Tag Archives: England

London Shots, Part Deux

Posted by Steve on July 26, 2012 No comments

Slowly working my way through the shots I had planned to process. Here is the next batch!

While walking past Buckingham Palace, we didn’t plan on going in, but I would be remiss if I didn’t grab a shot of one of the guards.

From the London Eye, everything seems so small! I loved the skewed view of this shot, and the curve of the earth.

“As every school child knows, there have been ravens at the Tower of London since time immemorial, and if they ever leave, the monarchy and the tower itself will fall.”

While visiting the Prime Meridian, we got a great view of the city. You can see them building up te Horse Arena to be used for the Olympics.

Highgate Cemetery is separated into and East and West side. We opted for the East side and I am glad we did. It’s covered with overgrown graves and very ominous.

London Shots

Posted by Steve on July 17, 2012 No comments

As promised, here are a few of the good shots as I go through and process them.

Click to Embiggen

This panorama was shot from up on Parliament Hill in Hampstead Heath. We stopped off at the Southampton Arms pub and had a few GREAT pints of cider. Somehow we thought it would be a good idea to stagger through the park and hike all the way up to the top of the hill. I am really glad we did since I was able to take this shot. I used Photoshop CS5 to stitch the panorama together.

Click to Embiggen

Here is your standard picture of the Clock Tower. Apparently, Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the tower. We stopped along the bridge and I snapped this one pretty quick. I was happy with how it came out.

Click to Embiggen

Click to Embiggen

On the Thursday we were there, the building known as The Shard was having its opening ceremonies. Part of that was shooting off lasers across the city! I didn’t have much time to get to a closer location and thought that, through the London Eye would be a good shot. I set up for about an hour and got both of these shots. One is the lasers going off and the other is a Long Exposure of the Eye as it spun. The laser show started at 10:15pm and the Eye stops moving at 10:00pm

Click to Embiggen

Lastly (for now) is the London Underground. On the last day I realized I didn’t have any good shots of the Tube. I loved the blur on the train for this one, but had to do some cleaning up of some other parts of the shot. Lets just say someone gave a crack at photobombing.

I will try and have some more shots up soon.

We’re Back!

Posted by Steve on July 16, 2012 No comments

This was the start of our London Journey

Hey all!

We are now back from London! We had a total blast the whole time out there and I took a metric F-Ton of pictures! (They use the metric system over there.) Most of them are the touristy style pics, you know, because that’s what we were. I did manage to set up and take some good solid pictures that will require some post processing and tweaking. Those will be trickling out over the coming days. Sarah actually as a very good day by day accounting of our trip over on her website.

Sarah got a few snaps of me taking snaps

I did want to touch on a few things that really made the trip though. (from a Gadget/Tech/Game perspective, that is.) For my photography stuff I brought the whole backpack of gear, but rarely used all of it. For general city travels I used my messenger bag and typically just the camera and my 18-270mm lens. It was great for all around shooting. On a few days I brought my 35mm with me, but rarely needed to swap it out. I found that carrying around my full 15-20lb bag of gear would wear me out fast. Also, I am not ashamed to say that a lot of shots were done in AUTO. I was there as a tourist, I liked some of what I saw so I wanted a picture. These were for memories, not art. I know there are some photogs out there that claim they would never use the AUTO setting on their camera……they are full of crap. It’s there for a reason. To get the memory you want at a good quality.

Setting up for a shot of the London Eye

That said, I also set up a number of shots specifically to be processed and done in an artistic way. These were set in M and bracketed. The downside being that 1: I have a large number of photos to go through, and 2: Sometimes I would forget I was bracketed and ended up with some shots all over the place in exposure. (what, I was tired!) All of my Touristy shots are in my gallery on the site here. My Artistic shots will be trickling out as I work on them and probably uploaded to Flickr. Keep an eye out!

Actually, we had good Signal everywhere

We had a very fun experience with Cell phones while in the UK as well. My friend loaned me an old iPhone 3G for the trip and my wife as using her unlocked Motorola Razr Maxx. First thing at the airport I tried one of the kiosks to grab a sim that we could at least use to call our driver. It was an O2 card that was 10£. Sadly, I didn’t use it at all, it had no data and we found our driver before needing it. Next, while out we hit up a local shop that dealt in various phone stuff. I picked up a 3 sim that had the low end of texts and min, but unlimited data for 15£. Since we were only using data while here it would be perfect. It worked perfect in the old iPhone but in the wife’s Motorola it wouldn’t get any data. The guy said to go to the 3 store in westfields and they would fix it.

Had I realized (or not been tired from the plane) there was a mall right next to me, I would have just gone there. The 3 store was shit for help. Their on staff folks were clueless and their phone support couldn’t figure out the Android APN settings. We decided to hit the O2 store and got a sim that had 500mb data topped up to 1.5gb. The Guru was enamored with the Motorola and set up the APN very quickly. Everything worked great! Again, had I been more aware of my mental state, I would have just had them top up the card I bought at Heathrow.

As a side note, while out and about we noticed that O2 had better service with better coverage, but 3 had that unlimited data factor for cheap. The final score board was 1 O2 Sim from the airport never used. 10£ 1 3 Sim from random store, never used 15£ 1 3 Sim from random store, used in iPhone 15£ 1 O2 sim from O2 store, used in Motorola, 20£

Yeah, that’s a game.

From the gaming side of things, we had a great meetup with some of the RetroNickRadio fans out in the UK! You can find the details of that over at the RetroNick site. We were also clued in to a little hole in the all Arcade located right near the London Eye. I got very few pictures and didn’t have enough time to really explore, but it was a great find.

I know this post is starting to drag on so I will cut out here. Expect some more excerpts from the trip in the coming weeks!

On Holiday

Posted by Steve on June 27, 2012 No comments

Cheers mates!

Just a quick post to say that we are heading off to jolly ol’ England for a bit of a holiday! Many gadgets will be used and pictures will be taken. An interesting note, we are not planning on taking any laptops! This will be a little bit of an experiment. Sarah and I are only taking the iPads and our phones. I’ll stock up on Memory cards and clear off the iPad to use for storage for pictures, but yeah, no laptop.

We rented a flat in London and it is supposed to have Internet access. to spread this into WiFi I picked up a [amazon_link id=”B004T8FC66″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]ZuniConnect Travel Router[/amazon_link]. So far this thing is awesome. It will bridge the connection from a wired LAN to WiFi, or the reverse, Or echo an existing WiFi! This will work out great to share the connection with the iPads and phones. So far I have used it to extend my WiFi connection to a wired only machine and it worked great. More reports to come.

We have a huge list of things to see and fun to be had, including a day trip out to Stonehenge! Keep an eye on Twitter for some potential updates along the way!