New Lens - Update 1

Big daisy like flower, originally uploaded by chored.

Yesterday we went for a bit of an exploration of Midlothian. First stop was the newly opened Springfield Mill wildlife park just outside of Loanhead. While we didn't see much "big" wildlife, I got some close-ups of flowers and insects.

The Tamron 17-50 seemed to handle everything pretty well. The maximum magnification is similar to the 70-200 but you can get a lot closer to the subject (27cm minimum focusing distance) which makes taking close-ups really easy.

After Springfield Mill we headed down the road to Roslin Glen to take some more shots. Pretty happy with the lens so far. Seems good even wide open. At 17mm, close-ups aren't that sharp, but I'm thinking, that maybe I should be shooting close-ups that wide :)

Still need to test it out on bigger subjects though.

New Lens

My new lens arrives, originally uploaded by chored.

So I gave in and bought the Tamron A16 (17-50mm f/2.8) on Thursday, so that Amazon could ship it and it would come today (I love Amazon Prime), turned up this morning. (I'm even feeling little animosity towards City Link today).

I took some photos of the lens to compare it to my other Tamron and a couple of test shots and everything looks pretty decent. Need to try it in real life now rather than taking photos of crap in my flat. Hopefully will get some good shots in Berlin at the end of the month.

Airbus A380 at Edinburgh Airport

Airbus A380 as it flew over Edinburgh Airport, originally uploaded by chored.

Caught site of the new Airbus A380, the largest passenger jet in the world as it performed an approach and go maoeuvre at Edinburgh Airport. My in-laws live pretty much at the end of the runway and we were over there for lunch anyway, so hopped into the field behind their house to get some photos. (Taken with my new A700).

Despite the size of this thing, it is massive, the most impressive factor is how quiet it is. It is way less noisy than a lot of the other aircraft which regularly come into Edinburgh.

Blurb photo books

After seeing an advert for Bob Books on the side of a bus here in Edinburgh, I was interested in seeing how good these photo book companies actually are, I thought I could maybe get a book made with photos from my holidays. Bob Books seemed pretty expensive, but then I found Blurb, they are slightly cheaper than many of the others (80 page 7" square book is about £18 delivered).

I downloaded their software (Windows/Mac only) and Rosie and I set about creating our book. The software lets you drag photos onto pages and do some fancy layout (e.g. a mosaic of 4 photos, one big photos with a smaller insert). These layouts are both a good thing in that they are more imaginative than my uncreative brain would have come up with, but also a bad thing in that sometimes you want something slightly different from the way they do it, but you can't change it. This means that if you want to make a page any of the 100 odd ways that Blurb let you, you can, but if you want to stray from this, you're stuck. While this wasn't a huge problem for me, I can see that it might be more infuriating for someone who wanted more control over their book.

Anyway, we add about 54 pages of photos, put in all our captions and text and uploaded it to Blurb. After paying and choosing the cheapest shipping it was a matter of sitting back and waiting. A week later, we got a parcel through the door (it's worth mentioning shipping to the UK came from The Netherlands, I was a bit worried about getting stung on customs charges since Blurb seemed to be an American company, but if they ship from within the EU it should be OK).

The book is pretty impressive, it looks almost exactly like how I imagined, the dust jacket is nice and glossy and the pages are laid out as shown in the software. It has a look and feel of a "real" book. The only downside is that the 7" square book is a bit smaller in real life than I had imagined, but to be fair it is exactly the size Blurb said it would be.

Overall, I would recommend Blurb to anyone looking to make a Photo book of their own, as long as they aren't too concerned with having absolute control over the layout on every page and are happy enough to go with Blurb's templates.