Catching The Rain

Digital camera sensor cleaning

I embarked on a potentially fraught task on Sunday, not without a little trepidation. I’d been doing some macro photography and noticed that my sensor had a family of dust specks, small and large, littered across the surface. In fact when I looked closer it was more like the population of a small town.

I guess swapping lenses more frequently had let more dust in, but shooting at small apertures meant they were showing more. After I noticed this, about a week ago, I started to wonder what I could do.

Searching the web, I came across the following:

Dust in depth - http://www.photo.net/equipment/digital/sensorcleaning/

DIY cleaning - http://www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com/howto.html - a thorough review of all the techniqies that can be used, and at the bottom of the page a great little tip on how to prepare a test image (mine shown below) to check for dust.

I also found that Warehouse Express were selling an ‘Introductory Cleaning Kit‘ for not too much money.

Which brings me to Sunday. Armed with a good light, a clean table, kids removed from the house, and my new cleaning kit, I braced myself and went to work. As you can only use each swab once, and that’s just a quick swipe in each direction, it was almost a disappointment that it turned out so quick and easy. And the results? Well, see the images below. Not perfect, but way, way better than it had been, and at wider apertures I now can’t see anything. Phew.

pre-clean

Shot after cleaning ccd

post-clean

Ice crystals

Ice crystals on a car

More winter pictures….

London Pride

I don’t drink that much, but I do like to go out for a few pints a couple of times a week. It certainly helps having a great local in the form of The Fox in Old Hanwell just down the road. My ‘regular’ is Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, but it wasn’t on last night. That brings me to my rant. Fuller’s London Pride is a nice enough beer, if not quite to my taste, and you can pretty much rely on The Fox serving you a pint in good condition. But why does it always make you feel cr@p the following day? And I’m not talking hangover, I only had two pints. It’s not just me as other people have said the same to me, even though others will say they won’t drink anything else. What has it got in it that other beers don’t?

Where in the world? Part II

I have been spending what spare time I can get trying to upgrade and enhance the map features in the new Where in the world? section.

There’s now a map of post locations (i.e. the locations mentioned in the posts, not which computer I was sitting at when I wrote them!). Click on one of the map ‘pins’ and you’ll get a pop-up summary of the post.

There’s also a map of image locations. When you click on a map pin here you get a thumbnail of the image and the date, title etc.

In each case there’s just a small sample set of data at the moment, but I’ll go back and georeference all the galleries in the Places section for starters, and make sure any new images have geo data where appropriate.

I love it, but what do you think?

Where in the world?

I have just launched a new experimental feature, a map showing all the locations for which I have made posts. You can find it, with just a sample set of data at the moment, at Where in the world?. I am now looking at ways of integrating this with data on image locations from the gallery, as well as looking at functional improvements to the map.

More soon….

More Autumn leaves

There’s something strangely animate about this picture. It’s the leaf buds on an Acer growing in the garden. The tree has been gradually turning colour over the last few weeks, and is now on its last legs, but with a borrowed 105mm Nikon macro lens it was too good an opportunity to miss.

More pictures of Autumn leaves….