This is my original iPhone bought on the release day over here in the UK. It’s served me very well for over 9 months now, and I’m sorry to see it go. However, it’s all for a good cause: the upgrade to the iPhone 3G.

Taking the shot was actually more tricky than you’d think. To get the blacks to look right, you couldn’t really use the ambient lighting with flash and we didn’t have any studio lights available. Instead, I pre-focused, turned off all the lights and fired flash only, bouncing to diffuse and get a softer light.

I had some black fabric which was okay, but with the dual flash arrangement we had going it was way too reflective. In the end, one of Mark’s t-shirts turned out to be pretty good in providing a non-reflective background.

Bryant Park is a fairly small park in central Manhattan, right next to the New York Public Library and a street away from Times Square. This was taken on our first full day out in NYC, having gotten in the night before at about 9pm and, as you can see, the weather was absolutely fantastic.

Most of that day was spent looking at the big tourist attractions and this place provided a much needed rest after a hard day’s walking (at least, by my standards!) If you look to the left of the picture, you’ll see the Empire State Building.

This photo in particular stood out for me. I like the unusual perspective that the 10-22 brings out, and the way the trees creep in from the edge as if growing directly towards the sunlight.

Any regular readers should expect a lot more of these NYC photos for the time being, as I have a couple good ones to show off!

Well, as I mentioned in the blog, I had a little trip to the States where a heck of a lot of photography was done. Very pleased with this shot in particular, taken about 850ft up on top of the Rockefeller Centre in New York City - otherwise known as the Top of the Rock.

This shot was taken with the 10-22, and was stitched together from about 7 images (4 covering the top, 3 on the bottom). CS3’s Photomerge utility is exceptionally good for this, and the ‘inverted fisheye’ you get from it in this case really adds a lot to the character of the photo.

Another from the series of photos taken after a very heavy frost on campus. Although the duck was a bit of wary of me I grabbed this before she flew off. Favourite thing about this photo is the bokeh, and it shows what the 40D can do at ISO 1000 with very little noise correction.

Recently we had a (graduated) university friend visit us and needed somewhere to go out for the day. Being located around Coventry, there’s absolutely bugger all to do here, so we decided to visit Stratford instead as it’s a half-hour drive and there are vaguely interesting things to do. Since the RSC is being bulldozed refurbished, we went a little in the opposite direction and visited the Butterfly Farm.

It’s a relatively small place; however, there are a whole heap of different butterflies there. As a testament to this, I have precisely no idea what on earth the species in the above photo is (although if you do, please comment!) One note is that since most of these guys are tropical, it’s damned humid even in winter. Large jackets are not advisable, that’s for sure.

Way back when in October, I visited Keele University to attend a summer school on hydrodynamic stability theory. In essence, this covers topics such as perturbation theory applied to fluid dynamics and is hopefully something I’m going to study later on.Keele is also the largest campus-based university in the UK, and has its own arboretum. We had an afternoon off to look around, and I saw this opportunity for a shot. Clearly the farmer had just laid down a whole load of seeds and this attracted the attention of a whole load of birds for some free food. The conversion to black and white is to give a little more atmosphere to the shot.

Another from the series of shots taken at the London Science Museum. The ring itself is a digital message-board, with short notes written by visitors to the museum; these can be seen in the inner LCD bit.

Again, this was taken with the 10-22 which was absolutely brilliant for all of these shots. Ultra-wide angle is definitely the way to go when you’re taking these shots. Auto-focus speed and sharpness is as good as (or better than) the other two L lenses in my collection.

Myself, Sarah and Mark all traveled down to London a couple of weeks ago to visit the London Science Museum. It was a great day out and the first time I’d been to London in quite some time. The place itself is vast, but there’ll be more about that later.

This particular shot was taken on the way back to the tube. It caught Mark’s eye and we went and had a butchers. To capture a bit more of an “arty” shot I took a long exposure and balanced on the nearby railing. However, I do wish that the tree lights weren’t there; it would have been a lot nicer without them.

As an aside, the 10-22 was absolutely great; I was a little worried that it was too “specialized” for my style of shooting, but it simply didn’t come off all day. For super wide angle architecture and shots like this you can’t beat it.

Taken with my brand new 200mm f/2.8L, which was had for quite a bargain off of POTN. We went back to possibly my favourite place of campus — the Tocil lakes.

Coming back after the Christmas holidays, it was pretty obvious that nobody had fed the ducks in a while. They were everywhere, and when someone came along with bread, there was massive amounts of attackage which made for a good photo op.

The first term as a postgrad in the maths department has been really busy, and most of the delays in posting these new photos in the first place has mainly been down to a complete lack of any photos even being taken. However in a period of 2-3 days I not only received the new 40D but also the 10-22mm ultra-wide angle lens.

After that it was just a matter of finding a good opportunity to go out and shoot, which came when we had a particularly heavy frost one morning (about -4C). This is a shot of the Rootes accommodation block on campus, which houses a good proportion of the first year undergraduates.

Mostly, I wanted to concentrate on capturing the amazing sky which was totally barren of any clouds. The wide angle also bends the perspective which I have always found to be a fascinating effect, and also adds a noticeable vignette which was emphasised in Lightroom.

Performance-wise the 10-22 is outstanding. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was an EF-S mount instead of EF, it would no doubt be branded with the legendary L tag.