echohelloworld

Some building by the new IKEA in Southampton. Someone told me what this building was for, but I either wasn’t listening or forgot.

I bought an ND8 Graduated and it’s awesome. There were kids swimming here, they were a bit special.

Nothing particularly special about this, but I love the reflections in the glass so in it goes!

Today, I witnessed how temperamental postfix can be, yet again. On our test server, postfix wasn’t starting and hadn’t been for around 35 days. There was also a cron queueing up mail every minute as well as the regular apps. This lead to over 430,000 emails being backed up and it was my job to remove them all! What fun!

I’ve also found out that I’m going to be making an iPhone app. I’m so excited!

There is a huge cemetery right next to Southampton Common. I knew there was one there, but I didn’t realise how huge it actually is. There are hundreds of graves there, it’s incredibly overgrown and it’s a really quite upsetting place to be. There are some incredibly ostentatious headstones and there’s even a locked crypt. Kinda reminds you of the mortality of everything.

I also discovered that there’s not really a lot to take photos of in cemeteries. The one I picked looked so sad, and the ivy growing over and around it I thought made it look really creepy. Enough words.

The word “festival” is misleading here, unless the definition of festival has changed to “a field, sparsely populated with people tenuously connected by not disliking a given theme”. There didn’t appear to be any planned events, and there weren’t really any funky kites or anything like that. Havind said that, it was free to get in and the weather is gorgeous (yeah, I’m British, it’s in my genes to comment on the weather) so one can’t really complain.

Having said all that, the people on/in kite buggies looked to be having fun.

Edit: Damn Wordpress desaturating my images.

So, after too much time on GT5, we trekked into town. Just as we hit the cross-road by KFC, the army arrives in town. Perhaps they went for some shopping, we don’t know, but we do know that they brought a marching band with them. Which was nice. I love Southampton for random stuff like this. There’s pretty much always something cool going on in the centre on a Saturday.

I love about this shot that the Colonel seems to be presiding over the whole thing. That juxtaposition was entirely intentional. Promise.

Went to meet Charlotte from work and there’s this cool-looking door set back from the road.

On a different note, I need to get Wordpress to stop desaturating my images when I upload them, it’s bloody annoying!

I’ve never done any HDR before, but this kinda called for it - dull grey sky almost impossible to expose correctly and keep the foregound nice and light. I think it’s come out really well, and it’s an impressive building with lots of photographic opportunity. I’m sure it’ll be revisited on quiet days!

Can’t spend all day taking photos, Metal Gear Solid 4 is calling me.

One of the great things about Southampton, if you like that sort of thing, is that it’s home to an incredible amount of very simplistic architecture. I have no idea how old this building is, but there are loads of buildings like this - massive patterns, lots of symmetry just cutting into the sky and it gives great scope for some abstract shots of bold shapes and colours.

Since we got to Southampton, this has been my favourite building here. I don’t think I’ve really done it justice as far as the overall impressiveness of the structure goes, but I love this view of the building. I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot more of this type of photo to be had around here.

Charlotte saved the day today. Normally if I went out and didn’t get a single thing I wouldn’t really care, but we were out for hours today and the centre of Southampton had nothing to offer. I thought I was going to be posting pictures of the roses in the garden (now people will know when I’ve not had a good day!). She spotted this on her driving lesson!

Today, I invested in an ND2 and an ND2-Grad filter and Cokin holder. The grad was used on this as the sun was pretty damn bright. I like them a lot. I wanted to get an IR filter but apparently the D200 doesn’t like IR. I’m looking forward to getting my filter on. Or something.

Tomorrow, hopefully something from the New Forest