Chris Worfolk's Blog

While in Helsinki we stayed at Hotel Haven.

I was expecting the rooms to be really small, as they are shown so on the virtual tours. However, it seems that is only for sea room views; our room was quite large.

Positive points:

• Good size room
• Very well furnished
• The wifi was included and didn’t come with any stupid login system – you just got the WPA2 code, connected as many devices as you liked and you’re on permanently
• TV in the bathroom
• Shower had a massaging shower head
• Breakfast was good
• Staff were helpful
• It was very quiet
• The beds were very comfortable and I got some brilliant night’s sleep
• The curtains did a great job of keeping the light out

Points for improvement:

• Our TV slash entertainment system didn’t work on the first night
• The bed was two single beds joined together
• The windows didn’t open

Overall, it was a really enjoyable stay and I wouldn’t hesitate to go back.

Photos:

Video review:

This was my second day out photographing one of our local american football teams, the Yorkshire Rams. Here is what I learned…

Set the white balance manually. During the Lancashire Wolverines game I left it on auto, whereas in this game I manually set it to cloudy and left it there. The photos came out a bit cold in the first game and a little inconstant too. This time they have a more consistent, warm feel.

An exposure of 1/500 is not fast enough to freeze the action. It is OK for players running around but when the ball is being thrown, you need at least 1/1000. When I photograph birds in flight I use 1/1250, and the ball is probably moving faster than that, so makes sense.

I tried taking off my 2x extender and just using my 70-200mm lens (whereas with the extender on I would get a focal range of 140-400mm), as this allowed me to open the aperture up to 2.8. I didn’t see much benefit though, I was already shooting at around ISO 100, so I simply didn’t need to open it up to that unless I specifically wanted to do so, and while that allows me to easily blur at the background, it makes it difficult to keep everything in focus. So 140-400mm f5.6 it is then; it is broad daylight after all.

I also tried increasing the ISO to 3200 in an attempt to get a much greater depth of field. This allowed me to work at up to f11 even at 400mm, again I didn’t see a great deal of difference, but I might give it another go next time and see if I can shoot some catches and plays where I don’t have time to re-focus the camera.

I used AI servo and back button focusing for this shoot. That means I turned off auto focus activation when you press the shutter half way down (I posted a video on how to do this a few weeks ago), and used a button on the back to activate it instead. Because it is in AI servo mode (continuous auto focus), I could then press this button on the back to focus, hold it if I wanted it to work continuously and then release when I wanted to take a shot, or even leave it going the whole time. Mostly I focused and then left it alone, unless the action started coming towards or away from me.

There is also an element of luck to it. I was shooting in continuous mode, but cameras can only take so many shots per second, and given a kick of a throw takes less than one, being able to capture the exact moment comes down to chance. Of course, the more expensive your camera is, the more it can take – my 6D clocks in at 4.5 I think, whereas if you have a 5D Mark III it can take up to 6.

You can find some of the photos in a previous blog post.

My photos from the East Kilbride Pirates at Yorkshire Rams game. The full set is on Flickr.

Last month, Leeds City Toastmasters teamed up with Leeds Speakers’ Corner to put on “Toastmasters in the Park”. That is basically what LSC do anyway, but with more Toastmasters there. Thanks to Chanaka for being Toastmaster and John for his excellent speech. Myself, John W and Andrew spoke as well, as did a few members of the public!

A video of the event is also available below.

12 hostages. 24 hours. 1 Partridge.

Steve Coogan bringing Alan Partridge to the big screen has been long awaited. Was it worth said wait? Yes, it probably was! While other comedies build up to huge, though sometimes disappointing, funny moments, Alpha Papa delivers clever, funny dialogue from start to finish.

There is always the danger that a comeback will ruin the franchise, but Alpha Papa has no such concerns. It does a fine justice to the Partridge legend.

