Birmingham Night Shot

We spent the night in Birmingham at the weekend and, like most of the rest of the country, there was quite heavy snow by domestic standards. We were staying on the 19th floor of the Rotunda building in a fab apartment – one of the nicest we have ever stayed in- which had slide open floor-to-ceiling windows. Actually not as dangerous as it sounds – there was a hip high barrier made from glass and tubular steel. This is a 5 second exposure at F8. It’s actually handheld, with the camera jammed up against the side of the window frame. It’s also manually focused using the Live View magnification. Surprisingly short depth of field, given the aperture.

Birmingham

Green Bee Eater

I’ve just been processing some of the better pictures from our holiday in India for stock upload and came across this shot. I have lots of these: shots of interesting subject matter that are never going to make it through the submission process. I’m pretty sure it’s a green bee eater. These are lovely: the colours are fantastic.

Green Bee Eater

There was a huge amount of droppings on the concrete which I admit to having clone stamped out in about half a minutes careless post processing.

More admin – new banner

I had to change the picture – the horizon was knocking my eye out every time I looked at it. Doing the custom crop to the precise dimensions that this theme requires has exposed an irritating feature – or rather absence of feature – in Aperture: you can’t save a custom crop size. The original picture this is taken from is here. The croc was at theĀ Ranganathittu Sanctuary.