A New Home!

I have NOT given up on my Project 366 - it's just moved house...

It's always been my ambition to get my various blogs integrated properly with their relevent photographic website. And whilst I've enjoyed the blog being hosted with Blogger for the past six months, now I've finally managed to get everything set up properly on my general photography website.

The main site lives at cazphoto.co.uk and you can now find this blog migrated to the site too, with a properly integrated version of WordPress and a lovely new style to match the rest of the site.

I shall be leaving this site here as a permanent record, but all new posts will now appear at the other site. I hope you follow me there!

Day #188

Title: Best Seat In The House
Location: At my parents’
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: Mum is an avid tennis fan, and she’s glued to the box during Wimbledon fortnight. I visited for lunch today, and there’s no prizes for guessing where she was camped out after we had eaten. The Men’s Final was quite a Marathon, and was, of course, accompanied by the obligatory strawberries. At least we didn’t have to don our macs during the interruptions for rain!

Day #187

Title: Saturday Cricket
Location: Mountnessing
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: Despite dire predictions for today’s weather, it was actually a lovely day. The big fluffy clouds, against the blue sky would make a perfect backdrop for a picture of Mountnessing Windmill, so that’s where I visited around lunchtime. I took a few pictures just of the mill, and then noticed they were gearing up for a cricket match. I haven’t photographed cricket for ages, so I hung around for a while at the boundary and took some action shots, as well as this wider setting.

Day #186

Title: Stand Out From The Crowd
Location: Ingatestone
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: Exploring the fields around Ingatestone for today’s picture, I liked the way this ear of corn did its own thing, and really stood out from its neighbours.

Day #185

Title: Molten Lead
Location: Buttsbury Church
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: I deliberately left it late for today’s picture as I wanted to revisit the location of Day #64’s image, which faces west. Despite taking quite a few ordinary sunset pictures there, I wasn’t really very enamoured with any of them when I got home. I much preferred this view of the sunset reflected in a window of Buttsbury Church. It reminded me of some of fellow 366 Flickerite touchingthelight’s images.

Day #184

Title: Red Sky At Night…
Location: Galleywood Common
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 75-300mm EF f/4-5.6 IS USM
Notes: For the most part, it was another grey, miserable day. So I stayed indoors and nursed my poor, bruised knees. However, by about 8pm, there was a chink of light coming through the clouds, and I decided to go to the Common for a hobble round. I got a few fairly mundane shots in the woods and grasslands, and then returned to my favourite spot overlooking the Wid Valley to watch the sunset. I was rewarded with a great Red Sky At Night just over Hylands House, which is lurking in the shadows at the bottom.

Day #183

Title: Half Full Or Half Empty?
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: This week’s 366 theme is “a phrase or saying” - so here we have, The Glass Is Half Full/Half Empty. At the moment, I would have to say it’s half empty. I’ve been having a bad week generally, and just when you think it can’t get any worse… This evening, shortly after I’d taken this, I managed to trip over in the garden. So now I have two sore knees, a slightly fat lip, scratched glasses and a bruised ego. Wonderful. On a slightly more positive note, at least we’ve made it to Half Way today - day 183/366. Congrats to all who have come this far too.

Day #182

Title: Beach Hut Pastels
Location: West Mersea
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: After doing a load of dull jobs at home this morning, including finding my car’s MOT and insurance documents so I could go and renew the tax disc, I took a trip this afternoon to Mersea Island. I haven’t been there for years - I used to have Clarinet lessons in West Mersea when I was at school, but probably haven’t been back since. I had heard about some smart new beach huts in West Mersea, so that was where I headed. The sun was out, there were fluffy clouds in the sky, and the pale pastels of the beach huts didn’t disappoint. I took many shots from lots of different angles, but I thought this view was a bit more unusual than most.