We went to Everyman Cinema, which once again offered an excellent experience. We meet up with Chris and Carly beforehand for pizza in the restaurant that delivered to its usual standard as well.

The sixteenth book in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series looks at music with rocks in it. It might be just a noise but it’s all the kids are listening to these days.

It has some good characters in it, including Susan (the granddaughter of Death), Dibbler and the Death of Rats. The commentary on the music industry, stardom and the rise of rock and roll was somewhat interesting, though I didn’t find it particularly deep.

Higher end Canon EOS cameras have two types of shooting modes – regular and silent. I use silent almost all of the time because I find regular quite loud and annoying. However, surely there must be some disadvantage to it, or they would just have silent mode as the only mode and be done with it.

The answer is it is to do with how fast the camera can take photos.

Under regular continuous shooting, my EOS 6D can burst to 4.5 frames per second, whereas on silent continuous mode, it slows down to 3fps. So if you’re trying to capture action and things in motion, best switch off the silent mode until after you’re done.

I’ve recently purchased a polarising filter for my camera, so I took it out for a test run. You can get quite a difference out in the bright sunlight, though some times it seems to detract from the dramatics of the image. Below is a photo I took of Leeds Canal, with light polarisation on the left and heavy polarisation on the right.

The fly and clouds come out with a lot more texture in the one on the right, and it’s difficult to see at this size but the water goes from a horrible grey to a beautiful blue too.

At first, it felt a little like just under-exposing the photo though. If I wanted to prevent the cloud detail from blowing out, surely all I had to do was drop the exposure a little. But of course that isn’t the case, as can be seen in the photos below.

In the top two photos, I haven’t used much polarisation. In the top one I’ve used the camera’s recommended settings, and in the second one I’ve sped up the exposure a few notches. In the third one I’ve put it back to the camera’s recommended setting, but used heavier polarisation.

As you can see in the third one, I’ve obtained the rich detail of the cloud, while still maintaining the vibrant face of the building, and captured much more detail from the block of flats behind it too.

I tried my hand at panning so that I could capture cards speeding by. The idea behind the technique is that you pan the camera as the car drives past, thus blurring the background while keeping the car in sharp focus.

I was using my 24-105 f4 lens. Ideally I would have had my 70-200 f2.8 so that I could blur the background even more, though whether I could get down to f2.8 and still keep an exposure of 1/200 I’m not sure. I got better results when I turned off my image stabiliser (because the camera stops trying to fix my panning), but my better lens also has a specific image stabilising mode for panning, so I would like to give that a go.

The warm weather has got me thinking about hose pipe bans. I’m not sure whether they are instigated by the water companies themselves, or by a statutory instrument of government, but either way, it is at the hand of the water companies themselves, complaining about the lack of water. Sometimes this can be attributed to exceptionally dry weather, but often it can just be the case of the private sector cutting water reserves in an attempt to extract more profit.

Therefore, in my opinion, if a water company fails in this way, they should be fined. And fined heavily, because water is quite important.

But extending this, we could regularly fine them, and restrict the profits, for the greater good. Utility companies, and indeed many other natural monopolies that were previously nationalised and have since been sold off, often report large profits. This is just more money passing to the rich, from the poor. Which is bad.

However, we privatised them anyway, because we’re told that private companies run more efficiently.

But why do we let them make such high profits?

Consider if we bled them dry. We hardly let them make any profit because of the price caps and fines we imposed on them. Would this make them less efficient? I suspect not. I think, if anything, they would be forced to run themselves more efficiently in their desperate bid for survival. It would encourage the very efficiently we originally privatised them to bring.

The consequence however was that private investors were less likely to invest in infrastructure. But how much money actually ends up being invested in infrastructure now? Clearly a lot less than could be given the profit given out to the shareholders.

More importantly, if you have just skimmed most of the profit from a private company and taken anything they have left back in fines, you suddenly have a lot of spare money. Money that can then be used by the government to subsidise investment in infrastructure.