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March 2006 Review

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15th March 2006 As you probably read on the home page when you first browsed the site, this was the first day of the 365 project. A visit to Thorpe Park to have a ride on "Stealth" their brand new Intamin Rocket Coaster which opened that day, along with the park. Naturally a shot of the new coaster in wide-angle (obviously, being the only lens I had at that time) was the photo of the day.

16th March 2006 I returned home from work on the 16th to find three ducks sitting on the front lawn, quietly quacking away. It's quite eerie hearing ducks quacking quietly! This is actually a pretty poor photo really, trying to use the onboard flash along with a wide angle lens isn't easy. There's a lot of crop work going on, and some horrible direct flash.

17th March 2006 Again, I'd love to go and recreate this shot again now that I've got the gear required. If you couldn't tell, it's a long exposure of my watch, you can see the second hand moving through ten seconds, but because of the focal length restrictions and the state of the watch, it didn't come out quite how I was hoping!

18th March 2006 It must have been a fairly chilly March in 2006, because the fire's on! Fairly long exposure of the gas fire. Some interesting colours in there!

19th March 2006 It's the official opening of Alton Towers! I was happy to get the new camera to Alton Towers with all the rides operating. Obviously with various settings at my disposal, I was playing with panning and zoom bursts and other things that can only really be created well with a digital SLR camera. This is Spinball Whizzer.

20th March 2006 To the day, still one of my favourite photos of the project. I think it was one of those days where I was frantically looking for something in my room to shoot, and I got the iPod out and started playing around with reflections, eventually finishing at this point! If I'd have shot it now, I probably would have processed it a bit better, maybe removing the keyboard cord for example. "Keys of Music" was a title suggested on a photography forum, I liked it, so it's stuck.

21st March 2006 My housemate bought a new plant for the dining room table, so I took a photo of it. Easy day that one! Not a great photo though.

22nd March 2006 I went for a little bit of a wander in the area to find something photogenic, this church is just up the road from me. I would have liked the wide-angle effect to be a bit more accentuated, but what can you do?!

23rd March 2006 I saw this "technique" on another website and had to give it a go. It takes rather a lot of setting up actually, again, I'm sure I could pull it off in a much classier way now. I do like how I left the monitor cables on the desk, so it looked like they were going nowhere and the monitor is powering itself.

24th March 2006 This was the beginning of another weekend theme park trip, starting with an extremely wet drive from Stafford to Winchester to pick Mark up from Winchester Station, I decided to take a few photos while we hung about on the platform waiting for him to arrive.

25th March 2006 The first day of the "Stealth, Rattle and LOL" CF-Live event. A CF-Live is a CoasterForce community meetup at a theme park or two. This month's CF-Live was at Paulton's Park and Thorpe Park, to celebrate the opening of Cobra (pictured) and Stealth, which you saw on the 15th. Cobra was a surprisingly good little coaster, but it wasn't easy to get and decent photos of it, and it was a pretty miserable day aswell, which always hinders photography!

26th March 2006 The day at Thorpe Park was a bit better, and with hundreds of shots of Stealth under my belt from the 15th, I decided to use this picture of Colossus's cobra roll for the photo of the day. As usual in wide-angle (still no new lenses)! I think this was about the first time the clouds broke up aswell!

27th March 2006 So back to the shoot-something-after-work weekday fun; the bathroom window here, in monochrome to make it look a bit cooler!

28th March 2006 This is not a picture I like, there's so much wrong with it. If you don't know what it is, it's a picture of my Sigma lens, taken with my Olympus compact camera. Maybe I'm used to the DSLR now and think everything taken with the compact is rubbish, but I really can't see anything to like about this. The aperture blade controllers look quite cool though.

29th March 2006 More of the crap-around-the-house shooting then, it's the washing machine! The wide angle made this one pretty impressive. Nice collection of reflections and things in there. I'm sure the "household photography" will get boring soon enough though!

30th March 2006 A lot of people have told me that this is one of their favourite photos from the collection, and I think I'd be inclined to agree with them. It took quite a while to get right, but it's actually a really simple technique. I think the shutter speed was set to ten seconds, and I just had a mini-maglite and put it in "candle mode" and spiralled it up and out of the glass. Nice effect.

31st March 2006 When I took this, the clouds looked a lot better than how they came out on the photo. A bit of tweaking and conversion to monochrome made them a bit more interesting. It's a bit of a bizarre composition though, I'm not sure what I was thinking really. The shot is in my road, just outside my house.

© Martyn Hoyer