Day #181

Title: Bottoms Up!
Location: Hanningfield Reservoir
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 100-400mm EF f/4-5.6 L IS USM
Notes: After all the time I’ve had to spend in front of the PC this weekend, restoring numerous websites after the server crash, I thought I’d get out for a bit of fresh air this afternoon. So I went to Hanningfield Reservoir, armed with my longest lens, to see what I could find. Generally the birds were quite a long way off, but this Coot swam nearby and I caught it just as it dived under the surface. Perfect for this week’s 366 Theme, “A Phrase or Saying”. So this is “Bottoms Up”. Cheers…

Day #180

Title: A Bit Of Passion
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 50mm EF f/1.8 + 12mm extension tube
Notes: The passion flower over my back gate is beginning to flower now, and looks quite sculptural in detail. It’s always a devil to get a big enough depth of field to keep all of it sharp, so this time I’ve mainly concentrated on the central portion and petals, and let the stamen go a little bit fuzzy.

Day #179

Title: Elemental: Water
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: I intended to go out this morning for a photo or two but didn’t get around to it. By 3pm the rain was hammering down oustide, so I nipped out the back door and took this (from underneath an umbrella!) - heavy raindrops splashing on the top of the neighbour’s fence. Another for this week’s theme, The Four Elements.

Day #178

Title: It’s All Gone Pear-Shaped
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: Had a major disaster with my web hosting which began late afternoon yesterday. It still isn’t resolved. The server which hosts all my websites (personal and for clients’ sites) decided to give up the ghost with no warning. The tech folks are having to rebuild it from scratch, and then I have the joy of reinstating nearly 20 sites of varying complexity as soon as it’s fixed. I thank the Gods of the Interwebs that I backed up everyone’s databases just yesterday morning, hours before the system fell over! As I said, the problem is ongoing, and has been occupying my thoughts for much of the day today. So I bought some pears from the shops, intending to photograph them as an illustration. But they looked pretty dreary, so with a bit of fiddling, a cutout filter and some tidying up, this is the end result. It did start off as a photo, honest!

Day #177

Title: Elemental: Air
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: Another one for this week’s 366 theme, The Four Elements. I saw a face in the clouds, looking back at me!

Day #176

Title: Enigma IX
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: Not much inspiration today, so I present another Enigma; it will have to do.

Day #175

Title: Elemental: Fire
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: This week’s 366 theme is The Four Elements. I was getting a bit pushed for time this evening to take a picture, but I thought of the theme as I was cooking some dinner - and came up with this view of fire.

Day #174

Title: Ally Pally
Location: Alexandra Palace, London
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: Day 2 of Mashed, and although we were promised howling gales and heavy rain at midday, this was the scene around lunch time as we ventured outside to watch one of the hacks - a rocket launch in the park! Great fun.

Day #173

Title: Pie & Mashed
Location: Ally Pally
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 24-105mm EF f/4 L IS USM
Notes: Spent the day geeking out at Mashed and this was part of the catering provided for dinner - a surprisingly tastey steak and mushroom pie. With Mash, of course.

Day #172

Title: Early Bird
Location: At home
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 75-300mm EF f/4-5.6 IS USM
Notes: I hate early mornings, but had to get up just before five today to answer a call of nature. Whilst looking blearily out of the bathroom window, I noticed a soft, orange glow in the sky to the east. “Could this be what they call dawn?”, I thought to myself. So in a state of half-consciousness, I managed to find the camera, fit my long zoom and take this image out of the back bedroom window. It’s not quite as dramatic as the other dawn I photographed (there have been only two!), but the silhouette of the wood pidgeon sitting on the neighbours’ TV aerial is still quite nice.

Day #171

Title: Windy Whitstable
Location: Whitstable, Kent
Camera: Canon EOS 30D / 75-300mm EF f/4-5.6 IS USM
Notes: After a nightmare 4 hour journey to Whitstable, it was eventually worth it for the sunny skies, sea breeze and good lunch which we enjoyed in the town. This adventurous chap was kite surfing on the choppy waters, with the Thames Estuary wind farm in the background. The train journey home was much more comfortable, and I’m able to live-blog this on the move thanks to my new mobile data modem for my laptop. Ah, gotta love technology.

Day #170

Title: Que Pasa Cappuccino
Location: Chelmsford
Camera: Canon Ixus 850IS compact
Notes: Had a couple of meetings in Chelmsford this morning, so spent some time drinking posh coffee. This one from Que Pasa was rather nicely branded.