A few unashamedly touristy snaps from me, which will all be rubbish because they were taken on a rubbish Sony, and everyone knows the only good thing Sony makes is the playstation. 
One of the more interesting show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show
A quick'n'dirty destauration job of some, err, blue flowers (as you can tell, I'm a f*cking genius when it comes to gardening)
No surprises, Canary Wharf
Doesn't even really need explaining, does it?
Because Canons are better than my rubbish Sony, I didn't take this shot handheld at night after a few beers and the rubbish built-in image stabilisation certainly didn't help it come out superbly sharp at 1/4s exposure
And looking back the other way, at the National Gallery
One of the more interesting show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show
A quick'n'dirty destauration job of some, err, blue flowers (as you can tell, I'm a f*cking genius when it comes to gardening)
No surprises, Canary Wharf
Doesn't even really need explaining, does it?
Because Canons are better than my rubbish Sony, I didn't take this shot handheld at night after a few beers and the rubbish built-in image stabilisation certainly didn't help it come out superbly sharp at 1/4s exposure
And looking back the other way, at the National Gallery
Sounds to me like you went to a Sony Centre. That's your first mistake.
Sony Centres are, in fact, not part of Sony at all. They're all private franchises, and while some might be brilliant (although I admit, based also on my own experiences, this is highly unlikely), it's also possible for them to be utter shite. Find an independent camera shop or even a decent sized dept store and have a play there. Sony Centre staff have zero expertise or knowledge about their products, they tend to be pure salesmen. As such, whenever I happen to find myself in a Sony Centre, I consume as much time as possible and get them as excited as possible ("Have you got an A900, CZ24-70 lens and the 900's vertical grip in stock? I'm itching to buy one"), then saunter out having "changed" your mind.
Well, thanks for your pearls of wisdom on this topic. Obviously, everyone should go and buy a Canon. :rolleyes:
As an A700 owner I may be biased, but as mentioned above, there's so little to differentiate image quality between most cameras that it really comes down to ergonomics, lens selection, and personal preference. The Sony ergonomics are carried over from Minolta, and are simply superb. I've used Canons and Nikons since adopting the Sony DSLRs, and while they have their merits, I've instantly hated their ergonomics. So a vote here for the Sony.
Also depends on what you like to do. Stick a high quality wide-ish lens on that A350, keep the ISO low for bright days, and you'll get some remarkably crisp, sharp, detailed images, with an IQ arguably superior to any other APS-C camera. But if your idea of photography is arty, low light shots with high ISO, or sports and fast moving things, then I'd steer you towards a Canikon.
That's because it is consumer level, and it is plastic.
Like most camera families, if you want all-alloy construction you need to move up to the A700/40D tier.Don't be deceived by plastic bodies though. I once dropped my Sony A100 from neck height onto a concrete carpark floor. Lens was twisted on the mount, one of the shoulder dials was badly scuffed, but after removing and reattaching the lens, it was fine. I was astounded that such a seemingly flimsy plastic body could withstand such a sharp impact, and remember it has a moveable image sensor for image stabilisation, which survived too.
Lovely portraits - he does have an interesting face and you've captured the detail wonderfully. In the last one I'd prefer to have a touch more depth of field - it's nicely focussed but the thin plane of focus is a bit distracting. Still great though.
Like the gumball shots too. The processing you used works really well on most of them, giving them a very vivid look - which let's face it, is what you want for photos of occasions like that.
@ Sam, earlier: cheers. It's from Beadnell on the Northumbrian coast. I just need to work out why exporting it to jpg with sRGB colour profile is losing so much richness in colour (especially greens) compared to the on-screen version within Lightroom - never noticed that happening before. :/
Like the gumball shots too. The processing you used works really well on most of them, giving them a very vivid look - which let's face it, is what you want for photos of occasions like that.
@ Sam, earlier: cheers. It's from Beadnell on the Northumbrian coast. I just need to work out why exporting it to jpg with sRGB colour profile is losing so much richness in colour (especially greens) compared to the on-screen version within Lightroom - never noticed that happening before. :/
Although I have immense respect for your skinning and design skills, I'm afraid these photos are, for want of a more polite way of putting it, junk.
As Quiksilver put it, being poorly composed with no focal point and no lighting and poor focus does not make them "artsy".
As a professional photographer, you'd know that digital noise is to be avoided at all costs, and your best option with a static subject would've been to tripod it, use low ISO for a clean image and then apply a filter in photoshop to recreate film grain. I used to have a Sony A100 and they are wonderful cameras (wish I still had mine for landscapes - the low ISO quality plus the very weak AA filter on the A100 produces amazingly crisp results), but they are absolute noise monsters at high ISO - and it's not "nice" noise either.
