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!