IMG_1562: Perseid Meteor Shower, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

(Hmmm, I’m a poet and I didn’t know it….).

I popped up to Leith Hill Tower this evening to try and get some photos of the Perseid meteor shower. I only realised it was madness while I was stumbling around in the pitch black wood trying to find the right path that goes to the tower. The tree cover rendered my GPS useless, and at one point I really thought I was going to spend the night in the woods!

Anyway, I eventually found it, and bumped into a local warden and his wife who were also star gazing up there. Leith Hill is the tallest point in South East England, and you can see London to the North and the sea to the South. On a clear night like tonight London stood out like a sore thumb - really spoiling the sky IMHO.

I saw loads of meteors, but as you can see from the photo, I failed to catch any on film (or digital). It’s all about the journey though, not the destination… (read: “I don’t care what the photos came out like, so long as i had fun taking them!”).

Right: it’s a school night so I really must get to bed!

Tags: Perseid, Perseid Meteor Shower, meteors, Leith Hill Tower, surrey

Credit: my sister in law…

Tags: ripley, surrey, duck, silly, driving

Royal Albert Hall - IMG_0857, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

More evening shooting, this time the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington (London, UK). I wasted about three quarters of an hour on the other side of the building as I thought I might get an interesting photo with the traffic going past, but when I got home and inspected the results I wasn’t too impressed.

I’m still getting to grips with my new camera, and last night I fell into the trap of not looking too closely at the histogram, relying instead on the preview picture in the LCD. This image looked a lot brighter ‘in the field’, and the sky was pretty impressive. Maybe I need to tweak it a bit more, but I guess the learning is half the fun….

I used my flashgun to fill in the pedestal in the middle of the frame as it was a bit dark compared to everything else. Anyone watching must have thought I was mad - running from side to side during the exposure firing my flash!

Although the camera was level, I think I was positioned a bit too far to the left — the statue isn’t quite in the centre of the building and the paving slabs aren’t parallel to the bottom edge of the frame. However, the verticals are nice and square, so that’s something to be pleased about

Tags: royal albert hall

IMG_0755, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

Popped up to London last night to take some photos of St. Paul’s and the Millennium Bridge with a couple of friends. It almost didn’t stop raining, but it was worth hanging around…

IMG_3859, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

I’ve been off work I’ll for the last few days (well, Friday and Monday, with the weekend in between just for good measure), and this gave me the chance to finish sorting through my Croatia holiday photos from last September.

The above photo is about the last one I took while away, and I think perhaps my favorite.

You can view the full set for now, and when I get around to it I’ll work out how to do something cunning with my GPS tracklog, google earth, and flickr.

Don’t forget to look at my flickr map for this holiday now that I’ve spent ages hand-geotagging the photos!

IMG_0674, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

I went to the Saturday evening portion of the annual Linton Festival last weekend, which gave me a chance to try out my new camera (Canon EOS 5D).

The festival was great, with a nice selection of real ales and some good bands (mainly blues while I was there, though there was some jazz too earlier on).

I was messing around with my 17-40mm lens most of the time, which on the full frame sensor gives an amazing wide angle view! As it got darker I switched to my 24-70mm lens, which is great for low light and was used for the photo above.

Although I’ve still not really put the camera through it’s paces, I’m very pleased with it so far! It looks like the EOS 5D Mark II is still a while off, so glad I finally jumped in now while the prices are (relativley) low!

The low light performance of the camera seems excellent (with very low noise), and the bigger viewfinder makes it much easier to see if the subject is in focus! I still feel that it slightly over-exposes the images compared to my EOS 20D, but I guess I just need to get used to the meter.

Tags: linton festival, eos 5d, beer festival, blues

I treated myself to a new baby today: a Canon EOS 5D. I’ve been after one of these for a long time - it seemed so fitting as I used a film Canon EOS 5 for many years before I got into digital with my EOS 20D. I’m pretty sure that Canon are going to replace the 5D with an EOS 5D Mark II, but given the likely price hike when the replacement comes out, and the relativly few enhancements that you’ll get for that extra money, I think I’ll be pretty happy with this version.

The best thing about it is the full frame sensor and the massive viewfinder that this gives you. This makes all my lenses much wider than they were on the 20D (in fact, its just like using them on my film SLR ), which is fantastic for some of the kinds of photography I like.

It’s been chucking it down with rain today so I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it, but I’ve got all of tomorrow still to come!

TTFN

Tags: 5d, canon eos 5d, eos 5d

After attending the recent Blogs and Social Media Forum, I had lots of ideas about how we should be making more use of collaborative and “social” tools where I work. We’ve had a wiki in place of the intranet now for a couple of years, and so collaborative bookmarking seems like it would (should) be one of the easiest and next most useful things for us to implement.

I’ve used del.icio.us for a while now, and find it very handy indeed. Although I don’t really have much of a network on del.icio.us, the benefits of this type of application seem immense when used by a whole development team, or a sales team researching competitors and so on.

However, the draw-back with del.icio.us is the lack of group-level bookmarking and privacy. If our development team started bookmarking content related to new features that they may be working on/researching, then it would make it very clear to our competitors what we’re doing.

I’ve had a few thoughts on how we could get around this, but it would mean writing more code… and I’m sure it would be reinventing the wheel!

This is where the “enterprise collaboration bookmark server” steps in. But can I find a decent open source one? Well, not yet! In fairness I’ve not spent much time looking. Mike Gotta publishes a useful list of alternatives to del.icio.us, and through this I discovered that the code to connotea is available for download. Just need some time to have a play. I also need to look more at the XML Bookmark Exchange Language (XBEL) to see if that throws up any good ideas.

In the meantime, if anyone knows any good options for me here, please feel free to leave a comment!

Tags: bookmarking, social, collaboration, delicious