Skip to main content

Leeds Hyperbeastly

It's been five long months since I posted anything to this blog. Including this post here, I have posted no less than three times in 2014. As you can tell, I am nothing if not prolific.
I would not park here.
A lot has changed since the last time I posted anything. I sold all my SLR gear, for a start, and switched to micro four-thirds. I got a lovely, lovely little Olympus OM-D E-M10 and a small selection of lenses including the must-have Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake and the stunning Olympus 45mm f/1.8. Marvellous, and the camera, four lenses and spare batteries and SD cards in a bag that wouldn't fit the SLR and a single lens. Cracking stuff, because it's now small enough to carry all the time. In fact the body and pancake lens is barely bigger than my Fuji X10 compact!
Flakey.
Anyway, the point of this post; I've taken several walks through Leeds while I've worked there over the past few years and I've been finding it more and more difficult to find non-boring subjects. Everything is so drab and bleak and uninviting.
Still works. Seldom used.
At the same time I've come to enjoy VSCOcam on my phone. The built-in RAW processing on my camera, the built-in wifi and VSCOcam on my phone mean I can do a full photographic workflow from RAW to Flickr without involving a computer. Of course once I get home Lightroom definitely gets a look-in because it is so much more capable, but for quick edits on the go doing it on my phone is great. One of the presets in VSCOcam is called "Hyperbeast" and I quite like it. A high-key, faded look with deep blacks and flattened highlights. I decided to recreate it in Lightroom.
Eye tea?
So here we go. I took some photos on my lunchtime walk today of things that, while maybe not pretty or interesting, sum up the bit of Leeds I walk through. I processed them with my mocked-up Hyperbeast-esque preset and gave them some spit and polish, and here they are. Leeds through my eyes.
Toxic sofa.
It might not be most complimentary photo set, but I think they are quite pleasing in their own way.

Anyway, there are a handful in the post but the whole set can be seen on the photos page under the Leeds Hyperbeastly album. Enjoy.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fairy Lights

Street lights at night can be very pretty. For someone who lives close to the centre of a large city, skirting round the edge of the town centre can provide a host of beautiful views at night. One advantage to using a wide open lens when taking these pictures is the capture of bokeh, or creative blur. An extreme example is shown to your right; a mass of coloured circles that roughly represent the city they are part of. A more subtle example, of course, is in the picture of the day at the top of this post. The lights cluster around the top of the leaves like fireflies, obviously part of a cityscape but at the same time abstract. The extreme out of focus image is a blurred version of the picture on the left. A view over Sheffield from Pitsmoor, looking up Netherthorpe Road and up to the university. Even when the buildings are focussed (roughly; I'm still practicing) the lights take on the shape of the lens's aperture. I try to incorporate some foreground focus wh...
4 comments
Read more

In which I complain that coding standards are a waste of time

Just kidding. I'm not going to rail against coding standards. No, I'm going to rail against the absolute and dictatorial enforcement of coding style guidelines, to the point where a single misplaced curly bracket can fail the code review of a thousand line project before it's even started. I'm going to rail against the fact that many people these days don't actually know that coding style guidelines and coding standards are not the same thing. Coding style guidelines are not coding standards. Coding standards are rules on how to construct software. Rules that have practical and defined benefits. Rules than can be proven to assist in the structured and correct building of code. For example: Do not perform database access in the constructor. All database access should use the framework's DAL. Do not rely on complex instantiation instructions; provide a factory method. Do not inherit from a class in a different module or library; only encapsulate. Avoid sin...
2 comments
Read more

DeCSS on Ubuntu 9.10 and later

It used to be the case that enabling DVD playback on Ubuntu was a case of installing ubuntu-restricted-extras and that was that. Unfortunately DMCA nonsense in the US has buggered that up for all of us and so now there's an additional step. So, without further ado, here are the commands that need to be run at a command line: sudo apt-get install libdvdread4 sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh Voila! DVD playback a-la Ubuntu.
2 comments
Read more