Category: photos
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The Scented City
We spent a few days in Cologne over Easter. I took lots of photographs. Here are two that have had some tweaking in Lightroom. I'm especially pleased with the second one. The effect is almost like an impressionist painting to my eye.
Cologne by night; a funfair across the Rhine.
It didn’t actually look like this. The things you can do with software.
Pulp Magazine Covers for All
The [Pulp-O-Mizer](http://thrilling-tales.webomator.com/derange-o-lab/pulp-o-mizer/pulp-o-mizer.html) is a fun thing that lets you generate pulp-magazine-cover-style images, with your own text and good range of images, backgrounds, colours, etc. You can download web-size versions of your creations, or get them printed on cards, notebooks, mugs, etc, at [Zazzle](http://www.zazzle.com/); though I haven’t managed to work out how to get it to use the UK version of the Zazzle site while still keeping your generated image.
Here’s one that I made using the title of a story of mine. It remains unpublished so far, but it was the short story that was the seed for the [novel I finished in November](http://devilgate.org/blog/2012/12/02/november-spawned-some-words-but-not-that-many/).
Day Trip
We had a wee day trip to Cambridge yesterday (Monday). Lovely city. I took some photographs. They're so small and unlinked because, I think, I'm experimenting with a plugin for Lightroom that uploads them directly to the blog. But I have a few wrinkles to iron out, I think. There are bigger versions of them [at my Flickr account](http://www.flickr.com/photos/devilgate/), if you're interested.
First, some punters punting on the Cam:
Then the famous King’s College Chapel. More of a cathedral, really:
This wee guy looks decidedly unhappy:
There’s a pair of war memorials in a side chapel. A famous name at position 2 of the WWI one:
There’s plenty of stained glass, of course, but in another side chapel we see this interesting creature:
Then on to Trinity College Chapel, where Isaac Newton stands in marble:
Here’s a closeup of Newton. I can’t work out what he’s holding:
And above him there’s this rather attractive chandelier and dramatic ceiling:
New Camera; Also Reviewing Purchases
I finally have a dSLR. No longer do I have to hold my camera up in front of me in that quite silly-looking way; once again I can look through a viewfinder. Hurrah!
I say “once again” because I used to have — well, still do have, but almost never use — a film SLR, namely an Olympus OM-1.
With the new one I’ve gone over to Canon, though. It’s an EOS 600D; which rather oddly is known in America as the Rebel T3i and in Japan as the Kiss X5
Here’s a picture of Clapton Pond to show you what it can do. Click through for a better view on Flickr.
I bought it online for full £200 less than I’d’ve had to pay at Jessops; and by going to a site called DigitalRev I saved about £100 over Amazon’s prices. DigitalRev’s service was incredibly good: my camera arrived in London from Hong Kong in two days. It took a few more days for DHL to get it to me, but that’s not DigitalRev’s fault. Really astonishingly fast service, and for the cheapest price I could find anywhere.
The only slightly annoying thing is that I clicked a link in their email asking for comments (essentially to say the above); it took me to a site called Reseller Ratings, where I filled in a few boxes, and then hit “Submit”… whereupon it wanted me to create a profile before I could submit the review. And I just couldn’t face it. I’ll almost certainly never go to that site again, so even though it’s only a name and email (and password) I just thought, “No. I’d rather put a good review up on my own site.”
So think on that, people running review sites.