Stream

Stream, a photo by Whisperin' Al on Flickr.

Blossom

Blossom, a photo by Whisperin' Al on Flickr.

Back to Photography (and this Blog!)

I've not posted anything on the blog for quite a while (although I have been busy on my wargaming blog - The Wargame Shed) but recently I decided to take a bit more interest in photography. I bought a Nikon D40 a couple of years ago and have been using it quite successfully for the usual family stuff and blog pictures but I wanted to try my hand at doing something a little more interesting. A long time ago I started to get interested in "proper" photography with my little Olympus Trip 35mm film camera - but the wind was rather taken out of those sails when my car was broken into and the camera, along with some other stuff, was stolen.

The D40 is an excellent introductory DSLR and has a very good Auto mode but it also has plenty of semi-auto and full manual settings to play with. So I got the camera manual back out and started reading it again. Now I am slowly working my way up from using it as little more than a point and shoot (but with better glass) and using some of the features of the camera. This will be a bit of a journey for me and I am sure it will be some time before I start producing anything really worth looking at but nevertheless I have decided to share it (assuming anyone is really interested!).

I will be posting the odd entry about my experiences with the camera and some of the photos I have taken. Hopefully this won't be too boring anyway!

Test Photo

Untitled, a photo by Whisperin' Al on Flickr.

Just trying out linking the blog with my Flickr account

Star Wars on your TomTom

First the big D:


and Master Yoda:

The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu

Robin Hood

I rented Robin Hood last night with a little trepidation.  Whilst I though Gladiator was fantastic, I had seen mixed reviews of this Ridley Scott / Russell Crowe pairing.

This film takes a grittier approach to the Robin Hood legend than some previous ones and certainly has some epic scenes but overall it just failed to capture either the magic or charm of some of the previous outings.

The story concentrates on Robin before he becomes an outlaw, starting with him as an archer in King Richard's army returning from the Crusades.  The initial castle siege is reasonably well done but with some unnecessarily OTT elements (and the start of the fiddling with history - although this has come to be expected in this sort of film).  Crowe goes on to reprise his Marcus Aurelius role (although with less depth).  It moves through some entertaining story development and battles scenes to the climactic battle which was rather a disappointment in my view and then to a rather rushed ending.

It's not difficult to identify some of the main failings of the film:

• Russell Crowe's accent - whilst this settles down a little later in the movie he can't seem to make up his mind which accent he is doing
• The landing craft (knight) - I don't dispute that there were landing ships in medieval times but the design of these just jars too badly
• Maid Marion as Joan of Arc - unnecessary and implausible
• King John - lacked the appropriate depth and complexity

As you can probably tell this movie was a bit of a disappointment for me and given the material and budget I felt more could have been made from it.