Thanks to the power of PHP we are now able to host comments on the bennee server. This means you don't need to sign up for Vox to leave a message. The blog images are now open for everyone to voice there opinion. I have taken the opportunity to give the blog a bit of a redesign. I hope you like it in its new location here

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I think I've made up for missing the fireworks last year by going to three firework displays in three county's this year. ...at least it would have been if we had gone to Stamford on November 7th. In a last minute change of heart we decided to support our local display in Oakham. The Stamford display will have to wait till next year for me to capture it. The only change I made to firework five was to change the middle firework to bright green to make it stand out a bit. Firework six is as shot in camera.

Firework five

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Firework six

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The second of three fireworks nights was at Cottesmore Village Hall. It had a nice bar but because it was November the 5th it was full of kids which was a little weird. So far 24 images have been accepted at Shutterstock from this display. Here are a couple which had a bit of photoshop work done to bring out the colours.

Firework4

Firework3

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Here are a couple of the 60 firework images which were accepted at shutterstock from the ferry meadows firework display. The red firework is as shot in camera. The other one was cropped and significantly colour shifted to give it that electric blue hue. A big thank you to John for giving me a hand on the night. I discovered the one thing better than taking two cameras to a firework display is two cameras and two photographers.

Firework Two

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Firework One

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I took this shot while leaving the Ferry Meadows Firework Display last night. One of the photographers from work, John helped me capture over 200 firework shots. I have submitted the first batch of 24 to Shutterstock today. I used a one second exposure for this shot. The stream of people leaving the site where all blurred until these four paused for a moment to take their own picture. Bingo.

Meadows Mist

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I haven't had a post for a while so I threw this one together from some old images. The planets were made from two 360 panoramas from Egypt. The one on the left was taken on the shore of a salt lake in the Bahariya Desert. The one on the right was taken after a steep climb to a peak in the Black Desert. The fireworks in the middle were taken at the Nottingham Riverside Festival a few years ago. This years fireworks will be posted here soon.

Planet Crash

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I made this mermaid by downloading three stock photos from Big stock and then compositing them together in Photoshop. Big stock have recently merged with the largest subscription-based stock photo agency Shutterstock. The move is designed to allow Shutterstock to hit the ground running with a credit based stock model to rival iStock and Dreamstime.

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Karen took this picture of me at the controls of a Vulcan Bomber during a visit to the Solway Aviation Museum with Karen's parents. Karen's father even found a picture of himself in the museum in a room dedicated to the Blue Streak Rocket Project which he was a team leader of in th 60's. The Vulcan Bomber below is a delta wing subsonic jet which fulfilled the role of nuclear deterrent against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Although this one did not fly. Parts of it were taken recently to get the Last Flying Vulcan back in the air.

Vulcan

Bob and Benz

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By popular request ...well the first comment in 18 months at least. This is some more detail about how this picture was made. Each layer has either a blending mode or a mask. The mask is a very powerful tool as it lets you paint with whatever effect you like. For example adding saturation to the whole image would not work as the stones start to produce some bright greens and blues which do not look very stone like so you can paint out the saturation using a big soft black brush on the mask. By the time I had added all the layers the clouds had taken a blue hue so I used a black and white layer and used a mask so it only changed the undersides of the clouds back to gray. The blending modes on the base layers are just a case of cycling through until something looks interesting. They are great for inspiration.

How To Henge

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I have played with this a bit in photoshop. However the pool of light around the henge was a result of luck or being in the right place at the right time. The light made this image stand out from the fifty others I took of the henge that day. The sun and lens flare where added and the various colours and textures were enhanced by building them up in 11 photoshop layers. Finally a little bit of lens correction to give it some depth.

Henge

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