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April 2006 Review

(click on the thumbnails to see the full image)

1st April 2006 A walk around Cannock Chase, just south of Stafford. I was still getting used to the new camera at this point, and I'd managed to spend all day shooting with the settings completely wrong. I managed to knock the dial, setting the exposure level to its lowest, resulting in a lot of dark images! Fortunately, this one looked ok, in its own weird kind of way!

2nd April 2006 A rather miserable Sunday afternoon which involved a bit of overtime at work. I shot this out of my bedroom window at a point when it was still light, and while I wasn't at work!

33rd April 2006 It's an indicator stalk from my old Renault Clio, at time of writing, I've just got rid of it, and upgraded to a Ford Focus! A fairly inane photo really, blame it on weekday syndrome again I think!

4th April 2006 Yes. It's a towel. Not very inspired is it. Slow week so far! The colours didn't even come out properly from the camera, I had to add most of the green in with Photoshop!

5th April 2006 Aha! Something interesting came to town! Stafford has a fair! Awesome! And a fair means long exposures! Handheld, so not the greatest photo ever made, but still quite colourful!

6th April 2006 I took this Thursday off work to go to Drayton Manor with Rob. Now that I live so close, I could finally get to Drayton Manor for the first time. It was a pretty murky day unfortunately, so the photos weren't brilliant. This ride is G-Force, as the sign suggests.

7th April 2006 I think this was the first and only day during the 365 project where I almost forgot to take a photo. I was staying at Big John's because we were off to Flamingoland on the Saturday and we'd sitting around chatting all night and playing games and things. I looked at my watch and it was ten to twelve! Cue blind panic, trying to find something to shoot. Kir saved the day by having interesting footwear! For such a rush job, I still really like this photo!

8th April 2006 This was a very memorable day for me. We (CoasterForce) went to visit Flamingoland to check out their new-for-2006 coaster; Kumali, we were given half an hour exclusive ride time before it opened to the public and during that time I got to climb its lifthill and shoot from up there. I didn't use one of those pictures for the photo of the day though, because this one was a bit more interesting! A nice panning shot!

9th April 2006 Because we were in the area, and Big John's mum is very accomodating, we stayed another night "up north" and went to Pleasure Island in Cleethorpes. It's a pretty poor park really, but it's got a Boomerang coaster (which can be fun) and a Frisbee (which are always fun)! It was a pretty miserable day though, so we left at around 2pm I think. This photo was really bad, so I processed it quite heavily! Apparently you CAN polish a turd!

10th April 2006 And once again, back to the reality of the weekday! Another rarity here, a shot taken with my compact camera. It's my not-so compact camera with its flash going off. I'm sure it could have been a lot better!

11th April 2006 It's nice when you look out of the window and are graced with a sky as impressive as this. It makes the photo of the day so much easier!

12th April 2006 This is an attempt at capturing things in motion, using external light sources. The only problem was I wasn't particularly well equipped at the time. I wanted to capture the coins falling through the air with multiple flashes, so I used the anti red-eye on my compact camera to flash at the falling coins, while keeping the shutter open on the SLR. This was the result, not what I was hoping for, but fairly interesting still... maybe.

13th April 2006 Pasta! In a jar! In wide-angle! Simple as that really.

14th April 2006 Woohoo! Four day weekend! And most of it spent at Oulton Park, for the start British F3 and GT season. We arrived on Friday evening and once we'd set up our campsite, went for a wander around the paddock. The Volkswagen cup was full of new shape Golfs this season. I was still playing with zoom bursts and got this shot of the GTI badge on the grille of one of the Golfs.

15th April 2006 Saturday at Oulton Park was the qualifying sessions and one of the British GT races (probably an F3 race aswell, but I can't remember, and the GTs are the reason I go anyway!), still only with the Sigma 10-20mm lens, I couldn't really shoot anything on the track, so I wandered around the paddock and watched the scrutineering and things. Lovely orange Panoz here, they sound nice when out on the track aswell! Unfortunately I clipped a tiny bit of the Panoz "P" off the edge of the photo, which is quite annoying!

16th April 2006 Being Easter Sunday, there was nothing happening at Oulton Park, but it wasn't worth going home, so we amused ourselves all day, we did venture out in the car to try and find something to do, to no avail, so we came back and did a lap of the track (on foot obviously) which was interesting. The banking down at Shell Oils is surprisingly steep when you walk down there!

17th April 2006 On Sunday night at Oulton Park, Pete and I stayed up trying to capture some star trails. After about an hour and a half of standing around with the cameras on their tripods we found out that we'd failed rather miserably! It was such an interesting night though, and we walked into the paddock at around 2am and I shot this long exposure of the team trucks bathed in orange light. The blurry flags are quite interesting!

18th April 2006 These two photos were done just to prove a point really! It's fairly obvious what's going on!

19th April 2006 See above!

20th April 2006 God. A particularly boring photo of my DVD player, with a disc whizzing around in it.

21st April 2006 I think it was the Queen's birthday. So I took a photo of some money! This was using my compact camera. The macro mode on it isn't too bad really!

22nd April 2006 Ian and I decided to go and visit Camelot before heading to Chaz and Kaz's to stay there overnight before Sunday's trip to Gulliver's Warrington. Camelot didn't have a great deal to offer really. Although it had chips and gravy, and a roller coaster powered by a diesel engine! This is just another generic roller coaster picture really. The Gauntlet. It's not there anymore, replaced with something hopefully quite a lot better!

23rd April 2006 And talking of Gulliver's, here we are! This was a REALLY fun day, just a small group of very good friends, a silly little park and lots of laughs. Lots of rides on The Antelope aswell. Or T'antelope as it's now known!

24th April 2006 There is certainly a trend of Monday photos not being very interesting! This is my camera body cap and rear lens cap, proudly displaying that I am a Canon user.

25th April 2006 With the weather getting better and the evenings being lighter, it meant I could go for a walk after work. There's a canal just down the road, and it's quite a nice place to go for a wander. This is a photo I really like, barbed wire is always an interesting subject!

26th April 2006 I rather like this photo aswell, which is surprising, considering it's a crap-around-the-house photo! I just think the composition is quite pleasing really, and the spiral is interesting... if you like that sort of thing!

27th April 2006 It's the front door, taken from the inside, looking out, but then mirrored! I remember a few people commenting on it, a bit confused, wondering why there was an entire street in my hallway! Not a photo for the wall though.

28th April 2006 I went for another walk around the canal on this Friday evening, and found this little waterfall thing. I had wanted to try the long exposure waterfalls for quite a while, so this was my chance! Handheld aswell, which is quite pleasing for me!

29th April 2006 It's quite funny that I was happy that I'd finally got a long exposure waterfall the day before, only to get another one on the next day! This one is particularly good though, because it has the mighty Nemesis in the photo aswell! I was there for quite a while taking this photo, and I'm very happy with the final composition of it! Both the coaster and the waterfall lead you through the picture nicely! This photo is taken from the Alton Towers gallery here.

30th April 2006 Remember the Kronenbourg glass from March? Well, here it is again, this time with some Ribena in it! Shot with the macro mode of my compact camera, the four is actually shot through the glass, which is why it's backwards, it's surprisingly sharp considering.

© Martyn Hoyer