Archive for September, 2013

For the first speech in the Public Relations advanced Toastmaters manual, you have to speak about Toastmasters. The project is a “good will speech” in which you promote public speaking, and thereby Toastmasters by making a few references to it in your introduction and conclusion.

I felt this was a bit of a lazy speech as a lot of it I’m quoting other people. But it was good enough to win Best Speaker on the evening, so can’t have been too bad.

While on Jersey last month, we went to the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Centre. I took a few videos while I was there. First, some otters playing.

Second, a mother gorilla and baby feeding.

Last month I went to Hull Speakers to provide a bit of peer review on their meetings. It seems like a lovely club and I felt very warmly welcomed. On the way back, we stopped at the Humber Bridge to take some photos. Click to see full size.

Turns out that herring roe is delicious. You probably don’t want to know what it is though…

Dan recommended me a budget set of ND grad filters. They’re £16 so you would expect them to be terrible but all the reviews on Amazon spoke highly of them, so I gave them a go. I’ve literally taken a few photos out of my windows so far, and at 25mm I get some serious Vignetting, but at 35mm and beyond it produces good results.

The top image is taken without the ND grad and the details of the building faces and trees are lost. The bottom image is taken with the ND grad and has far more foreground detail while still maintaining the dark and stormy look of the clouds.

My friend Samra recently bought herself an SRL, so we headed down to the river so I could show her how not to take photographs. I’m hardly a tutor, but it was quite nice to be able to share my tips.

Last month, I finally found time to head up to the very excellent York Skeptics. It was good to see a lot of friendly faces and an interesting talk on autism.

While there, I took the opportunity to take some photos and polarise the flip out of them.

Is anyone else rather gutted that Jon Stewart is coming back?

Jon Stewart is a great host for The Daily Show and I enjoy watching him on it. I also blogged about it a few years ago.

But having said that, John Oliver is brilliant!

You might have already seen this…

The best was yet to come, though. When John Oliver took over as guest host for two months while John Stewart was away directing a movie, he truly came into his own. Check this out…

I’m going to go as far as to say I think John Oliver is actually a better host of the show.

We’ve previously used Skype to allow Jane to attend White Rose Speakers meetings virtually while she is in Spain. This time, she connected in from the French Alps and hooked up to the projector, gave us a Giant Jane to provide a speech evaluation.

Further to my rant about Bristol Cameras recently, the new new tripod is finally in my possession and seems to be holding up quite well.

I’m sure I’m that told on the ball head as it is more complicated than simply setting up and having a flat platform. It takes it easier on an uneven surface of course, but it still rather fiddly.

It has a lot of nice features though. All the legs work independently, and the foam padding really makes a difference in the cold. The feed unscrew so you can replace them with spikes (though you have to buy those extra) and there is a retractable hook in the bottom of the centre column for hanging weights/bags to. The legs also have three different settings for how far out they are.

The centre column itself comes all the way up, and then you can even swivel it up to 90 degrees out flat as shown in the picture. It has a pan-only mode too.

As mentioned I got the Giottos ball head version two with it that while fiddly, seems to do its job. It has a pan mode as well, a quick release head and two spirit levels, though they’re a bit slow to move and hard to see once you have the camera on there.

So far I’m pretty happy with it.