Richard Hobbs

As the title implies, there’s rather a lot to talk about this time around, so I’ll try to keep each subject relatively short!

In summary, Sarah and I have been to several more steam rallies, I have been to a bike show, I queued up at 5:30am for an iPhone 4 on launch day, I was official photographer at a wedding(!), I’ve spent 2 nights sleeping on a punctured air bed, we’ve bought a caravan and “done it up” and I’m now involved with “Ada”!

First of all, Meldreth Manor Bike Show

Held at Meldreth Manor School, this is a charity event organised by the Royston and District Motorcycle Club. It’s actually the “Royston and District Motorcycle Club Annual Show”, but is known as the “Meldreth Manor Bike Show” to most people.

I wasn’t planning on going to this, mainly because it’s held on a Wednesday evening, but decided to at the last minute. I have to say, I’m very glad I did! Over 3,200 bikes turned up for those 4 hours and it was spectacular!

Photos of Meldreth Manor Bike Show 2010

Video of Meldreth Manor Bike Show 2010

Somersham Carnival

Sarah and I travelled to Somersham Carnival again this year on the back of the Matchless. The carnival was as enjoyable as ever, with a Mardi Gras theme, and guess what? I won “Best Motorcycle” again!

Photos of Somersham Carnival

iPhone 4

Some of you are going to think I’m crazy, some of you may not, but I queued up outside Lion Yard Shopping Centre (now called the Grand Arcade, I believe!) in Cambridge at 5:30am on iPhone 4 Launch Day to attempt to swap my perfectly good 32GB iPhone 3GS for a brand new 32GB iPhone 4! I was 8th in line.

Did I get my iPhone 4? Yes!

Was it worth paying out my contract with 1 year remaining? Was it worth getting up at 4:30am? Was it worth spending that day with no mobile phone because I had to activate the new one in iTunes before I could use it?

Yes! Well, I think so anyway.

Many people have spoken of reception issues, dropped calls etc… but although I can successfully make the reception indicator bars drop off by holding the phone in the wrong place, I have never suffered a single reception-based issue with the iPhone 4 whatsoever. I do have a case now because I keep dropping it, but I never had an issue for the 2 months before I got the case!

The “Retina” display is amazing, the LED camera flash is excellent as a torch, the speed increase is gratefully received, the camera is of much better quality and the 720p video recording is very good indeed! In summary, I can definitely recommend the iPhone 4 above all other iPhones! There is *no* reason not to upgrade in my opinion!

Classic & Vintage Bike Day, Cambridge Museum of Technology

Once again, at the Cambridge Museum of Technology, there was a classic and vintage bike day. It unfortunately clashed with the “World Cup” (something to do with a game called “football” apparently), but there was a very good turnout considering!

There were a few people out the back working on the main steam engine too (unrelated to the bike show, of course), trying to find which one of the boiler tubes was leaking. I must admit, I spent most of my time with the steam engine people discussing the best way to find the leaky tube! Every idea I came up with, though, had either already been attempted or was actually useless! I guess we live and learn!

Photos of Classic & Vintage Bike Day, Cambridge Museum of Technology

Video of Classic & Vintage Bike Day, Cambridge Museum of Technology

Hollowell Steam Rally & Heavy Horse Show

The Hollowell rally is always one of the best rallies of the year in my opinion, with a great variety of exhibits, ranging from giant insects, through Titan the Robot, to the “Dancing Digger” (a JCB with a very skilled driver!). Needless to say, we took the motorbike again and had a thoroughly great time for the entire 3 days! If I remember correctly, the temperature outside was very warm indeed (high 20s, anyway) and helped make the weekend great!

Photos of Hollowell Steam Rall & Heavy Horse Show

Video of Hollowell Steam Rally & Heavy Horse Show 2010

Photographing a wedding!

