The purpose of the study wasn’t to condone illegal or anti social behaviour conducted by people driving cars, but to shed light on a different perspective rarely given an unbiased means for expression. I wanted to look at the motivation behind the wave of moral panic that surrounds car enthusiasts and demonstrate it’s ineffectiveness in addressing real issues.

I conducted interviews and looked into the government’s own research and statistics to challenge common stereotypes and publicised motives for legislation, in order to promote the need for genuine constructive discussion and original thought that involved multiple areas of society when dealing with issues of road incidents and illegal behaviour.

Below are just a few images from my study. My written exploration into the issue won’t be publicly published yet.

On another topic. Heres a picture i shot the other day. First time i’d picked up the DSLR in a while. There were some really interesting storm clouds i could see form the back of my house so thought i’d get a few photos. It looked pretty dramatic. I would of loved being in that plane

Ok, this set of shots are just randoms from my most recent trip. I’m posting them up pretty roughly for the time being and will save the proper finished products for my new gallery when it comes to life.
Here are a few from Germany and Switzerland…

• Its a way of using some of the greatest lenses ever made (ie. there a massive variety of lenses to try),
• They’re generally smaller, lighter, and cheaper than modern lenses,
• Many have unique characteristics and draw nicer than modern lenses,
• Build quality that still shits over most modern lenses,
• Trying something different for the hell of it.

As you can see, theres several good reasons to consider using older lenses.
From using film cameras recently, i’d already built up quite a selection of Zuiko lenses for my Olympus OM bodies. Luckily, Zuiko have made some of the best lenses in history ( you cant dispute that its a fact), so i got a cheap adapter off ebay to start using them on my DSLR.

I’m not going to keep rambling on, so i’ll cut to the chase.
This afternoon i attached my newest Zuiko, a humble and underrated 100mm f/2.8 that cost me $55 including postage from the U.S. The light was going down, and the wind was pretty strong, but f/2.8 is still pretty respectable even if it’s not exactly “fast”.
Here is what i came up with shooting wide open at f/2.8 at 200ISO. There is no processing whatsoever, its straight from the RAW. No sharpening, no level/colour adjustments. I’ve also included a 100% crop of the image. **click images for full size, the resized ones can look a little soft**

100% crop

Shooting with a manual focus lens on the 400D isnt the best combination you can think of. The viewfinder is pretty small, and it doesnt have a focus screen designed for manual focus lenses. You can buy them and they’re relatively cheap, but i probably wont bother unless i upgrade to full frame. I’ll definitely be using my other manual focus lenses form now on though and im looking forward to using the 100mm for some portrait work.

Click the images for a larger view, especially the second. I just stitched two shots together for some fun. No real post processing done at all.

After looking at the 3 noise reduction programs, i have to say i quite like them all in one way or another.
I’d never used DPP before, but i liked how it treated the image. It still has some grain, but removes most of the digital noise which is what i want most. It had nice contrast i thought, and the colours looked fine too. The only downside is that theres not many options for individual settings. So fine tuning is pretty much out of the question. (It almost seems as though it was bit of an after thought with the DPP software, but thats another story).
Noise ninja seems very powerful with a large range of fine tuning options. I think once i play around with it i’ll be able to reduce the plastic skin look. The colours looked quite different from the original too, but thats probably another thing that can be fixed also. The program seems to need a bit of fine tuning which is to be expected i guess. But the whole idea is to minimise hours infront of the computer, if i have to play around with NN each time i use it, i’ll probably lose interest. Thats just a personal thing though.
Then theres Camera RAW which seems fine, but would probably be my last choice. It just seems to give bit of an overall blur to the image, which isnt all that useful.

I guess it all comes down to personal preference. If i can get Noise Ninja sorted out, i’ll use that the most. Otherwise i’ll go with DPP and its simplicity.