Birmingham – Kebablog

January 27, 2019January 27, 2019

Me, in a Church!

No don’t worry regular listeners – I’ve not found god, however I was invited into Birmingham Cathedral (St Philips) as part of the Birmingham We Are / We all shoot Photos group.

It’s a place I’ve walked past on many occasions and never thought to venture in (not knowing if you are allowed to take photo’s etc – seems they are fine with it!!)

Fujifilm X-Pro2 XF14mm f/2.8 R ƒ/8.0 – 240seconds – iso200 SRB Photographic ND 1000 Filter

Fujifilm X-Pro2 XF14mm f/2.8 R ƒ/11.0 – 1/30 – iso200

Fujifilm X-E3 8.0 mm Samyang Fisheye II 1/60 iso 3200

An interest place to photograph as it’s open to the public and at certain times services are being conducted. I’m pleased with how the first image came out as I was using an ND1000 filter to remove people from the shot – hence a 4 minute exposure. The last image was high iso as I was hand holding the X-E3 whilst lying down.

As a group they are trying to get access to other building in the city for us to point our lenses at,

May 6, 2018May 6, 2018

Scanning again…

This time it’s a few scans of a couple of recent lunchtime walks around Birmingham. Using my Canon AV-1 and loaded with Ilford Delta 400 I took a walk around the rotunda side of the city.

A mixed bag as you can see, but it’s a struggle to find new viewpoints in the City – I’ll keep trying and hoping the avoid the usual suspects in terms of pictures.

March 19, 2018March 19, 2018

Show Purchases

Remarkably the discounts (for Fuji – didn’t check others) were decent. Infact in some cases better than the best recent price on CameraPriceBuster.

So, what did I get?

Fuji Goodies from the Photography Show. NEC Birmingham

To recap (like an annoying Channel 5 Documentary) I was looking at the following:

100-400 + TC (Lowest price and current £1490/1649)
18mm (£400/479)
27mm (£319/349)
Fisheye (£212/219)
Battery (£41/46)

Fortunately a Facebook/Forum friend (Alec) offered me the Fisheye for £130 – he was awaiting an Ebay purchaser that never paid up – so a win for me.

A further win was the 100-400 + TC being on offer for £1479, so that was snapped up fairly quick (along with a lens pen and lens wipes for an extra £10).

During the week I was thinking about picking up an X-E3 and 27mm to use as my carry to work camera (not wanting to take my X-Pro 2) – so that combination was grabbed as well. The X-E3 was £100 less and selling for £699 – the 27mm lens wasn’t discounted too well, at £339 it’s just a tenner off the normal price – however if bought with a X series camera another £50 was taken off. I did ask for offers on this combo and they eventually got it down to £969.60.

As I needed a SD card I picked up an Extreme SD card for £16.50.

So all in, I paid Wex £1615.10 as I had £850 in store credit (Total £2465.10)

So with regards to lenses I managed to do a Meatloaf – two out of three ain’t bad. I did have a look at the 23mm and X-E3 bundle, but found the protrusion of that lens a bit too much – Likewise the 18mm was a bit bulky.

I didn’t find any Fuji Batteries at decent prices, so I’ll probably pickup some Hahnel branded ones online – they seem to be a reasonable 3rd party replacement from a recognised brand. I’ll need to pick up a small bag for the X-E3 – I had a look at the show, but couldn’t find anything small/protective enough for my liking.

Overall I enjoyed the show and it was quite an expensive day – but mostly paid for by my Canon trade ins.

March 3, 2014March 3, 2014

The Photography Show – NEC Birmingham

So the annual trip to a photography show is now complete (this year it changed from Focus to ‘The Photography Show’) – actually surprised how busy it was for a weekday. For a change I wasn’t overly bothered about kit, nor did I have any intention of spending large amounts of cash.

The show itself was much the same as Focus on Imaging – which isn’t a bad thing to be honest, though the main difference was a couple of stages where every hour or so Pro togs would talk about their specific genre of photography. I did sit through a wedding show which mainly comprised of the professionalism of the photographer – which was a better talk than it initially sounded.