Another thing I’ve done since the last blog post is be official photographer at some good friends’ wedding! Now, there’s a rather large learning curve to go from photographing stationary steam engines to photographing a wedding, but now that I’ve edited all 1,840 or so photos down to the final set (after a number of weeks!) I think I pulled it off! The photos are far from “professional”, but I’ve learned a lot from the experience and, of course, thoroughly enjoyed the day, as did everyone!

And the main thing? The bride and groom like the photos, so in a way, nothing else matters! The lack of professionalism, the overexposed whites, the underexposed blacks and the bad composition mean nothing now because the people that matter like the photos!

Cambridgeshire Steam Rally

A week or two after Hollowell, the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally at Swavesey happened. This was only the second year for this rally, but with double the number of exhibits from the first year, the event was the best yet! The weather was roasting hot too, which helped bring the crowds in.

Photos of Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, Swavesey

Videos of Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, Swavesey (this year’s video not yet edited, but watch this space!)

Thurlow Steam Rally

The latest rally was the Thurlow rally. This year it clashed with the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Jampot Rally (due to the Jampot rally having been moved forward a few weeks) and although the decision of which one to attend was a difficult one, I’m very glad we decided to go to Thurlow this year! More on that later.

One thing I’d like to say about the Thurlow rally is about the atmosphere. This rally is one of the most relaxing rallies of the entire year and for that reason it is one of my favourites. The larger rallies have to be very organised, with scouts running the car park, army cadets acting as wardens to ensure safe passage of vehicles in and out of the arena, people in yellow jackets everywhere keeping the rally running smoothly, etc… but somehow Thurlow manages to operate pretty much on time, perfectly safely and everything just happens on-site with seemingly no stress whatsoever!

Don’t get me wrong though – i’m sure lots of stress goes into the organisation of the rally each year, but the impression of a lack of stress and panic during the weekend certainly makes for one of my favourite rallies of the year, so thank you for a great rally again Michael!

Photos of Thurlow Steam Rally

Videos of Thurlow Steam Rally (this year’s video not yet edited, but watch this space!)

Caravan

While at the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, there was a problem. Our air bed developed a slow puncture. On my side. During the first night. On a very rough field.

This wasn’t the end of the world, as I can somehow survive on very little sleep if I have to(!), but I could not find the puncture anywhere! If I pumped up the mattress in the morning, by 10pm it would still be up, but 3 hours after I started laying on it, it’d be out of air completely.

At this same rally we were informed by a couple of fellow rally-goers who we know quite well now, that there was a caravan for sale near them for £200. So, the day after we got back from the rally, we headed up there to pop in for a cup of tea and to take a look at the caravan down the road. Needless to say, we drove home with the caravan in tow!

Since we bought it, we’ve actually spent more money on it than it’s worth, but in doing so we’ve made it our own, and in the 1.5 weeks that followed the initial purchase we have completely re-foamed and re-covered the seats, washed the curtains, cleaned and sterilised the inside, washed the outside, re-carpeted it and put all the hinges and door-stops on that weren’t quite screwed in properly! Our aim was to have it read for the Thurlow rally, and that we did!

I have to say, having spent a year going to rallies in a tent, upgrading to a caravan is an infinitely large step up (not literally). For a start, there’s no risk the air bed will go down leaving you sleeping on the grass! When it’s raining, you can still have a cup of tea. You don’t have to sit on a chair leaning forward cooking or boiling the kettle on a stove on the grass. You don’t have to sit in awkward folding camping chairs. The list goes on and on! In summary, upgrading to a caravan was one of the most sensible things we’ve done in relation to rallies and other multi-day events! The only disadvantage is having to do one trip to take the caravan and another to take the motorbike, but I’ll buy a van one day to solve that problem!

Finally, I’ll mention “Ada” (seen below).

As far as I know (at this early stage) Ada is a 105 year old (built in 1905) 10-ton 7 nominal horse power Fowler general purpose steam traction engine. It is owned by David and family, who were after some help with the engine. David currently looks after the maintenance and running of the engine mostly on his own and while I know very little about the mechanical side of steam engines at this stage, I’ve been wanting to get involved with a full-size steam engine for many, many years. This year, at the Thurlow rally, that opportunity came up and I took it!

