If you ever visit my blog, you will know that it’s been a while since I’ve posted a new entry.

The reason for this is that I’ve been a little busy lately 🙂 Work has been manic (well it’s always manic so that’s a terrible excuse) but then I’ve just moved house – probably one of the most stressful thing’s I’ve ever done! Yes I’ve moved before, but for some reason this one took its toll (maybe it’s because I’ve also hit 50 and it hurts more – who knows).

So I’ve been a busy boy. I’m writing this posting on a Sunday night, just after we unpacked our last box, so we are feeling pretty good right now.

Anyway even though I’ve been up to a lot of stuff, I still had time to take the camera out. Back in July (yes it’s been that long) we went to Disney in California for a week. We stayed at the Paradise Pier Hotel and hit the parks each day.

It’s actually been a while since we’ve visited Disneyland, we normally go to Florida, but we decided to go somewhere closer (and cheaper) as we were about to move. Staying in a Disney hotel was fantastic, we could literally walk out of the hotel directly into either Disneyland or Disney California Adventure and of course we were right by Downtown Disney too.

The hotel had a couple of super posh restaurants – too nice for us – so we ate most nights in Downtown Disney. We did get to enjoy the Concierge Service though, which entailed going to this private room each night were we got free drinks and “nibbles”.

The kids had a blast, we went on all the cool rides – thankfully Abi is now old enough to not want to go on the really baby ones and the weather was fantastic.

Most nights found us in “Earl of Sandwich” (James favorite) or Tortilla Jo’s (Lisa’s favorite) where they served the best tableside made Guacamole I’ve ever had.

As a keen photog I of course took my camera, but this time did a little experiment. I’ve been carrying around my D4 DSLR and some heavy glass for a while now. Let me tell you it definitely takes some amazing pictures, but my god it’s heavy! Now I’ve been reading a lot about people getting rid of their expensive DSLRs and replacing them with small mirrorless cameras. So as an experiment I took with me a small Fujifilm x20 compact mirrorless camera. Some day’s I took out the D4, others just the x20. Here’s the question, can you tell which image came from which camera?

Remember the D4 and 28-300mm lens costs $7,000. The x20 cost $400.

Here are some of the pictures from the trip.

I was a little bored this afternoon as Lisa and Abi had gone out for a girls day out, and James was really engrossed in his XBox game.  So after lazing around all morning I went for a run and then decided to get the camera out.

It was a little miserable outside so I decided to photograph something indoors.  But what to shoot?  In the end I went for a self-portrait.

Now I’ve taken a few self-portraits before, but quite frankly it’s a pain to do.  You have to set up the lights without having the subject in front of you (because the subject is actually fiddling with the lights), then you have to turn the camera onto timer mode and run backwards and forwards and well take LOADS of pictures.  Getting good focus is a nightmare, you have to go to manual focus and then adjust, shoot, adjust, shoot etc., until you nail it.

I thought I’d do something a little different and as I spend my life in front of my computer I thought that might be a fun picture.  So out came the Mac, out came the lights and the setup began.

One of my favorite photographers is a guy called Joe McNally (he really is amazing).  Anyway I’ve been to some of Joe’s classes and one thing I saw him do was take a portrait picture of a guy on his computer.  What he did was place a piece of white paper on the computer screen and fire a light against the white paper that reflected back on the person’s face, this made it look like the computer was lighting the person – and it looked cool.

So that was light one.  I wanted to shoot the portrait kind of in the dark so I needed a back light behind me to provide separation for my hair and t-shirt.  So that was light two.  Things were looking pretty good, but the front of the computer was really dark, so that was light three.  The last problem was the Apple logo on the computer wasn’t bright enough, so I had to take a second picture without lights with a longer exposure to get the logo, and then put that into my picture in post processing!  Fun eh?

So that was the setup, next I had to take the picture.  So you’re probably wondering how many pictures is LOADS to get the focus right.  Well this afternoon it was 79 pictures.  79 attempts to get a picture in focus that I liked.  In reality focus took around 40 pictures, then nearly another 40 to get a picture of me that I was willing to share – hey, photographers don’t like being in front of the camera either!

Once I got the shot I had to do some tidying up in Photoshop and of course add that bright Apple logo to the front.  I didn’t do too much here, brought back some of the shadows in my t-shirt, sharpened the image and added some clarity (another form of sharpening) that makes me look all manly 🙂

Here’s the end result, and I’m pretty pleased with it too.  In the end it was a fun afternoon and well worth the time.

RecOp (Recreational Optional) of Western Washington is a competitive gymnastics program that provides gymnasts an environment to develop skills and abilities in gymnastics with quality training and competition experience while developing confidence and sportsmanship without strenuous costs or time commitments. At least that’s what their website says!

For Abi (my beautiful little girl – OK she’s nine so not so little any more but she will always be my little girl), this is an opportunity for her to learn gymnastics and compete every month with other young girls in the Seattle area.

Now Abi has been going to gymnastics since she was a year old, back then it was hysterically funny to watch, lots of uncoordinated kids trying to walk in a straight line! In fact I took my Dad once to watch her and he nearly pee’d himself laughing (highly inappropriate of course – needless to say I was doing the same right next to him).

Over the years however she has got better and better and now she’s pretty impressive (at least to me) and today she competed in Bellevue at Gym East. Now Abi has never really seen herself compete (obviously) and as I’m really into still photography she only get’s to see still shots of herself in action. But today I thought I’d take some video. Now I should say at this point I SUCK at video, so I apologize that it’s all shaky etc., but at least family and friends in the UK can now see her in action.

She did really well today too. She came first in the Floor, Beam and Bars events, and fourth in the Vault (obviously in her age group). She came first overall, so was top of her age group. Clearly I’m a very proud dad 🙂

Hope you like the video.