Latest Updates

Monthly Update Time!

2007_5_20

Although I haven't been updating this site a lot lately, I have been pretty active: I've done lots of gigs and rehearsal shoots, and a couple of 'studio' shoots. Select pictures from all of these will be added to the relevant sections soon when I get round to it but in the meantime, I'm posting the majority of my new stuff on Flickr. I never used to like Flickr as I found it awkward and slow but now that I've given it a chance, and uploaded a lot more photos to it, I'm rather enamoured.

Slight Gallery Rejig

2007_4_9

Since I'm going out climbing a bit now I thought I'd add a new section to the galleries: Crags. A lot of the photos possibly won't be very interesting to many people but hopefully they'll be useful for climbers looking to get an idea of what a crag looks like.

At the moment there are only two crags listed: Pex Hill and Frodsham. Neither gallery is complete either, since both lack any really good views of the climbing routes available, as well as much information about location and so on. Having said that, most of the information will be on UKClimbing.com so I'll provide a link to that site and add any of my own thoughts to the galleries on my site.

Pendle Hill Gallery Updated

2007_3_3

I brought some good photos back from my trip to Pendle Hill today and they've been added to the gallery. Luckily the weather was much nicer today!

New Gallery: Pendle Hill

2007_3_2

A few days late with the announcement but I've put up a new gallery of images from Pendle Hill, near Blackburn. I'm going there again tomorrow and hopefully the weather will be a little better. I'm also going to be taking a different route up, and exploring the surrounding area some.

I've also added a couple of "burnt car" photos I took last month to the Abandonment gallery, one of which is the main home page image.

Image Comments

2007_2_12

I've added the ability to leave comments on individual gallery images across the site. I've probably not done it the best way ever: I'm using plain text files to store them, which will no doubt make keeping track of them a nightmare. It does e-mail me every time someone leaves a comment, though, so that's something.

One day I'll try to get my head round SQL and databases and such, which look rather frightnening at the moment, but it should be worth it for the much easier maintenance of comments.

More Manchester Pictures

2007_1_24

Last Sunday I went to Manchester again. And really got rained on. But! The photos I came away with that day were worth it I think, and I've put them in a new Manchester gallery.

In other news, although I haven't been updating this page all that often I've still been pretty active, with a numerous gigs and a few photoshoots. I've been meaning to add to the People gallery using some of the images from the photoshoots.

I've also been playing a lot with off-camera flash, thanks to inspiration from Strobist. Today I even got a wireless flash trigger; it's no Pocket Wizard (cheapo Chinese copy, £17 from eBay) but it seems to work just fine even if it's a bit fussy about things being between the transmitter and receiver. Still, at that price it actually worked out cheaper than the PC sync cord! As well as the reduction in hassle of having to avoid tripping on or snagging a 5m length of cable it also makes it much easier to add extra flashes since I can just buy another receiver unit (about £10) for each one, rather than having to fiddle with splitting cables and the like.

New Article: Pentax K10D First Impressions

2006_12_27

On 21st December I finally got my K10D, after using a Pentax DS since March. I've put together a list of my initial impressions of the new camera, pretty much in the order they occurred to me. I hope anyone considering this camera find the article useful!

New Gallery: Word Abstractions

2006_11_17

Wednesday was a very productive day for me in Brighton—I think I took more photos on that one day than in the three weeks preceding it! I spent a good few hours wandering around Brighton making what I've decided to call Word Abstractions. I didn't realise it until I read about it on the way home but this kind of thing has actually been done before by the likes of Walker Evans, about sixty years ago, which makes me feel a little less foolish for finding the subject appealing.

So, without further ado, the gallery link: Word Abstractions

I also got five or so decent photos of the pier (the undestroyed one) and I'll put those up once I decide on a gallery for them.

Street Gallery Update

2006_10_29

I felt it was about time I actually mentioned here some of the additions I've made to the Street gallery lately - cone-steps, hotpotato, lewdballoon, man_dog, shadowkids, timetogo and waitingman are the new ones. I also got rid of a few xmaslights photos because they were'nt really that good.

Now that I've got the "street" lenses I need (21mm and 35mm) I'm all set to produce a lot more photos in this kind of style; all I need to do now is actually get out there and shoot.

New Article: Zoom Different

2006_9_18

See, less than a month between updates! In a burst of creativity I finally wrote another article, entitled Zoom Different, about a different way of using zoom lenses.

I also went to New Brighton yesterday and some photos from that trip will be on the site in a day or two.

Site Not Dead

2006_8_27

Honest. Even though I've not updated it in four months. It's been a busy time for me lately and I've just not had the time or the energy to do any proper photography. The pull is getting stronger every day, however, and the purchase of either a Pentax K100D or a 35mm f/2 or DA21mm f/3.2 lens (I haven't decided which yet) will likely get me out the door and shooting again. I'm also pretty much settled into my job(s) now so I feel more up to photography again. Besides which, in May I bought a 3-year lease on the caerphoto.com domain, so the site's not going away any time soon!

Main Page Revamp

2006_4_30

I've fiddled with the main page so the thumbnails part of a gallery takes up more of the page and the gallery menu now sits unobtrusively off to the side until you move the mouse over it. This is mostly just so I can devote more space to thumbnails, to save a bit of scrolling, but also so I can simplift the CSS that controls menu positioning. You may also notice I've rejigged the headings a bit—the rounded corners are gone and the main menu at the top has been tweaked.

Incidentally, I understand the new menu doesn't work too well in Safari. Unfortunately that seems to be about par for the course and I'm not going to add workarounds for a severely broken browser. I'm willing to add workarounds for Internet Explorer on Windows because that's only a little broken (albeit in a maddening way) and because such a large number of people use it.

People Gallery Added

2006_4_26

As promised, the People gallery is now online. Since portaiture is a relatively new direction for my photography this gallery is rather empty for now but I hope to add to it soon.

Next item on the agenda: pruning the Southport and Freshfield galleries to one apiece.

Minor Updates

2006_4_25

Apologies for the sparsity of updates lately—I've been working a lot and not had much time for photography or site maintenance. I have, however, added a few new photographs: three of a foal in the Animals gallery and one to the front page entitled Yellow Green Blue, which is also the new main image.

COMING SOON: a new gallery entitled People containing… photos of people! Portraits and candid shots mostly, including some from my recent shoots with Kat Flint and Jessica Grace.

I also need to work a bit on the design of the site following some reccomendations and comments, plus I'll be really definitely getting to the colour scheme thing I was going to do last year where each major section of the site has a different look. The Articles section, for instance, will be wood-and-paper–themed, while the Latest section will have some newspapers as the logo image. Maybe. I haven't thought that far ahead in much detail yet.

New Article: Why Pentax

2006_3_10

I've written an article explaining my decision to buy a Pentax DS to largely replace my D70. Needs a photo or two adding which I'll get to in the morning.

Two Updates

2006_3_2

This past month I've been rather busy settling in to my new jobs so unfortunately I've had little time for photography. That's not to say I've been entirely idle in the art—the observant among you may have noticed a few unannounced additions to the Street gallery, photos taken at the Collectormania event at the Manchester G-Mex last month.

I've also added a few photos to the Winter gallery of the snow that fell here last night, most of them taken on my way to work at 6.45am! Unfortunately these are the type that could have done with a tripod but for obvious reasons I couldn't bring mine so had to make do with using my 28mm lens wide open at f/2.8 and ramping the ISO up to 800 for the Alexandra Drive photo. Still, all considered the photos came out rather well—I've made a print of the Iveco Trucks image which looks good.

New Gallery: Wigan Pier

2006_2_3

Yesterday I visited Wigan Pier, where there's a museum of Victorian life, a retired cotton mill and a working steam engine which was originally used to drive the mill. All in all it was a very interesting day out and my photos of the trip can be found in the Wigan Pier gallery.

Incidentally, the reason the mill photos are in black and white is because the lighting was really horrible and orange, making white balance a nightmare. Moreover, there isn't actually much colour to be seen there anyway so the greyscale emphasises the hard lines of the machines.

New Article: Cooking With Colour

2006_1_21

I've written a new article about raw processing programs, entitled Cooking With Colour. It originally started out as an update to go on this page but I ended up writing rather more than expected so I made it into a full article.

Gallery Rebuilding

2006_1_12

The first stage of the gallery rebuild is done, with the various Liverpool galleries now tightened up and merged into one gallery of 37 photos. Next up is are the Southport galleries.

Urban Closeups

2006_1_2

The site rearrangement is now complete. Let me know if it's broken in your browser (unless you're using Safari, then I can't help you).

The Cull is progressing, slowly. In the end I hope to have trimmed the Liverpool galleries down to one gallery with at most 40 photos, ditto for Southport. If that proves too difficult I may stretch to two galleries location.

Urban Closeups

2006_1_2

Yesterday I had a wander around Liverpool with a couple of friends and ended up with a nice selection of snippets of the town. I already had a Liverpool graffitti gallery but I have now decided to change this to a more general Urban Closeups, the implication being I will add more photos from various urban locales as and when I take them. For though the images are solely from Liverpool.

I've also made a few behind-the-scenes changes to the CSS on the site by splitting the styling into four separate .css files relating purely to box model, fonts, basecolours and accents. This modularisation will make maintenance easier, for example if I want to play with the layout I need only edit box.css, which is much smaller and easier to navigate than the previous monolithic .css file approach. A (rather garish) example of how changing the ‘accents’ file can affect styling can be seen here.

EXTRA: I've abandoned the ‘Themed’ section idea since it was a little hazily-defined as a category. The galleries previously in this section are now in the top level of the menu.

There are more changes in the works too: I've long been less than 100% happy with the concept of the ‘Home’ page so it's going to go. In its place as the site entry point will be a special gallery of all my favourite images, with the latest one (like the photo on the current Home page) displayed at the top. I'll also be adding an ‘About’ section with some biographical information and even a photo of me! No timeframe for this, it'll be done when it's done.

Frosty Day

2005_12_29

Today was rather cold so in my infinite wisdom I decided to go for a bike ride. Luckily there was lots of frost about to make things pretty so the trip was well worth it. A selection of the photos are now in a new gallery in the Themed section, entitled Winter (no doubt there'll be a spring an Summer too eventually).

Some of the images are in the gallery twice. The ones ending in -01 are those processed with RawShooter Essentials while the ones without are processed in Nikon Cature. I didn't have the patience to do all of them in NC.

Trip To London

2005_12_13

On Monday I took a trip down to London for three days, primarily to see the lovely Kat Flint but also to do a bit of Big City photography and to catch up with relatives. All in all it was a most enjoyable trip and I have a feeling it's affected me more deeply than I imagined it would.

Anyway, photos from my brief excursion around a small section of the city can be seen in my London gallery. I'd like to have got a photo or two of the tube but I didn't want to risk getting shot.

New Article: 28 Days

2005_12_10

At the suggestion of my brother (website) I've written a “review” of my favourite lens, the Nikon 28mm f/2.8D. The article can be read here.

A Few Minor Tweaks

2005_11_30

Nothing major: each galley and image page now displays its name on the browser titlebar, as opposed to just saying “photos - caerphoto” or “image - caerphoto”. This makes it a bit easier to keep track of things if you have site pages open in multiple windows.

Archive

The rest of the updates on this page have been archived to keep page load time down.