Circus.

Every now and then a group of travelling entertainers comes by and the circus is in town. It’s been a long time since I last saw a live circus performance, but a pair of ticket discount vouchers, good company and the need for a little nostalgia made me go again earlier this week.

There’s always a risk associated with going to a live performance of any kind, at least if you’re seated in the first few rows. Go see a stand up comedian, and he’ll probably make fun of you at some point. Go see a magic show and the magician will chop you in two or teleport you out of the building. Go see a circus clown and you’ll get popcorn all over you. Thankfully the clown didn’t happen to me, since I was strategically positioned in the fourth row, just outside the danger zone.

Or so you might think, the clown with this circus defied all circus clown etiquette and suddenly picked people totally at random in the entire audience. Especially one lucky guy was very uncomfortable with being a chosen one, but he eventually decided to go with the flow. When you’re picked up by the clown you really don’t have a choice.

Why so serious? Let’s put a smile on that face…

I brought my camera with me, hoping to get a few good shots, but the lighting conditions and the constant movement made it rather hard. Circus performers can’t stay still for a second. What gives?

Lightning in Sunset.

The greatest photo you’ll see today. Unfortunately not by me, this beauty was captured by Sam Javanrouh. Also available on Flickr. Protected by a Creative Commons license.

After the Storm.

After three weeks of vacation I’m now back in the mud. Not only have I started working again, but I’m also on support duty. When on support duty I’m always extremely paranoid for the first day or so, checking our monitoring systems every 5 minutes, constantly looking at the inbox for e-mails and duct taping the support phone to my left ear to make sure I’m not missing any calls or texts that might come in.

To be honest, it’s wearing me out a bit, and I wish I could handle it better mentally.  I should be able to relax, the monitoring system will inform me the second something is wrong with a myriad of text messages, e-mails and whatnot, so there is no need to be this proactive.

Ah, there you go, had to check the monitoring system again. And nothing was wrong this time either. So I had to check it again. Which I did now. Nothing amiss. Still nothing.

As you might have noticed, I used the last day of my vacation to re-design the site once again. The last design, which I downloaded from some Wordpress theme site, lasted for about 9 days before I got dead tired of it. The new design I almost created myself, you can probably see that from the extreme simplicity. I lack the creative skills to create a proper Web 2.0 design, so I’m probably stuck with pre-Web 1.0 for ever. Not that it matters really. So far I feel the design is good enough. There is, however, room for improvement, like on the navigation side.

Anyway.

Here’s another pic from the thunderstorm that hit Oslo a few weeks back. Not as dramatic as the previous one, but still. Enjoy.

Thunderstorm.

ISO 100, shutter at 15 seconds, aperture f/6.3, focal length 24mm. And manual focus. Who would’ve thunk it? My first attempt at thunderstorm photography.

With it another half-assed attempt on a site redesign, once again a theme created by some other creative soul and modified slightly by me. This one really don’t feel right either, eventually I will probably build a new one from ground up myself.

White on Black.

I’d like to return to yesterday’s Wedding post. But no more wedding-talk, this time I’m going to ramble on about something I know you love: Photography.

Of course I didn’t go to a wedding without my trusty Canon. After I tagged along as the bag carrying assistant on a wedding photo session a few weeks ago, I learned the importance of using a flash when shooting in bright sunlight. It can eliminate those sharp shadows that tend to turn up in people’s faces. So this time I attached my Sigma flash and used the EFS 17-85mm exclusively. I wanted to use the tiny 50mm as well, but there were too many people moving around and several of the shots were group photos that required a wider angle.

Not surprisingly I was not the only one taking pictures, so it was a bit hard to get both the bride and the groom to look into the same camera at the same time. That either makes them look a bit weird, or it can give the picture an artistic feel. In my case it just looked weird. It was also very hard for people to stay put without moving their heads or arms around, so I took my fair share of blurry pictures. I’ve been told that 1/30 shutter and f/16 aperture with a bit of under exposure to avoid complete burn out of the white wedding dress would be a hit on wedding photos, but I’m not sure. The 1/30 shutter will create blurry pictures as soon as people start moving a little, and since I was not controlling the crowd, I probably should have increased the shutter speed. The next time I’m out shooting, I think I will take a few shots while allowing the camera to control everything, then take note of the settings and play around with different variations to see how that change the quality of the picture. Continue reading "White on Black."