My involvement with the engine will begin this winter when I’ll start meeting David at the workshop to begin the winter maintenance cycle and will then hopefully continue on through next year’s rally season and beyond! To be honest, it’s a bit of a dream come true, so thank you David for the opportunity and thank you Hugh for introducing me to David and finding me the opportunity!

Photos of “Ada” on Steam Scenes

Recently, I have been attempting to learn a new photography technique. Well… actually, a post-processing technique.

A work colleague of mine makes a lot of models, and we though it would be interesting to try and make them to make then look life-sized or larger. I also stumbled across a photograph on the Nikon D300s Sample Images page by Ami Vitale of what looks like a scale model of Cairo. However, I believe it’s a life size image either with some blurring applied in post-processing or taken with a tilt-shift lens.

So, above, you can see a photo of a model diesel locomotive.

Actually, it’s not a model. It’s life-sized and was originally taken as part of the Nene Valley Railway Spring Diesel Gala photo gallery.

If you were not fooled by the above image, that’s probably because it’s my very first attempt at making something life-sized look miniature. It took me 1.5 hours to go from the original image (below) to the image you see above! 50% of that time, however was spent waiting for my laptop to access it’s swap file as I don’t have enough RAM to make continual edits like this!

The general technique for achieving the above is to reduce the depth of field drastically. I also increased the saturation to make it look a bit more like a painted model on a model railway.

The reason this technique is so difficult (in case you wondered!) is because you cannot get a depth of field shallow enough when you are so far away from the subject.

You can reduce the depth of field by either widening the aperture of your lens or by getting closer to the subject. When photographing scale models, for example, you are typically so close that the depth of field can be measured in low numbers of centimeters. When photographing a life-sized locomotive, though, you might be stood 5 to 10 metres away and as a result, the depth of field might now measured in tens of metres. Therefore, much more is in focus and the subject no longer looks miniature. You also cannot increase the aperture any further because even on lenses that go up to f1.8, that is still not large enough to reduce the depth of field enough to make the subject look miniature.

You can achieve a very similar effect by using a tilt-shift lens, but I believe they are quite expensive, don’t quite give the same end result, and I don’t have one anyway!

To counteract this, blurring must be applied in post-processing, but this is not as easy as you might think because the further away from the lens an item is, the more it must be blurred. Because photographs are 2-dimensional instead of 3-dimensional, the photo editing software has no way of knowing what is far away from the camera and what is very close – it just sees a rectangular bunch of colored pixels called a photograph. The blurring must therefore be applied in stages, manually.

I believe the Adobe Photoshop CS4 has a “Lens Blur” feature, but as I have not paid over over £600 for my photo editing software I must use Paint Shop Photo Pro X3‘s “Depth of Field” feature. I’ve no idea how these two features compare, but I suspect they are fairly similar in that they apply a gradient blur from inside to outside starting at the edges of the chosen area.

Anyway, my first attempt, as I mentioned, is above. Hopefully it fooled you enough!

Now onto the opposite – making miniature things look large!

Above is my first attempt at this technique. The main idea with this technique is to increase the depth of field until the subject looks life-sized. As the opposite of what I mentioned above, there are two ways to increase the depth of field. One method is to get further away from the subject and the other is to decrease the aperture size.

Obviously, getting further away from the subject is easy, but the problem then becomes the amount of zoom available. If the subject is really small and you are really far away, you need a lot of zoom to make it fill the frame again! Making the aperture small is also easy – my 300mm zoom lens goes down to f45, but even that is not small enough to keep everything in the shot in focus. Therefore, you must either bring everything in the shot within the still-small depth of field, or substitute the out-of-focus elements with in-focus elements manually in post-processing.

In the above example, I was easily able to get Tiny Clanger and the bonsai tree with its mud into focus, but the background was always out of focus. I therefore grabbed a photograph of a landscape in a glass picture frame and put it about 3 inches behind the subject. This kept everything in almost in focus, but also had the reflections on the glass picture frame visible along the top half of the trees.

