I work daily with visual designers and am constantly in awe of their skills. Visual design makes so much in life interesting. Playing with logos and branding is always a fun thing to do, as it offers a counterpoint in thinking about who the people are behind the image.
Here are a few of my favourite images, spotted across other blogs and RSS feeds…
A telescope for Christmas is one of the best presents a boy can ever have – even one in his thirties!
This “kid” here was the lucky recipient of a Sky-Watcher SK1309EQ2 – the first reflecting telescope I’ve owned. Using a reflector is really straightforward and a lot of fun.
Learning the difference between an equatorial mount and an alt-az mount is really the first order of business. Comprehending how to manage mounting the ‘scope, and tracking celestial objects as they circumnavigate the night sky, helps in understanding one’s position on the planet in relation to these heavenly bodies.
As you start spending time watching the night sky, your eyes become more sensitive to it. Focus on a particular area and, over time, more stars emerge. As I’m discovering, training the eye is as important a task as focusing the viewfinder.
Capturing the image is somewhat more of a challenge. Have a look at my first photo album of moon shots – taken with a dash of luck through the camera lens of a Samsung Galaxy S mobile phone, pointing straight into the telescope’s eyepiece.
The best part of using a telescope, though, is sharing the experience. Luckily for me, that means spending more time with the beautiful girl who was so kind to buy the device.
Which makes me wonder, am I simply the vehicle for somebody’s feminine geekism..? 😉
I’ve never been one for uploading my images in different places. I don’t upload images to albums in Facebook or into Blogger itself. Instead, I prefer to centralilse all my image storage at FlickrPicasa.
The main reason for this is was that Flickr has been around a long time, is a veteran Yahoo web application, and has a great Javascript-based uploader which works flawlessly on Linux browsers – well, Firefox at least. Unlike that stupid Java-applet attempt courtesy of Facebook’s programming team. Sorry guys, “almost, but no cigar”.
However, given that Yahoo charges for something that is an added detour from something else (Google+) that is essentially free, it no longer seems necessary to use it.
So, when we see another wintry spell in the UK, perhaps I’ll take the aging Pentax *istDL out for another burn somewhere.
Or maybe I’ll cling on to the Samsung Galaxy S (mk1) and the ease of Android 🙂
When most of us talk digital cameras, we talk megapixels, ISO, image noise, shot-per-second speed and image processing. We’re tech geeks. But really, none of that stuff matters as much as your camera’s lens.