Tag Archives: BT Tower
BT Towering
The trip to Iceland was enjoyable, but it sure was good to be home – and that’s how I feel about images some times. It’s great to process and post images from a trip, but there’s something very satisfactory about bringing it back to this wonderful city.
Here we have the BT Tower; it was taken a while ago when the satellites were still on the frame – these have now been stripped out, I believe due to heath and safety reasons. That’s a pity as I much preferred this building when they were on there.
It was a pretty boring day weather wise as far as I can remember (and judging by the sky).
So, a little bad news, followed by good news.
The bad news.
My PC has been playing up for a little while, and the other night it decided to die on me. It’s four or five years old and was due for an upgrade I guess, but it’s frustrating that it died on me when I have a commitment to post one blog image per weekday, and this is something I wish to continue doing – it’s just made harder without a working PC.
I do have an old laptop that I can use, but that’s only really good for web browsing and online poker. I tried loading up lightroom and CS6 on to it and it really cannot cope with such things, so it looks like I won’t be able to use that for processing any images.
Also, I found out last night that I’ve been neglecting to backup my Lightroom catalog for the past month. I did a reformat of my PC recently to see if I could make it perform a little better, and neglected to add the Lightroom folder to the backup system. This shouldn’t be too major as I have all of the images etc on an external drive, it’s just a little annoying.
Until I get a replacement system it means that I’m ideally going to be finding old images from somewhere other than processing them. Otherwise I’m hoping to be able to do a few on the iPad.
Fun fact, this shot above was taken well over a year ago!
The good news.
I’m done with custom building PCs. Yes, I love the power they offer but I’m finished with them. I’m heading in a new direction and so have ordered an Apple MacBook Pro, specs below should you care. I made that decision as I am a fan of Apple products, and as I’ve decided I would like to be able to process images on the go. If I travel for work and have a camera, I would like to be able to do all of my work tasks, plus my photo editing and image storage from a trip.
The MacBook should be with me in a couple of weeks…and judging by the performance of my laptop over the past few nights – it cannot come quick enough!
Here’s the specs:
• 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display
• 2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
• 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
• 256GB Flash Storage
I hope everyone has a lovely weekend.
King Kong vs London
I thought I would end the week with a fun post.
On Monday I took a trip up to the 34th floor of the iconic BT Tower. Though this location is normally very much closed to the public, there are various events which are held up on this floor for those willing to splash out and book such a lovely location. Several weeks ago I had been emailed by a lady at freedomfromtorture.org who had been scouting my work online and saw that I loved to take photos of London from high places, and so invited me to the event for a nominal fee to support their charity.
I of course didn’t want to pass up this chance to attend such a venue.
I haven’t taken the time to look through and process the images from this location yet, with the exception of this one shot.
I was in a fun mood when processing, and so opted to add King Kong to the top of one of the building. I must stress that this was added during post process, and there isn’t really a giant ape swinging from building to building in London (that I know of).
I hope everyone has a great weekend.
Panoramic Planet – London
I thought I would try something fun for today’s image.
This wasn’t the highest rooftop I’ve ever been on, and the views certainly weren’t anything special, but I opted to try and grab a panoramic shot of the surrounding sights to see how it would turn out.
Once I had the normal panoramic processed I noticed an overlap of the image, where a lot of the buildings at the start of the shot were then repeated at the end. This meant I was easily able to crop the shot so that it wrapped perfectly, and use the Distort > Polar filter in Photoshop to turn it into a nice circular planet shot that I’ve seen several times before online but never really done myself.
I quite like the effect for the fun that it is, and it allows me to add a bit of interest in to what was otherwise a pretty uninteresting shot.
Quite a few of the usual culprits are in there including the BT Tower, Centerpoint, Millennium Wheel, Barbican, St Paul’s Cathedral and The Shard.
