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After a pretty feeble haul of Christmas presents (really, a Shiatsu massage machine?) I felt compelled to bolster my horde of gadgets… by buying a new camera!

I agonised over whether I should buy a Canon 5D Mk II — a beast of a camera — or save £1500 and buy the 450D. It didn’t help that the mid-range option (the 50D) was thoroughly lackluster and had almost no features that I might require. A higher shooting speed (6fps), hooray. So, I went with the 450D which was still a huge upgrade over my old camera.

Surely it’s more about the lenses anyway; the camera is just a light-tight box at the end of the day. In fact, it seems you need incredibly good glass to make the most out of the new digital cameras with massive 15 megapixel sensors. At that kind of resolution you discover all sorts of chromatic aberration that wasn’t otherwise visible.

(Talking of lenses, did you see the new 10-22mm Canon EF-S lens? It seems to beat every existing ultra-wide-angle lens at… well, just about everything. I guess designing glass to focus on anything less than a 35mm frame must be child’s play for the Canon engineers.)

Anyway, with the new resolving power granted upon me by the 450D, I can finally create HDR photos, like you see below. I’ll try to keep the abuse of Photoshop fairly low though, I promise.

… or how I almost got stuck in a bog.

Yesterday, my photographic spider senses were tingling. I looked out my window (which overlooks a lovely 2-acre sculpted garden) and thought to myself ‘my, we might be in for a frosty sunset.’ Now, I got the sunset bit wrong, as the cloud cover was simply too heavy, but I did capture a little frosty moment above the lovely little Ashdown Forest in Sussex.

It’s a great photo, but I thought I could do better! So, heading down the hill you see in that photo, I stumbled across a lovely wide, open, frosty scrub land.

This photo isn’t quite so good (it’s just not as interesting), but I do like how it feels almost… Siberian. I forced the colours to come out very cold, and washed out. Dismal, I guess you could say. English and grey.

So, having taken that photo, I thought ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if I could compose a photo with that tree in the foreground, and the hill falling away below me, with the town’s lights in the background…’, and started trudging down the hill. I guess those of you from more interesting climates might be more used to bogs, quagmires and swamps, but here in England they’re certainly not common. I was a little surprising then when my foot sunk about 30cm into brown, sticky (and smelly)… bog. Not deterred, and avidly chasing THE killer photo, like all real photographers should, I strapped the camera around my neck and trekked on, using my tripod to test the ground in front of me, like a REAL explorer.

About half way to the tree, with no sign of the bog drying out, and realising I’d left my mobile phone at home, I decided to abort and scramble to safety. Yes, I wussed out without taking the photo… but to be fair, I didn’t think my tripod would balance very well in the middle of some mire. Better to escape with my life, and an unboggified camera.

Anyway, I’ve been looking at two new ultra-wideangle lenses to replace my venerable, awesome but-not-quite-wide-enough Canon 17-40L. I don’t shoot on full-frame-sensor bodies unless I’m in a studio, so the 17mm on my Canon 450D comes out at a not-so-wide 26mm. Both Sigma and Canon provide some awesome ’small sensor only’ (APS-C, for the geeks out there) lenses: Canon 10-22mm & Sigma 10-20mm. Both seem virtually identical in reviews, some even placing the Sigma above the costly Canon in terms of sharpness and chromatic abberation. Now I’m just waiting for a good deal to pop up on Ebay, or for one to appear at one of my local camera shops, and then I’ll wow you with some English landscapes!

I woke up this morning to quite a fantastic phenomenon — frozen morning mist. There might be a scientific name for such a form of precipitation (and if anyone knows, please let me know), but all I know is that it’s damn pretty. I guess it occurs when the temperature dips just before sunrise, freezing any of the moisture in the air, affixing it to everything. As a result, you get a lovely, crystalline sharpness to everything. It’s not quite the same as snow-covered mornings, as they are just a small, thin layer of ice crystals: so you can see the colours beneath the frost!

Of course the best way to illustrate this would be with a photo.

Well, you wouldn’t believe it, but as luck would have it (kind of), I was woken up by some reckless beast throwing a box from Amazon right onto my crotch, as I was sleeping. An interesting way to wake up, throbbing, not certain if you’ve just had a particularly… wild dream, or if some bastard’s just thrown a big box onto your nuts. Anyway, bruising and hampered fertility aside, it was the new Sigma lens! Hooray!

Muttering expletives and quickly squeezing my ass into some pants, I went out to take a photo:
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As you can see, it’s quite a sparkly, special look! It looks even better large, as you can make out all the detail on the end of the branches, and all the little specks of colour. I’ll try to get some more photos with the new lens, for my benefit and yours. Maybe strap a polariser on and go wild with a sunset.

