Stuart’s Photography

The Eden Project has chosen to use two of my photos for their 2008/2009 Guide Book.

The Nutcracker is a fantastic piece of art, and something everyone who creates software should take the time to go and study!  The whole point of the Nutcracker is to open peoples’ eyes to just how unnecessarily and ridiculously overly-complicated we make things.  You can find this contraption in The Core building, where it stands as the main draw in the room.  Just don’t forget to take the time to check out everything else in the room too :) 

This photo of the Rainforest Biodome has been chosen as the front cover photo for this year’s guide book.  They’ve cropped the top down a bit, and made it look really fantastic.  They were also kind enough to credit me at the back of the guide book.  It’s a great testament to the quality that the Nikon D200 and Nikkor 18-135mm lens combo can produce.   

I’m chuffed to bits over this  

We’ll be heading back down to the Eden Project in the near future, where I’m looking forward to taking photos of some of the things we missed first time around.  I might end up posting a shot of me standing beside the guide books too …

The most common advice given to new photographers is this: always have your camera with you.  You never know when you’ll come across something worth taking a picture of. That was certainly the case in March 2007, when Kristi and I enjoyed this beautiful scene on the way to work.

This is Cardiff City Hall, opened in 1904.  The tag-line for Cardiff is that it is Europe’s Youngest Capital City, but I wonder how many people realise just how modern its magnificent civic centre is?

Like most drivers, I hate speed cameras.  Too many of them, especially over in England, seem to be sited in places where they are most likely to generate revenue.  This camera in Cathays, Cardiff, is one of the more sensibly located cameras.  It’s placed outside a private nursery / school, on a road that has a major cycleway down the opposite side.

The car park on the opposite side has been built where the Glamorganshire Canal once ran, and the lane disappearing off into the distance is approximately the route that the canal used to follow up towards Gabalfa.

If you live or work in South Wales, then the chances are you’ve enjoyed a pint of Brains at some point.  And if you work in Cardiff, you’re very likely to have smelled the beer brewing from their new site on Crawshay Street.

It might be a long way from Merthyr Road, but the sea front between Swansea and Mumbles is just as historically important.  It is the site of the world’s first passenger railway service, just three years after Richard Trevithick started the ball rolling with the world’s first steam-powered railway journey.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing left of the railway today.  It was dismantled in 1960.  But at the end of the route stands Mumbles Pier, and from the end of the pier I took this lovely shot of Mumbles Lighthouse at the end of the bay.

Here are my twenty most popular photos (according to Flickr’s interestingness ranking) after 15,000 views. It will be interesting to see what the list looks like after another 15,000 views

Click on each thumbnail to see the full photograph.

When I’m discussing my Merthyr Road project with friends and colleagues who share an interest in local history, I’m often heard to remark that I’d love to be able to take my Nikon D200 with me back in time to take shots of what these places looked like in their heyday.  Alas, we don’t yet have a time machine (and current thinking is that, when we do have one, we’ll only be able to go back in time to the day the machine was first switched on), but we do have Photoshop.

Fellow Flickr user Capt’ Gorgeous has been busy with Photoshop, creating a tantalising shot of what the old bridge at Pontypridd might have looked like when it was first built, before the more modern (and flat) road bridge was built alongside it.  I think it’s a fantastic piece of imagination, and a great piece of work.

Here’s hoping that someone does build a time machine, so that we can go back and capture shots like this for real one day

(Taken at this year’s Beyond The Border storytelling festival).

Late at night, after all the stories have been told and it’s time to retire back to camp, the way home through the woods is lit by a string of lightbulbs suspended from the trees. They’re a simple reminder of home, and all the more comforting for that.

Best viewed on black.

View a larger version of this photo on Flickr, or on black.

Download the Aperture Workflow tutorial (PDF; 3.1M)

When it comes to digital photography, everyone always puts so much emphasis on the workflow - the tasks that are done, and the order that they are done in. There is no OneTrueWorkflow(tm) that suits everyone. Workflows are very definitely horses for courses. You have to find your own way of doing things that suits the way you do photography, the amount of time available to you, and the results you want.

After six months now of using Aperture, the way I use Aperture has settled down into a fairly consistent pattern. Using the simple but effective ScreenSteps, I’ve put together a short tutorial with screenshots showing what I did in Aperture to create the final image and publish it on Flickr. If you’ve just moved to Aperture from iPhoto or Photoshop Elements (or from Picasa et al on Windows), I hope it gives you a way to start using Aperture that you can adapt over time to make your own.  I’m not a professional photographer, but I don’t buy into the idea that Aperture is just for professional photographers either!
Please leave below any tips or comments about workflow in Aperture. I’m always keen to learn how I can improve on what I’m doing, especially if it saves time or results in a better final image!

Whilst exploring the banks of the River Taff at Hawthorn, near Upper Boat, I spotted this soggy piece of cardboard clinging onto a rock in the river for dear life.

I love the colour of this shot, and the energy injected into the water by the little weir just out of frame on the right. After all the black and white shots I’ve been posting these last few weeks, it’s almost a relief to come up with a stunning colour shot for a change!

Whilst I was there, I took the individual frames that I’ll need to make a panoramic shot of the River Taff. At some point, I’ll get the shots stitched together and uploaded to Flickr as part of a new ‘Panoramic Shots’ series for my Merthyr Road project.