I don’t usually take pictures of poeple or things that move at night. Mainly because it isn’t easy to do. This shoot was organised by someone on the Portsmouth At Night flickr group. Paul. He kindly supplied us all with the lighting required to take some pictures! It was brilliant, the only real set back was my lens. Since buying the lens and only really taking night photos I have given away and sold off all my other lenses. This means sometimes the distortion is too much and can ruin an image. So I think a new lens is on the cars very soon.
Here are some of my favorites of the night:
Best of the night
An example of the distortion problem
Nice shadows
There are plenty more that can be found here. More updates on the way.
My initial idea with this blog was to document every single photography “outing” but of course that got neglected. So, time for a catch up!
Fireworks at King George V Playing Fields - November 2007
I didn’t take a great deal of photos here and I’m not particularly happy with them! So, instead of posting pictures I will post a link.
The Spud Farm
This was an unexpected find really, we went there to take picture of the exterior but we found an easy entrance to the farm building its self which appeared to be some sort of vehicle maintenance building.
Inside were some really nice old buses. Click here to see full set.
Studio Shoot At SCC
This was a photo shoot that me and a friend went to which was hosted by the Solent Camera Club. The full set can be found here.
There are more updates coming that will have their own posts. Keep on the lookout and subscribe to my RSS Feed while you are here!
This post is REALLY late, but I am trying to catch up now. So, back in November 2007(Yes that really is last year) me and the usual night photographers headed down to the Tipner area of Portsmouth. This is where the Pounds scrap yard is located. Inside the scrap yard in clear view from the M275 is where the two tanks that reside there. They appear to be WWII tank amphibious type craft, although I don’t know the history or uses of them.
After about 20 minutes of scoping out the area and looking for good access points, we headed back and grabbed the cameras from the car which was parked in a nearby car park (more on this later). We did the usual climbing over the fence thing where clothes get ripped and equipment gets damaged. Naturally we made a b-line for the tanks as that is what we went there for! Here are some of the pictures I took:
After and hour or so of shooting, we decided it was a good idea to head off (it was about 2AM at this point) so we spent a good 15 minutes trying to get out, after one of us getting covered in slimy mud everything went OK. After more walking we got back to the car, packed all the equipment away. Everything seemed OK, but then we tried to drive out of the car park, only to find the gate had been well and truly locked. “F**K!!”
Next we all got out the car and started evaluating our options. We could of stayed in the car park until morning, break down the gate or remove fences. We really did not want to do any of this. So we sat there for a while twiddling our thumbs. Many swear words later, we started having a good look around. After heading into some overgrown land which was adjacent to the car park with no barriers inbetween (Apart from some big ass thorn/bramble bushes!) we noticed at the end there was a gate, it was slightly open!
20 minutes go by, and the whole area that was covered in bramble bushes was now almost flat! some serious force on the gate between three of us opened it (just) and we proceeded out of the area. I would love to see the person’s face who saw the car in there and locked it when they returned the next day. They were probably expecting to see us sat in the car. OWNED.
I can’t remember much more than that, I think I took more pictures after that. When I find them, I will post them to flickr, which is causing me problems at the moment. They don’t seem to want my money for a pro account. So a good 2000 images are hidden from public view. I will post about this soon.
Seeing as this blog is somewhat geared towards my night photography stuff, I thought I’d start sharing some other people’s work as well that I have found on the internet. So to start off is a video. I found this while searching for something to blog about as I thought after neglecting this blog for so long I better get some updates going on!
Anwyway, just watch it.
On a sidenote, somehow several months ago I broke the styles on this website meaning things were looking pretty bad, so today I just tidied things up a bit. I think I’ve just gone and made it worse.
Yesterday, I received my new camcorder. The JVC Everio GZ-MG130. First off, I would like to say this is a brilliant little piece of kit. It is even smaller than my digital camera!
One of the first problems I encountered when I used this camera was actually on the PC side of things. This being a hard drive camcorder it produces files, this means you have to transfer them to your PC before you can do anything with them. This is fine, as long as you can use the .MOD files it produces.
I’m using Adobe Premier to edit my videos at the moment which does not have the ability to open .MOD files, which I was quite annoyed about as I had read somewhere that it could actually open them. Luckily the proprietary .MOD files are just uncompressed MPEG2 files, this means you can easily change the file extension. there is a good solution which is so easy but a real pain in the backside as it takes a long time when you have a lot of files to “convert”. Here is a quick run down:
These steps are for Windows XP users, this may work on Windows Vista but I have not been able to test it.
Step One:
First, go to the folder where the .MOD files are located from the camcorder, click Tools > Folder Options > Go to “View” tab as shown in the image below:
Step Two:
Now scroll down the list of options with the tick boxes next to them. Find the row named “Hide extensions for known file types” (circled in red on the image blow) and un-tick the box to the left of it.
Step Three:
Now press OK, your video files should now all show the video file extensions (.mod) as shown below. Note the files have already been converted in this example as I am a lazy person.
If you are computer savvy, you will probably know what’s coming next.
Step Four:
Click one of the .MOD files once to select it. Then click again, this will make the file name editable. Like this:
Delete the MOD in the file name so it looks like this(do not de-select it or press enter yet.):
Next, simply enter the letters “AVI” like this:
Then, press enter. This will bring up a prompt asking you this:
Simply click “Yes” and your conversion is complete.
What to do next
Now all you need to do is repeat that process for every single file you want to use from the JVC GZ-MG130, it is a slow process. Let’s hope they ditch that silly idea and release some firmware updates to all their cameras so it does it by default!
If anyone knows of a free app that allows you to change the file extensions in batch, let me know and I will add it here and link you as I would be very grateful!
Yesterday, I received my new camcorder. The 