Anyway, I activated a neat new feature on this blog! If you double click any word on the page, you’ll get a cute little pop-up that defines the word for you. I don’t think it works with phrases, and it doesn’t work with links. It’ll probably tell you that I’m not spelling things correctly too, because the software is Americanz-English. Let me know if it doesn’t work, or if you have some kind of weird OCD-like condition where you always double click everything on the page as you read it (probably the same kind of person that highlights random blocks of text as they’re reading… you know who you are).

I also changed how images display on the site (just a little), but it’s still not complete. The slide show option is completely atrocious (really, don’t click it). I’m also working on a little shopping attachment to sell Seb-related apparel. Okay, that sounded a little too narcissistic, what I really meant was prints of my photos. And maybe 1 or 2 t-shirts with ‘Seb Was Here’ and an arrow pointing downwards. For the ladies.

Tomorrow I’m going to write about how I roleplayed a female in World of Warcraft for the first 2 months that I played. Yep, I even got gifts. It was an experiment on the back of my computer games degree course.

… but meanwhile, while the lazy bloggers are wrapped up in bed, most likely nursing a hangover, Sebastian is scarpering around outdoors and driving to the tops of nearby hills to take photos of the snow we had today. Following on from my little ‘Global Cooling’ rant, it seems we’re now due a massive snowstorm — with up to 15cm of snow in some places! FIFTEEN CENTIMETERS! Madness. The picture I took last year, in April, was only about 5 or 6cm, and I thought that was a lot.

Anyway, I’ve been a busy-bee this week — I photographed a show — Stepping Out — which was fantastically lit by friend Gabriel. It’s not the most exciting show in the world (Can you say ‘it only has one location’?), but the lighting can really make or break a show. As a photographer, the lighting is almost the only thing I am interested in, assuming the actors actually know how to act.

(Some more can be found in the ‘People‘ album)

I actually found it quite hard to work with the Sigma 10-20mm when I was taking the Stepping Out photos. It has such a vast field of view that it really is hard to make the entire frame interesting. Not to mention that you need a LOT of ambient light to make it work indoors — it’s very rare for an entire room/stage to be well-lit, and so you end up having to under-expose heavily, or the few well-lit elements are way over-exposed — the photos tended to come out quite dreary and low-contrast. I guess it really is an outdoor landscape lens!

I also took a bunch of photos today, a few of which you can find in the Sussex album, and I took a rather fun self-portrait when we had yet another power cut. Really, you’d think that living in England would entitle me to Western World benefits, like stable electricity… but alas. But it’s not all bad to be forced away from my computers occasionally; a lot of things have been invented or discovered when necessity strikes, or people are taken away from their comfort zone. I doubt we’d have harnessed electricity quite so quickly and efficiently if the Americans hadn’t required a ‘good’ way to execute people at the time.

Anyway, I digress. Today was meant to be a post of photos, as people probably don’t want to focus on anything too meaty on a Sunday. So here’s a lovely captioned image, quite accurately portraying the current success and affluence of black people (and almost-black people):

(You could click it for a full-size version, if you can’t make out the writing…)

I’m working feverishly on my Pakistani accent, but I’m really concerned it might be slightly offensive to anyone of somewhat Eastern origin; and it might also just be plain offensive on the ears of everyone else. I may just wimp-out and do some Russian/Slavic thing. They’re so incredibly misogynistic there that  it was quite awesome (and awful) to observe male/female interactions while I was there. They have the whole patriarchial thing going on in the household too. It wasn’t always overt domination, but there was always those little, questioning looks from the woman to the man, to see if he approved, or if he was about to blow his top.

But man, their women were beautiful…

Oh, and I caught a fox in my garden this morning — are its eyes shut?!

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that low’r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

Richard III by William Shakespeare.

One of the few Shakespearean phrases I remember from English literature at school; the others all coming from Romeo and Juliet (I’m a soppy romantic at heart!)

The snow is continuing — we’re up to about 10cm! The most snow we’ve had in 20 years! Those old biddies that are always saying ‘they don’t make winters like they used to!’ have finally been silenced. Probably because they’re dying of hypothermia, but I digress. As always, as soon as any kind of immoderate weather hits the United Kingdom, we collapse and stay at home. An inch of snow, and the buses stop. Two inches, and the trains stop. Three inches, and no one even bothers to go into work. Retailers are hanging signs apologising for the long lines of people trying to pay, because their staff haven’t bothered to come in — and people wonder why us Brits have a bad reputation as workers… union action, strikes… calling in sick/otherwise indisposed if the weather creeps up above 30, or below zero.

