Here’s where we’ve booked for our wedding in 2010. I was sold once we got to the top of the tree covered drive and saw this view.

I hadn’t prepared at all for any of the photos taken that weekend, and especially not this one (we were all cold but excited to get inside and see if it was just as good!) I’m happy with the way it’s turned out considering it was a click-and-run. Only edits were to up the exposure slightly and change the white balance.

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This one should go some way to explain why it’s been a bit quiet on here…

This is the engagement ring - taken quite a while ago (before I asked) sat on a white pillow next to a lamp on the floor! We used a cropped and slightly cleaned up (in Photoshop) version of this for our ‘save the date’ cards which should have all been sent out by now.

The venue’s booked too - hopefully I’ll upload one of the pictures of it next weekend.

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Little bit late with this photo - spent the weekend in Belfast looking at wedding venues! I’ll put some up from that trip over the next few weeks…

Before that, this is the last one from the Rome trip of the statue on top of the Palazzo di Giustizia. This photo is as taken (except for a bit of colour tweaking) through some trees across the river. It’s a bit cheesy - the idea has been done to death - but it came out so well that I had to include it here. It’s just a shame it’s using the far end of the lens - the 18-135 I have isn’t exactly sharp at it’s extremes.

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This photo was completely accidental - I had the camera strapped to my arm (as I don’t have a proper hand strap) and accidentally tapped the shutter release a few times over the course of the day. Obviously most of it was junk but I quite like this mistake! It needed a bit of colour saturation tweaking and cropping to (remove the lens hood!) but other than that it’s pretty much as taken.

- P

Another photo from the Rome set, this time of an amazing stained glass window up in the roof of one of the many, many churches we visited while we were over there.

Technically this was quite a difficult one for me to take. I’d never needed to use spot metering before this picture, or at least never tried it! I took about 3 or 4 photos of this before realising that’s what I needed to do. I think it came out ok but as I was using the far end of my zoom lens, some sharpness was sacrificed that this photo could’ve benefited from.

- P

I was a bit busy yesterday with wedding stuff so didn’t get a chance to upload this latest one until today (sorry Stu!) This shop is just up from the Spanish Steps in Rome. I’m not sure if it’s a marketing ploy or if “expensive” means something else in Italian…

This pic is part of a set experimenting with street photography. As this is probably the only one I’ll publish here from the set, you can draw your own conclusions to how successful it was!

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The next set of photos are from Rome back in August. I took about 800 photos in the four days we were there - no surprises it’s taken until now to finish working through them!

This one’s from the first day on our way up to the top of the Spanish Steps. Considering it’s the middle of the day, the shadows across the buildings and the texture of the road make it slightly more interesting than the usual whitewashed photos you’d get in the midday sun. (i.e. Almost every other photo from this day…)

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Just a quick post about the site redesign. It’s something I’ve been working on for a few weeks here and there.

There’s a couple of quirks with it, mainly as I’m using some CSS3 stuff which isn’t finalised yet (as far as I can tell) so if you’re looking at the site in Firefox or Safari, it’ll look as intended. If you’re looking at it in IE6, you’ll notice some weird delay on the formatting - that’s because of a hack I’ve had to put in to get it to look right in that. I’m definitely not bothering next time so if you’re using IE6, go get it updated!

…and a quick apology for the lack of updates. Had a lot going on in the last few weeks (more holidays, busy work, got engaged…) Normal service will be resumed shortly ;)

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This photo of the strip is from the “Top of the World” revolving restaurant in the Stratosphere casino. It was an amazing evening with some great food and stunning views across all of Vegas. You can see most of the main casinos in this pic with the Luxor beam just about visible in the top left.

As the restaurant is moving (goes round completely in about an hour) and there was lots of nice, expensive wine involved, this one was always going to be blurry! I took lots of photos here, experimenting with the ISO to try and up the shutter speed - this one was the best compromise of ISO noise and blur although still far from perfect. I think  the only way I could’ve improved this picture would be to use a better lens… or use a restaurant that didn’t move!

- P

One of the better shots I took of the Bellagio fountains. They’re a set of very powerful jets that can shoot water almost as high as the casino behind it and are choreographed to music. This one was taken while “Viva Las Vegas” was playing through the very loud speakers hidden in the barriers.

This photo manages to show a bit of movement without losing the definition of each jet. Considering it was taken hand-held in the middle of a busy croud, I’m very pleased with the result. Shame about the construction site behind though.

- P