We had a great time but, unfortunately, the weather was pretty grim for most of the week which didn’t lend itself to getting pretty pictures of the canals.

Instead I decided to just concentrate on shooting interesting things on the street, particularly at night time, and also with a 20mm Diana Fish Eye lens mounted on my 5Dmkii which we found in a Lomography shop in the city.

The Diana Lens+ when mounted on a Canon camera is fixed at around f11 which meant I really had to ramp the ISO up, which in itself helped to enhance the creative feel of it all. Using bulb exposures and flash fired from a point and shoot camera also produced some interesting effects.

I did some limited post processing on the lomo shots, just messing with split toning to give an ‘old,’ look but they are otherwise relatively untouched.

Hope you like some of them! (personally I like the old style Citroen!)

I was asked to take some photos of their new products and took the opportunity to use a light tent, risers and lighting lamps to get some great results.

I used 5400k day light simulation bulbs lighting the tent from the left and right side with a bounced flash to fill in some of the shadows. The majority of the photos were taken on a 100mm f2.8L macro although I used a 24-70 f2.8L for some of the wider shots.  Some choice picks below!

Inspired by a short tutorial I saw on Wimp.com I decided to do a similar setup for our first macro shoot together. After mastering slices of lemon we moved onto ink drops in water (or food colouring in fact.)

Here’s the budding photographer at work:

An here’s a couple of my shots – Laura’s are on the way  (and are much better than mine!):

We experimented taking shots from various angles – our favourites were top-down with the multi-coloured lights with a shallow depth of field – the results look almost psychedelic!

Flatties produce Vinyl and Urban Toys/Art and have been working on a project called ‘Codename Babushka,’ where they have, with several well known artists, created a series of interesting matryoshka dolls which are for sale on their website. Here’s some of the highlights:

I used a daylight simulation lamp from the left side of a light tent and filled in with a flash bounced on the ceiling from the right hand side.

Lessons learnt: check your sensor is clean first by taking a long exposure at a small aperture on a neutral background. Annoyingly, I had lots of spots on the clean white backdrop which I had to remove in Photoshop. I think this was from my beach/desert honeymoon

I have selected some of my favourite photos from the honeymoon, below. I make no excuse that there are quite a few of my beautiful wife!

The Hermit Crabs were truly charming creatures, great fun to watch and photograph. The fruit bat, or “flying fox,” was much more elusive..

You may also spot a photo of my wife on our wedding night – the only photo I managed to get of her the whole day.

Alternatively, you can view a standard definition version below:

Some details:

10,016 JPEG’s @ 2352×1568 (cropped to 1920×1080 for video)
Aperture Priority
5 seconds between photos
Auto ISO