’s birthday in the SUMMER (for goodness sake), we went on a history tour of the ‘new’ St Pancras Grand hotel. It opened a couple of years ago following an enormous and expensive refurbishment which took the building from severely neglected Victorian station hotel to one of the most high profile venues in London, and for good reason because it’s quite breathtaking. The tour, which may have been an unusual birthday gift for some but fits right in with my oldest friend (er, by which I mean we have known each other since we were 6, not that she is 102) and the kind of things we enjoy, was very interesting and gave us the chance to see inside a hotel that we could never afford to actually stay in without a lottery win. We also learnt a lot about carpets.

It has now been such an embarrassingly long time since this visit that I can offer no good explanation as to why my aperture values seem so off. Well, that’s a bit of a lie. It was really quite dark inside so I suspect I had tried to open up the aperture as much as possible. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to cause too many problems.

34mm, f/4.5, 1/12 sec, ISO 1600

Instagram collection #3

It’s been a while since I updated shared some of my latest Instagram offerings. Again, these are all from photos taken with the iPhone 4S, which is my point-and-shoot camera of choice purely for the fact it’s always with me.

December arrives

Although I am making slow and steady progress through the backlog of photos from months past, I thought it was time to share something a little more up to date. Winter, it seems, has been switched on in the UK. This week I am not sure that temperatures have made it more than one degree above freezing where I live. However, combined with a week of working on an evening shift pattern, this means fun with the macro lens in our icy garden. I am starting to get the measure of both this lens (although I curse it for not having IS) and my own ability to hold completely still whilst taking a macro shot. It’s still a skill very much in need of practice, but these shots are some of the sharpest i’ve managed yet and I’m quite proud of them.

100mm, f/6.3, 1/160 sec, ISO 400

Photos from another garden

I like taking garden photos. This is because I have a garden that I quite like, generally. I also like my in-laws garden, which has recently had a bit of a horticultural make-over that looked fantastic when we visited in August (yes, still on the backlog…) This wasn’t long after I’d got the macro lens and I wanted to have a play with the f2.8 aperture it offered.

100mm, f/2.8, 1/160 sec, ISO 640

Spectating at London 2012: Paralympics Closing Ceremony

My ticket for the London 2012 Paralympics Closing Ceremony may be the best £100 I’ve ever spent. I can’t really explain how good this night was. Good company, amazing performances, a feel of celebration and appropriate closure, and the best send-off to an incredible summer. If I can’t explain it in written form, I can come a little closer with photos.

Spectating at London 2012

Still sticking with the Olympic theme for at least one more post, as well as GamesMaking, I was very lucky to see a few events too. I’d come through the very first ticket ballot with tickets for athletics, and then at a much later date decided it wasn’t every day that the Olympics came to town and bought some for the Paralympics closing ceremony.

These photos of the first trip to Olympic Park and the athletics are not particularly remarkable, but again are memories. I would have liked them to be better, but you try getting nice crisp shots of sporting action when you’re a mile up in the Olympic stadium with lots of very excited people. Who often had flags. Anyway, fair warning: there are a lot of photos under the cut…

300mm, 1/500 sec, f7.1, ISO 800

Autumn in the garden

In an effort to be more timely than I have recently (hello, 3 months of silence & belated posting), I thought I would share some photos from our garden recently. Autumn – in fact, winter now – is definitely upon us and there have been a good few days of blue skies and impressive colours. This has also been good for getting the new-ish macro lens out, although I am dependent on it not being too windy. It’s bad enough that I have to carefully time a macro shot as per my own, apparently in-built, sway, without Mother Nature joining in the game.

However, when she did make an appearance in bird-form, the 70-300mm lens was more appropriate.

300mm, 1/400 sec, f/8.0, ISO 1600

Bletchley Park

At some point last winter we paid a visit to Bletchley Park. We live close enough to this fascinating site that, frankly, we were ashamed to have not visited before. Particularly when you consider how much can be seen there, and that your entrance fee covers as many visits as you may wish to make in a year.

Bletchley Park, for those not familiar, is the site of secret codebreaking operations during WW2, the biggest & most famous being the breaking of the Enigma code. This was also the birthplace of modern computing, and the workplace of Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers and sometimes Ian Fleming. Due to the Official Secrets Act, the park was close to being bulldozed due to the fact no-one was legally permitted to speak of it’s history, and it is only in recent years that the 50 year silence was finally allowed to be broken. It is now run as a sort of massive visitor centre and museum, and in the last few weeks has secured Government and Lottery funding to continue to preserve and restore the site.

Many of the buildings – huts, in fact – where history was made are currently still boarded up and derelict in appearance, something which excites me the most when I have my camera. I know they need to be invested in and restored to preserve the history, but I have great affection for looking at places like this and knowing that what I’m seeing has remained largely untouched and undiscovered since monumental things happened there.

Needless to say, I cannot recommend enough that you pay a visit. These photos were taken on our second trip, as this time I knew to bring the camera with me.

21mm, f/8.0, 1/80 sec, ISO 100

Force India F1 car

Interrupting the enormously belated Olympics-related posts – although I say ‘interrupting’, it’s hardly been a speed of light experience – I take you back to the beginning of July. It was, as it happens, torch relay day in Northampton, but also a day when there was a Formula 1 car from the Force India team on display at our local theatre*. Enjoying both Grand Prix and having my camera on me from the aforementioned relay, it seemed stupid to ignore such an opportunity…

48mm, 1/30 sec, f5.6, ISO 800

Olympic GamesMaking photos

So, a mere 3 months later, I finally share with you some of my Olympic photos. This post is devoted to photos which will not stand out technically, or in many cases even visually. These are all taken on my iPhone 4S and represent photos as memories – to me, it doesn’t matter that they’re perhaps the wrong speed, too grainy, slightly blurred and/or wonky. Besides, I couldn’t exactly turn up ‘at work’ with my 60D and lenses, tripod, flash, filter system etc. etc. So I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. But this means there’s a honesty to these photos – although some were fractionally enhanced using Snapspeed or Instagram, I will confess – because I took them without thought to “photography” and with the thought of, “I want to remember this”.