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Anyway, here in Sussex, we have about 3 acres of fields and gardens visible from my bedroom window, so when it’s snows the vast amount of reflected light always wakes me up early (I took to leaving my curtains open so that it’s more likely I wake up before noon than Hell freezing over… although it’s probably pretty nippy down there at the moment.) Anyway, not to be deterred by being woken up at Godless hour of 11am, I sat on my windowsill and tried to catch animals bouncing around in the snow, looking for food. I guess the fantastic hush that swamps the senses during a large snowfall also amplifies even the tiniest of noises; the animals weren’t coming close enough to photograph. So I headed out onto the estate, seeing what I could find…

I found a tiny rabbit, about 500 meters away, but it just wasn’t all that photogenic at that distance.

I ended up taking some pretty pictures of plants covered in snow; plants don’t sprint away at the slightest rustling, which is great for a photographer like me — I’m not the most agile person, being 6′5″ and all (although I can get both legs behind my head — ask to see my party trick one day, if you ever catch me partying…), so sneaking up on rabbits and ravens is pretty taxing. I’m happy with this photo though:

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It’s like one of those photos from a glossy magazine — the cooking section — but that isn’t actually icing sugar. It’s snow!! Perhaps I should do some more macro photography!

I have no idea if these photo-filled entries are actually well received, or if people just scroll past the pictures. Perhaps if I interleave photo posts with penis monologue posts, I should be able to cover most of my bases. So if we call this a ‘photo post’, I can sneak in this cute photo that my sister took of me in the snow.

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Yes, that’s my largest ‘penis extension’ as my father calls it. No, my hair isn’t dyed red and blue.

While writing something altogether more… meaty… I got a little side-tracked by the thought ‘I bet it’d be fun to look through some of my old photos.’

You see, I was going through some photos I took of a friend (some head shots), and I found a truly atrocious photo of myself, wearing sandals (and socks!), shorts (with hairy legs), a t-shirt, and a hairband. It was pretty bad, made worse by the fact that I was actually posing for the photo…

What can I say, I’m comfortable with my appearance (thus the photo of me in a tutu, or as a gay cowboy).

Anyway, the point was, it got me thinking about times gone by! So I started digging through some old photos, hoping to find something nice to reminisce over and to show on my blog! You may or may not know this, but you do now: our senses trigger memories. If you smell something that you’ve smelt before, it will tend to trigger the recall of a memory. The same goes with hearing and touch… and of course the most vivid of all — sight! When you pick up an old photo you are almost magically transported back to that moment. The feelings associated with that moment in time come flooding back to you — the freshness of the air perhaps, or the elation as you re-live looking down at the Grand Canyon for the first time.

That’s why we, as a race, love taking photos. We love having these little, easily-accessible keys to our vast memory. It also goes a long way to explain why some people feel slightly violated when someone has a photo of them (especially after a bad break up), or why some tribes/cults think that photographs steal your soul.

Enjoy a few choice photos (not from my travels, I’m saving those for when I can accompany them with stories!) — and poke around the collections (on the sidebar, if you’re not on my blog right now).

To start with, a picture from my second year at university. This is Sadiq. One of about… three friends that I have (I am probably overestimating by 1 or 2!) You can also see I’m not lying when I say I’m 6′5″. We just about to head out to the summer ball — University of Essex’s famous all night summer ball, where a ’survivors photo’ is taken at 6am!

Right, with the sappy stuff out of the way, I can post some arty photos! This first one is one of the very first photos I took with my first digital camera (Canon 300D). The joy of super-shallow depth of field with an F1.4 50mm lens… I’ve always intended to take some more ‘impressionistic’ photos, I just need it to be sunny enough so that I can recreate the right conditions!

And the last one is just another at-dusk photo from near my house. I love this one because… well, it was a cold and very fresh night. I was alone, in a large field, with nothing to be heard except for the quiet snap of the shutter on my camera. Some of my favourite experiences have been alone, up the top of a mountain in Turkey, or looking out over Belgrade. Perhaps you can only find yourself in true reflective solitude? Plus, everyone loves a bit of mist!

Now back to writing something slightly more punchy.

We rarely get sunsets worth mentioning in Sussex — our atmospheric conditions are mediocre at best. However, with a little bit of fun (HDR), I created a landscape that has an awful lot to look at  — the tree in the foreground, the line of trees in the background, the details of the grass. And of course, quite a spectacular sunset!

This is a post for Skywatch Friday.

This is another sunset picture from Sussex, my home county, in England. This one is early on though, with there still being plenty of daylight to bring out the detail in the foreground.

While the sky has a creamy and dreamy quality to it, I love the texture of the frozen pond — and the ducks that are huddling for warmth! Poor things. This is an ‘original’ photo with only minimal cropping, and no colour correction.

This is a post for Skywatch Friday.

(Dear Lord, how’s that for an alliteration BONANZA?)

This is a shared photographic assignment with Brigid. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with later today! (It’s Monday here in England, but it’s not in America… so I’m cheating a little!)

The brief was “It can be of a car, or a study of a certain part of transportation.”

I give you… the Mazda RX-8, under a rather lovely Sussex clear sky and full moon.