Here’s a quick look at my average day - staring at a screen full of code!

If I remember right, this is some JavaScript code utilising mootools to do some funky effects. If you want, you can see it in action.

In a related note, I’m seriously considering starting a 365 or maybe a 52 (that is, one photo per day or week). I think it might be nice. We’ll have to see if I can keep it up!

So this is the first post in quite a while. My plan for this year is to post one photo a week, starting from now. So hopefully, every Sunday, I will post some new stuff!

This one is continuing the Iceland theme, located at the same glacier I posted earlier. Around the glacial tongue, large puddles (actually more like small lakes) form where the ice melts below the surrounding volcanic rock.

It was a really nice day and there was a lot of blue in the sky, and this is something I tried to emphasise by bumping up the saturation on the blues. I always thought this picture a kind of other-world type look; the volcanic rocks, random pool and a fleeting glimpse of the mountain range.

This is a quick shot of some of the amazing lagoons you can find in Iceland. This batch is very close to the Keflavik airport, at about 10-15 minutes away from the Iceland’s main airport. The very light blue colour comes from silica and other minerals occuring naturally in the water.

In fact, this is part of the Blue Lagoon facility where you can bathe/swim in pools heated using geothermal energy. It’s really quite something.

I’m back with another picture from the Iceland trip. My intention is to post one a day for the next week - maybe it’ll look like I’m actually using my camera gear this way!

This is the Skógafoss waterfall, one of the largest in Iceland at about 180ft, if memory serves correctly, and is probably one of the most photographed sights. It can easily be seen from the main highway, Route 1.

In any case, I should probably point out that on this particular day - and on another three of our four days in the mainland - the weather was horrible. Very dreary lighting, mist and rain everywhere and I was struggling to come up with anything interesting from the photography point of view. Luckily, there were a couple of other tourists there and eventually my eye saw this. It just reminds me of how utterly insignificant a human life is compared to some of the other stuff we can find out there in nature.

I have to admit, going to Iceland I didn’t realise the sheer size of the glaciers you find there, or any of the surrounding features you get around them. Near Skaftafell National Park are a series of glacial tongues where the Vatnajökull glacier comes over the existing mountain ranges.

Probably the most striking thing is how blue the ice is, which is to do with the way that the snow forming the glacier is compressed. Near the edge, you also get the ridges that you see here. I’m not sure what forms them, but I assume it’s to do with the way that the ice melts. In any case, I think it makes a great picture.

Some more pictures from Iceland to come!

After a long hiatus, I have some new photos! Recently, myself and Sarah travelled to Iceland to take in the sights and see some amazing scenery. This is - hopefully - the first of many posts to outline some of the better stuff we saw.

One of the best days was our visit to Skaftafell National Park, a very large glacier on the south-west coast. One of the things we were hoping to get a good look at was the Jokulsarlon glacial lagoon a few kilometers up the road. Basically it’s a large lagoon where icebergs forming from the glacier head out to sea.

Unfortunately… on the day we were there, it was extremely foggy and visibility was down to probably less than 100ft. However, we were treated to the following sight of some wild seals! Of course, just after this shot it started to rain horrificly, and all the kit got wet - as happened many times afterwards.

I know that I already posted one of the London Eye, but really it was too tempting to post this one as well! After we got off of the Eye we went and had a meal, and afterwards I managed to capture this from the Golden Jubilee bridge.

Really the conditions were ideal and I got lucky with the light. Very little wind, extremely still water in the Thames, which really made this an obvious candidate for the long exposure treatment. However… I’d neglected to bring my tripod. Oops - not doing that again!

Luckily, if you’ve ever been to the bridge, you’d know that the handrails are spaced just far enough that you can slip in a DSLR lens in-between them, and brace the camera against one of the supporting columns. So I got this pretty sharp 4s exposure.

This photo has been a while coming, taken back in the summer. That weekend we were celebrating a friend’s birthday and went down to see the stage musical Wicked. This was the view from the side balcony of the flat we were staying in, around the London Docklands area. and I just had to capture it - luckily, we’d arrived in time for the sunset and there weren’t any clouds in the way to spoil the view.

I decided against a HDR-type image, as the “gherkin” was nicely lit up and, to be honest, the buildings surrounding it weren’t particularly fantastic.

I’ve been asked by a few people to post some more images from my NYC trip (which, by the way, was completely awesome). So here we go.

If you ever visit NYC, one thing you need to do is visit Times Square at night. No other time of the day will give it justice, and trust me on that one. One of the truly awesome things though, is that this place is always busy. Doesn’t matter if it’s 4am or 4pm; it will be rammed.

The nice thing is that it’s right next to all the Broadway theatres (which should also be on your list), so it’s pretty easy to go visit. I’m not big on watching theatre productions, but we went to see Spamalot anyway at the Shubert Theatre. Apparently it finishes in early January, so if you’re a Python fan you should get there whilst you still can. There is an awesome restaurant with great cake right next door - we loved it so much, we ate there twice in four days.

Anyway, the idea behind the shot was to get a nice - but different - capture of that commonest of vehicles in Manhatten: the taxi. I stood around for about 40 minutes waiting for another Nikon user to get out of my way before I finally got the shot I wanted. I took the panning shot with the 10-22 to add extra distortion to the motion blur, and also to ensure that most of the cab was out of focus apart from the logo.

I love these guys! This was another from the same set as the Pelican from a semi-recent visit to a nature reserve. They have a little hatch (is that the right word?) next to the river and aren’t very shy at all. They were quite friendly and indeed there were quite a few others standing nearby.

My aim was really to get the meerkat looking like it was in a natural environment. The trouble with nature reserves is that you really get a distorted picture of what’s going on with cars and people in the background. This one has come out quite well, because the kats were actually elevated which put them at pretty much the perfect height to take the shot.

All of that day was spent with my 100-400 glued to the 40D. I haven’t used it in quite some time, so it was really great getting out and about taking some nature shots.