In summary, it was a failure, but I don’t think it was bad for a first attempt.

Next, I wanted to try the technique on my work colleague’s models. The result can be seen below.

This model aircraft has a real-life wingspan of about 2 inches. The model was originally on a stand and was shot against the sky. I edited out the stand by cloning parts of the sky over the top of it, but found that the sky was still out of focus, even when using an f45 aperture size. I therefore took another photo of the sky separately, making sure it was in focus, and then substituted the out of focus sky for the in focus sky!

I think this technique works well!

The last thing to perfect is making models look life-sized when they are not shot against something as easily replaceable as the sky. I tried shooting some ground-based models on various surfaces, but none of them worked. The concrete looked like I had zoomed in, the blades of grass looked huge and the gravel also looked strange. All of these issues gave away the fact that the subject was actually miniature and I had zoomed in in order to take the photo. This is something I still need to sort out.

Anyway – I hope this helps someone out there attempting to learn this technique, and if anyone who has already perfected it has any tips, suggestions or other comments, please let me know! Feel free to leave a comment even if you know nothing about it at all as well, of course!

I was going to wait for this particular purchase, but while investigating potential digital SLR cameras for the future, I found a great “deal of the day” at Jessops in Cambridge – a Nikon D5000 camera body, an 18-55mm VR (image stabilization) lens, a 70-300mm lens (Nikon lenses are to be multiplied by 1.5 to get full-frame equivalents, so they were offering the equivalent of a 27-82.5mm lens and a 105-450mm lens), an 8GB SDHC memory card, a case to carry it all and 40 free 6×4″ prints – all for £599.00 inc. VAT. Not a bad deal at all.

Anyway, I’ve only just started playing around with the camera and getting used to the layout and all of it’s features. Most of the features that I used regularly are the same as my 12 year old Olympus 2020ZOOM which I’ve been using for the last couple of years. The main differences are the fact that this camera has many more features (which I intend to start using, of course!) and it obviously takes pictures of much better resolution and quality.

I’ve only taken around 150 shots with the camera in total so far, but here are a few of the better ones…

Cake!

The above photo was taken at a focal length of 280mm (full-frame equiv. would, of course, be 420mm) with the lens itself on Macro mode (not entirely sure what that does yet. I know what it does on the camera, but not the lens!). The aperture was F/5.6, shutter speed 1/125s, ISO 200.

Cambridge Science Park

This one was shot at 30mm focal length, F/4.5 with shutter speed of 1/1250s. You may notice that this photo is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo (i.e. has deeper, richer colours and more detail in the shadows and highlights). I actually took 3 photos for this – a “normal” photo, a dark photo at -2 EV (exposure compensation) and a light photo at +2 EV. I then used Photomatix Pro from HDRsoft to combine the images into what you see here.

Orion’s Belt

On the evening this was taken, at around 21:30, I went outside to attempt to photograph the moon. Well… i couldn’t actually find the moon in the perfectly clear night sky, so I gave up and zoomed in as far as I could to the star in the middle of Orion’s belt. According to Wikipedia, this star is 1340 light years away and is known as “Alnilam” or “Epsilon Orionis“.

Anyway, the above photo was taken at 300mm, F/5.6 and shutter speed of 1/1.3s. Again, i used ISO 200.

The Moon

Later on in the same evening, the Moon finally appeared above the roof of one of the surrounding houses, so here it is!

The moon was taken at 300mm, F/6.3 with shutter speed of 1/400s and ISO 200 again (I’ve not played around with the ISO yet). You may also realise that even at 300mm (450mm equiv.) the moon will not fill the frame. This photo is cropped as tighly as I’d like, so most of the outside of the photo has actually been removed, leaving just the tiny moon in the middle, which now, of course, fills most of the photo.

So, there we go! That’s the best of the phots I’ve taken so far! I hope you like them! Do feel free to leave a comment on the blog page, if you like!

More of the Nikon D5000 DSLR Initial Test Shots