BlindFish Ideas

For my holiday to Peru I wanted to find a small cheap and light way to keep my digital photos backed up every day.  When I travelled around south East Asia for 3 months I was paranoid about backing up my photos. I was terrified that something would happen and I would have lost every photo. So I carried a 1.5Kg net book and charger, a memory card reader and a bulky portable hard drive. It worked I didn't loose any photos and when my hard drive was stolen I bought a replacement and quickly backed everything up again. But it was a heavy and bulky amount of tech to take backpacking.  Doing some research I decided the best way to achieve a small, cheap and light back up was to make use of an OTG  (On The Go) Cable. This is simply a short cable with a male micro USB port at one end to plug into your phone and a female regular sized USB port at the other end for you to plug a multitude of normal USB devices into. This lets you do things like plugging a full sized keyboard ...

These photos are from a week or so ago when we were in Nha Trang, Vietnam. I have delayed in posting these photos because they just didn't look that great due to the green water making all the photos green. I then put the images into GIMP 2.0 (open source image manipulation programme) and experimented with changing the colours to compensate for the green water. I tried a few  different  things but in the end the simplest best way to improve the images was to use the curves tool, selected the green channel and lower the line with a simple adjustment. Then a few more tweeks with saturation and contrast lead me to be happy with the images. Please tell me what you think.     

I'm Experimenting with HDR photography and post production. Do people think this improves the photo? Normal Photo   HDR photo, 3 images at the same aperture but  different  shutter speeds merged into one. Then some colour adjustments with tonal mapping and saturation adjustment.  Normal Photo HDR photo, 3 images at the same aperture but  d ifferent  shutter speeds merged into one. Then some colour adjustments with tonal mapping and saturation adjustment. 

Last year I went to Kazakhstan for work for a HIV project, which lots of people know. What most people don't know is that I had a travel companion. An awesome travel companion who is cunning clever and strong. Very helpful in a pinch and a sneaky fellow. I am talking of course about Ninja Penguin.  I documented his adventure and am now sharing this small book I have made showing his travels in Kazakhstan.  (Just a bit of fun but it's great to remember my time in Almaty)  

Took these photos using a Sony a200 DSLR at Chester race course. Please let me know what you think.  Fireworks - Chester 5-11-11