Photo Gallery – Intro

Download Permission Please feel free to download the Photo Gallery photos and associated movie clips for your personal use i.e. for art reference, school, church, club, educational projects – artistic endeavours, craftwork, hobby or fund-raising. Permission is not given for commercial use of the photos on this website or to republish them on the internet or elsewhere. All the photos/movies were taken by myself and I retain the copyright of them at all times.

I like to take lots of art reference photos for drawings, paintings and other projects, and would like to share the best of them with you. They are for studying the details we often miss, and are not claiming to be magazine covers!

I hope you enjoy a journey through these photos and that they may inspire you to creative action, and maybe take your own camera or sketchbook for walk, with an eye for searching out the best features of your part of the world.

I plan to continue adding categories to the Photo Gallery section and the unlinked headings show proposed future pages.

Camera Canon A620 Powershot digital camera – loads of features, which as an amateur I have never really investigated. It is absolutely brilliant in moderately low light situations, and does really well without using the flash, which can sometimes wash out colour and leave sharp shadows round things. It takes low resolution movies (with sound) as well – handy to get a screengrab from. I take the camera almost everywhere. I avoid taking low resolution pictures as it can lead to disappointment – you cannot go back and retake it! Of course, I keep a complete backup on an external hard drive, and never make alterations to the originals.

Good photo opportunities are all around and it is great to have a camera that can do close-up shots (the A620 gets as close as 1 cm) – I highly recommend this feature to anyone buying a camera. It encourages you look more closely and to search out the small features of interest, which are the ones most often ignored and undervalued.

I take loads of photos and then delete the duds later – another way to save disappointments. Let me encourage you to delete the bad and out-of-focus shots, so that your entire collection is good ones. It is tempting to keep them all, but resist!

JPGs The first 4 numbers of the filename give the year and month they were taken e.g. 0811 = 2008 November. I have reduced the file size as far as I can without losing the detail that you need. Most are around 50-100 KB.

Panoramio Some the Photo Gallery photos (and many others not on this website) are on www.panoramio.com/user/2590774 which shows the exact location where they were taken. Panoramio is a good way of sharing views your home town with others around the world. It is fun and extremely easy, even for complete novices, and your photo remains your property and copyright. You could look around the Panoramio map of your home area and see where there are no pictures, then fill in the gaps yourself with your best photos – that way everyone benefits and the tourist spots are not overloaded with lots of identical pictures. Panoramio will submit suitable photos to Google Earth http://earth.google.com

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