Having acquired some decent studio lights I decided to have a play at a, sort of, lifestyle still life.

I used a Pentax K5iis, Pentax 100mm macro (at f8 ), Hitech 0.9 ND filter, 2 Elinchrom D-Lite RX 4s, Giotto tripod and wired remote.

I had to play with the aperture to get the amount of DoF i wanted and merged 3 images.

Image 1, lights set for watch bezel but winder pulled out to stop the watch.
Image 2, as 1 but with winder screwed down.
Image 3, lights repositioned to maximise the highlights on the jaguar keyring.

I used layers in PSE 10 and altered the white balance slightly to compensate for a slight magenta tinge caused by the ND filter.

Any comments on composition, lighting, etc, etc. more than welcome.

The music was downloaded as a whole and as a series of 'loops'. The Menen gate 'loop' is basically a percussion section with a background guitar that I simply lowered the volume on.
That bit did cause me a lot of angst to try and come up with an audio edit that continued the, fairly upbeat, music beat/rhythm but still recognised the nature of the service at the gate.
I'm still not a 100% happy with it.

Gwyn, you beat me to it.
I'm glad you liked it and I hope your LR loving relatives enjoy it to.

I must confess that I really enjoyed the editing. Syncing the music and choosing which clip to add, adjusting the timing etc. etc. was a lot of fun.

Video will never replace stills as my main passion but it's a close second

Gamka the audio was deliberately muted to try and reflect the solemnity of the service at the Menen Gate.
Maybe that bit wasn't as successful as I hoped

I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I shall be putting together a full length version eventually.

During a recent road trip to Nordkapp, inside the Arctic Circle, I used my K5iis in both stills and video mode.

In addition to the Pentax I also used a Kodak Playsport, Gopro Hero 2 and an iPhone 5. I used Final Cut Pro X and Apple Keynote to create the end result. The music is royalty free from premiumbeat.com.

I have now uploaded a short, teaser, video of our trip to youtube. It covers 5489 miles, 8 countries and 21 days.
The video only lasts 6 and bit minutes so don't blink or you will miss a whole country ;o)

The Pentax was used for the shots when I was on foot in Tromso, Hell, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Ypres. In addition the panning shots in the fjord and of the midnight sun were also taken with it.

I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfnSpSRGcKk

all comments are welcome

Thanks for all your suggestions but I'm afraid none of them worked. Some software would recognise that a card existed but wouldn't do anything others couldn't even 'see' it.

As such I have sent it off to East Anglian Data Recovery who have informed me that the controller chip, in the card, is fried. They will now dismantle it, extract the data from the storage chip and then attempt to re-encode it.

They have had it 2 days so far so I will let you know how it goes.

However there is some good news to report; the last night of our trip was spent at Ypres, in Belgium. We, of course, attended the very moving ceremony at the Menen Gate. Because I wanted to capture the scene without spoiling the mood and having to think about the camera, I decided to video it and just hold the camera still. Not wishing to have to swap cards halfway through, I put a fresh card in the camera and stored the old one in the battery grip.

It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't retrieved this card. When I did I discovered many of the images that I thought I had lost. Needless to say I am pretty chuffed. The interesting thing is that I, now, am not sure what is on the card that is being dismantled

Still, time will tell and at least I'm not so anxious

Thanks for all the suggestions I shall try some of them before I send the disc off. One company has quoted me £79 - £179 with a 95% chance of recovery and no data no fee.

So as long as none of these programs affect the card I'll give them a try first.

I shall let you know how I get on.

Just check and its 3487 plus those yet to be recovered....


oh, I forgot, and those taken on the iphone for easy facebook upload.

To be honest, I'm not sure. I will do a total up tonight and hope that I can add to that total when the data is recovered from the locked SD card. However I'm sure that it will be well into 4 figures!

My wife was using the camera to 'snap' general shots (on P) as we went along, so a lot of them will be rejected because of motion blur etc.

However I did mange to spend a whole 2 hours experimenting with the sun, at midnight, at Nordkapp. With any luck something good will drop out of that time.

It will take me a few days to sort through them, once I have I shall post a few on here for comment.