OK, it's a little late, but I've been away.

I spent the Easter break in Donegal with my wife and baba at her folks place. All in all, much relaxing and eating. God bless people who buy 2 year olds Easter Eggs, knowing full well it's daddy's responsibility to make sure they don't eat too much chocolate and that it doesn't go to waste...

More importantly, this trip was a great chance for me to plan some camera activities into my days. Whilst not all of them came off and most of the ones that did didn't work out, it was a valuable learning experience and I picked up or proved out some ideas. I'll post stuff over the next few days as I work through the 300 (yes, 300. That's 100 a day) photographs I took.

For now, Happy Easter.

(1/500, F2.2, 50mm, ISO-400, 22/3/2008)

(1/25, F1.8, 50mm, ISO-400, 22/3/2008)

(1/50, F2.8, 50mm, ISO-400, 22/3/2008)

The middle picture is a little soft, but I really liked the colour of the rose. I'm growing to like taking pictures of flowers, (flowers...growing... I crack me up, I really do). After spending an hour trying to photograph my daughter and her proving that the baby is quicker than the eye (or the camera), the lack of movement in the flower is a godsend.

I’m going to be away for a few days this week and, having just packed my bag, I made the executive decision not to take my camera.

I’d always planned that it would become part of my standard kit, but I’m guessing an industrial estate in Staines isn’t likely to give me a lot of time or opportunity to take good photo. I have packed my current photo read though, so expect a review of it when I get back.

In the meantime, since there are flowers in the house at the moment…

 (1/400, f/2.2, manual, focal length - 50mm, ISO - 800, 18/11/07 13:33)

 This was taken with the canon 1.8 lens that I’m playing with at the moment. It’s taken a while, but I think the whole aperture thing is finally sinking in and I’m finally getting away from the “must use extremes” approach that’d I’d defaulted to on this lens.

In terms of post processing, this shot is based from the raw image with the white balance (left on auto on the camera) changed to auto using Lightroom. You’d think this wouldn’t make a difference, but surprisingly it does. Geoff mentioned a few posts back in some comments that the cameras all use their own algorithms to decide on colours etc, and he’s right. Take a look at the original below.

I’ve also cropped the image to push the rose out towards the top right corner. There is a whole theory about this in the various magazines and books and I’ll try to explain this sometime soon in “snap speak”.

I'm quite concious that all photographs are subjective and that people will prefer the second over the first (or just hate them both). for me, I feel the first one draws you in more and maybe gives a softer feel - course I'm an IT geek, so what would I know about flowers...

One final thing... Having just grabbed the camera settings for this shot I look in horror at the ISO figure. Once again I’ve fallen foul of a night of messing - ISO 800 was not intentional!