Sorry to be so negative (hey, the third shot of the pedal is better), but I know fine well what talent you have with graphics and art and design, and I'm quite sure you can produce a much better stylised, "moody" photograph of a G25 than these.
Ah, right. I thought it was a pretty iconic structure that anyone would be able to place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyne_Bridge
But then I noticed where you're from, so I'll let you off if you send us some of your continental weather.
Thanks. Is that a trick question though?
F*ck off
hehe thanks for the comments though, I imagine it is a very different setting to it's big brother in Sydney. Colder and less glamorous! Didn't think I was going to be standing there so long waiting for the light to fade - was bloody freezing when I finally left!
Hmm, no I hadn't thought of that, but cheers for the suggestion - might look into it.
The colours in the colour images are basically natural - just slight boosts to the vibrance and contrast, but nothing dramatic or distorting.
Popped out tonight and took a few snaps. Didn't go far though as am still recovering from a knee op - the car was always close by.
Sony A700 & Tamron 17-50/2.8 @ 30mm, f/8, 6s, ISO 100
Sony A700 & Tamron 17-50/2.8 @ 17mm, f/8, 10s, ISO 100
And I gave this treatment to the first one, which I quite like. I'm looking for an image to hang in my kitchen (50×70cm), the room is grey and white and neutral in colour, so this might do the trick:
Comments welcome.
Sony A700 & Tamron 17-50/2.8 @ 30mm, f/8, 6s, ISO 100
Sony A700 & Tamron 17-50/2.8 @ 17mm, f/8, 10s, ISO 100
And I gave this treatment to the first one, which I quite like. I'm looking for an image to hang in my kitchen (50×70cm), the room is grey and white and neutral in colour, so this might do the trick:
Comments welcome.
Last edited by STROBE, .
Yes. Sony likes to give things really gay names.
Keep it on manual. Not sure about the A350, but my A700 has the option to specify the ranges of auto ISO - eg you can leave it on auto but restrict it to 100-400 if you're outdoors for the day, or 400 - 3200 if you indoors or in low light.
Top left shoulder dial, set it to "A". Use the control wheel to change aperture. The camera will calculate the required shutter speed accordingly.
It's all in the manual.
I'd still be more concerned with that crime against style called the bonnet.
I don't want to discourage you, but much better results should be possible with a nice shiny car and a Sony A350.
- Ignoring composition which is always subjective, some of the shots look technically wrong. A couple of them are blurred, presumably due to camera shake and too long an exposure. The A350 has image stabilisation built in - no excuses!
- One or two other images look way too noisy - as if you've left the camera on auto ISO and it's defaulted to ISO800 or more. The A350 has a lot of megapixels on a small sensor, so it does produce more noise at high ISO. Keep it under ISO400 for daytime shots.
- Some other shots have part of the car in focus, but other parts blurred. Maybe this was intentional, but I found it distracting - make sure you use a small enough aperture to render the whole car in focus when doing the typical front or rear three-quarters shots. Keep the selective focus for detail shots like when picking out the headlamps.
Just give the car a good wash and wax, and shoot it on a day with good light (I noticed your pics were taken on a typically bright but cloudy/overcast day, resulting in very flat light and blown out highlights everywhere).PS. I don't know if you've noticed, but VW appear to have mistakenly fitted the wrong bonnet to your Golf - it doesn't fit.
lol wot
Just opened a random .arw file in Photoshop:
In the past you used to be able to download and install the camera raw module separately, but a quick glance at Adobe's website suggests that it's now locked into the product version of Photoshop/Lightroom.
Fixes? Yep. Avoid Sony's RAW converter. It's shit. For some reason the first version of it, which came with my A100, produced brilliant images (one of the best RAW converters available for the A100's raw files) at the expense of a slow, clunky interface and no batch processing facilities. Later versions, like what was supplied with my A700, are still clunky to use but seem to have shit image quality too.
The best (apparently, this isn't something I've tried with) are SilkyPix and CaptureOne, although I just Adobe's raw converter which is ok for Sony.
