Don’t you just hate it when this happens? You try to push the cork-screw into the bottle and it just ends up pushing the cork right into the bottle.

Photographing concerts is hard. This one of Blackroom at the Water Rats in London was no exception.

It’s dark and with fast movement, which is a bad combination in itself. Low light implies longer shutter speeds; movement implies the exact opposite.

But just in case you managed to figure out how best to cope with low light and animated performers, there’s the added bonus of bright, flashing lights. This throws off the automatic metering that the camera performs, leading to a dark blur or a white blur, neither particularly appealing.

Okay, I tell a lie. It’s not a larch. This is a shot I took on my recent trip to the Parque Natural Sierras De Tejeda. I didn’t think this fitted in with any of the individual blogs I did but I really like this image and wanted to show it off a little!

Last week I complained that my iPhone’s camera was no substitute for my 50D.

The next day I was lucky enough to have my DSLR with me at sunset, and it looked a bit like this.

[](<http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/3962039016/[/flickr]

The following day I was in the neighbouring town of Competa and managed to capture these beautiful colours.

[flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/3961264013/[/flickr]

The church also looked fantastic bathed in the evening light.

[flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/stephendarlington/3961264081/[/flickr]

I’ll be posting some more pictures taken earlier in the day over the next week or two. Stay tuned!

At times like these I wish that my 50D was small enough to have with me at all times. Still, my iPhone did an okay job.

I was going to say that it was second time lucky with the weather but really that’s the difference between going to Brighton in April and going in August. Certainly, there was no-one grilling sausages on the beach last year.

In the late afternoon we walked all the way to the Marina and back, which meant shooting straight into the sun to get an image of the iconic pier.

There’s no PhotoFriday this week but I thought I’d post an picture anyway. This one was taken in August 2001 and is from Sirmeone looking back down the peninsula towards Colombare. It was this holiday, in Northern Italy, when I first started getting into photography more seriously. I went to Desenzano with no plans and a stack of different types of film. I’d read a lot about Velvia 50 and really wanted to like it but I ended up sticking to Sensia which tended to work better for me and was significantly cheaper!

In the weakest possible sense of the word, these two images can be considered to be my tribute to Ansel Adams’ work in the Sierra Nevada.

While he had to lug huge cameras around and work with large format film I merely had to carry around my 50D¹ and play around in Photoshop Elements.

I find it a little odd that the thing that drew me to both of these pictures were the colours² yet there is still enough texture and shape to make them work in black and white.

It’s at times like these that I feel that I have been short-changed with my 50D. Both the model above and below it have a HD video feature and mine does not. I’m not one to let these little limitations get in my way though…

With apologies for the size, here are a bunch of images I took in Yosemite stitched together into a single animated GIF¹.

We went for a longer-than-expected walk just north of San Francisco and stumbled across these mail boxes. I love that they’re so bright and cheerful. Maybe it takes the edge off receiving lots of junk mail and bills?