First up for me, was the Canon stand – like a moth to a flame, or me to an Apple Store I’m drawn towards the Canon Stand – probably some blinded fanboy loyalty, or most likely cos I own a chunk of the Canon Eos system. My only temptation camera wise at present is the EF135mm f/2 L – so I’d thought i’d have a look. The results aren’t anything spectacular (it’s indoors at the NEC!) but I had a brief play…..

Some bloke looking at things, colour down to me not playing with white balance and leaving it on auto – possibly the NEC lights might be an issue also

So there you go, Canon sorted. The one stand I wanted to check out was the Bessel Lighting stand – mainly as I wanted to speak to Tony Rabin who was demonstrating their kit. I’ve met Tony before at YPS and I do plan to visit his studio for Lighting and Model shoots. After a brief chat I finally got round to purchasing a remote trigger. I do own the Canon ST-E2 remote trigger, which is fine – but limited (distance) so I bought a £19.99 remote and £9.99 tripod/hotshot adapter. One trick with this is set the connected flash up as a master and reset as slaves and they all work fine. With this adapter you loose the E-TTL capability and have to use manual, but for studio settings that’s normal anyway. I’m tempted to eBay the ST-E2 and spend the cash on some soft box stuff from Bessel.

The picture above is just a test of the setup. The first EX580 MkII is connected to the hotshot adapter and the remote receiver is connected. This flash is setup as a master (and for space reasons I’ve stuck the front in a roll of packing tape). The other EX580 MkII and EX430 Mk1 are setup as slaves. The primary flash triggers the other two automatically. The 580 MkII’s were set with a flash rating of 1/128th and 430 was set to 1/64th (both at their respective lowest flash setting).

It seems to do the job well enough 🙂

August 1, 2013August 12, 2013

Open, sorry closedreach

Fibre broadband is the future. All the adverts tell us how lives will be improved by the installation of super fast Fibre. Though the reality for most is it’s not actually Fibre coming into our houses. Most implementations of ‘Fibre’ is in fact Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) – this is nothing new, V*rgin have used this method for years (Fibre to Cab, then Coaxial to home – not too dissimilar to the BT cable from the pole).

So living in Birmingham you have thought getting Fibre would be an easy task, well for some in the B26 area it is. However, for those on Cab 50 (and other small cabs) – chances are you’re not getting it.

Why? Well I asked Openreach and they replied:

Exchange Stechford
Cabinet 50
Postcode B26

Thank you for your interest in our Fibre Broadband deployment. We are deploying one of the fastest and largest commercial deployments in the world. Our commercial deployment will have extended to 66% of the UK by the end of Spring 2014. We aim extend this to 90% of the UK, in partnership with other sources of funding, e.g. local and National government.

Our deployment is based on the commercial criteria for each cabinet and your cabinet fails to meet the commercial criteria. This is because the cabinet has too few premise connected to it, rendering it too small to provide a return on the investment based on the costs for the construction and on-going running costs of providing a new FTTC cabinet.

So there you go, I can understand their argument – it would be nice if all the Fibre adverts would go away. I guess I’m fairly lucky as I know others would love the 5-6mb download speed I currently get. However if this house was 200metres or so in each direction I’d be on a bigger cab and able to get Fibre.

So no options available (BDUK isn’t an option as I’m potentially served by V*rgin M*dia) – I might consider writing to my MP – Maybe Mr Hemming might be able to do something.

So got a cab like this? Chances are you wont be getting Fibre as the Cab Capacity doesn’t justify the investment in this current tranche. So next time anyone in the B26 area walks past it, please be nice – don’t let dogs wee up it as it’s all we’ve got.

You can check your Cab number and availability with the BT DSL Checker website (you can check either phone number, postcode or address).

Oh, by the way I host this site at home on my current ADSL2 connect – it’s a bit slow at loading, hence why I’d like Fibre. 🙂

/update:

I dropped an email to my MP (John Hemming) who’s replied (via email and letter from the House of Commons!) to say his team will contact Openreach/BT for an explanation. Not sure if anything will happen, but we’ll see. To remind me how bad things are, downloading a couple of 3 minute movies trailers on my Apple TV tonight took a few minutes each to load.

/update2:

Had contact back from John Hemmings office – sadly they got the same albeit longer reply.

Sadly looks as if V*rgin are the only speedy option – I’m not overly pleased with their 18 month contract, nor their traffic management.