Johnny Corporate - Sunday Shouting (god I have some good memories of this tune... :nod
Taste Xperience - Summersault
Bus Stop - Kung Fu Fighting (oh the cheesy nights out at uni in the late '90s when we were all too hammered on cheap booze to know any better)
Taste Xperience - Summersault
Bus Stop - Kung Fu Fighting (oh the cheesy nights out at uni in the late '90s when we were all too hammered on cheap booze to know any better
)LMAO @ Brundle on his grid walk, squatting down behind two Brawn mechanics who are kneeling in front of a laptop with a shielded screen which is plugged into the car.
"So what are you guys doing?"
"So what are you guys doing?"
I thought it was called printing presses, which the BoE and Federal Reserve now seem to have resorted to.
Lovely scenes.
Makes me very jealous. Wish we had that kind of light and grand landscapes here!
(EDIT) That second one is superb - and all that empty road! Heaven!
Makes me very jealous.
Wish we had that kind of light and grand landscapes here!(EDIT) That second one is superb - and all that empty road! Heaven!
Last edited by STROBE, .
Correct - well, sorta. Technically I think you meant: "It's to do with money being way too cheap to lend!"
It's nothing to do with the BoE though. Bank A never went to the BoE and caused Bank B to go bust. It's all international. Both Banks A and B were able to take on debt very cheaply courtesy of some countries (like China) having a massive fiscal surplus. They then leant that money to you and I (well, the populace). Then when various insitutions and countries said "hey, we'd like some of this cake we're earning and you're consuming", Bank A & Bank B realised they couldn't repay it because they didn't have it - they had in turn lent it to us to make themselves more money. So the credit taps were turned off, and everyone goes "oh shit".
Wait, that's suddenly a bad thing?
Whilst I (shock, horror) agree with you on most things you say here, I think you're completely wrong on this one. Although it's a gross simplification, it's safe to say that a deregulated financial market and phenomenal amounts of greed and short-sightedness in the banking industry are the primary causes of the financial problems.
Anyway, the budget - what a joke. Hugely disappointing.
£15bn of "efficiency savings" in the civil service & public sector? If he can make £15bn of efficiency savings now, why didn't they a decade ago? Or even last year? Or does anyone find themselves reading "£15bn of previous wastage" rather than efficiency savings?
How about openly slashing civil service budgets and freeing the country from the shackled burden of a grotesquely inefficient, wasteful system? How about slashing benefits for the willfully unemployed who refuse to work? How about just resetting the entire damn system so that people know how much things actually cost? There's so many incentives, rebates, tax allowances & credits, and so on, that it's never clear what's what. Of course, if it were simple, we wouldn't need 60,000 staff at the Inland Revenue to work it all out for us.
More fuel duty is a joke. Or to put it another way, petrol is ~29p a litre, plus ~320% tax.
Car scrappage scheme is a joke. You can't artificially sustain an industry producing products that we now can't afford, and it's an environmental disaster.
More tax of fags and booze is no big deal. Too many people already live from paycheque to paycheque, spending every penny inbetween on getting pissed out their minds as soon as they have any money. If it stops more people from doing that, good thing.
50% tax above £150,000 is outrageous. Needless to say it doesn't affect me (I wish!), but if I'd worked hard to be in a position to earn that kind of money, I'd be livid. Half your income going straight to the government! We don't owe the government that much. They waste too much and give too many handouts and serve themselves too much to justify any tax rate like that. It's not just big CEOs and Wall Street type guys that earn that. What about self employed people who have built up a good business? Plenty company directors and senior managers can earn £150k, although now I bet they'll pay themselves £149,999, and good on them.
Over 50s have their ISA cap increased, with everyone else following suit next year. How about just letting everyone do it now? Oh wait, they don't want us to save. Well, they do, because it's us not saving that helped cause the problem, but now they want us to spend to help the economy. Barmy.
I think you'll find it's called discipline.
Or rather, lack of.
Maybe you need to buy a better car. I put fuel in mine, apart from that it needs no attention between each yearly service. So far in five years it has had four oil changes, a new set of spark plugs, and two new tyres. I suggest that this is by no means a "lot" of maintenance. Not in anyone's book.
If you can quote some sources for the various random facts and assertions you're throwing around, then I'll believe it. As it stands, cars do not come anywhere close to producing 70-80% of our greenhouse emissions. I don't know the true percentage, but it's tiny compared to industry, homes, and even cows.
Agreed 100%. It's utterly farcical, and to hear Lord Mandelson on the news proclaiming that it's going to be a revolution, makes you wonder whether to laugh or cry at the ineptitude of this government.
In a way, however the focus of this thread has nothing to do with communism, but rather the authoritarian tendancies of our govt. A highly authoritarian government does not make it a communist one.
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG