More HD VTs

The ever increasing use of 360 photography is becoming more and more evident as a USP for client websites.  This time we are working on another wedding venue as it is converts to full screen high definition virtual tours.  There are only one or two other photographers, beside ourselves, in the UK who offer VTs that include sound files, flash video and a realistic virtual interactive environment.  Weston Digital Imaging is developing these as a means to sell the clients venue or product, but most interesting of all is the means of bringing a virtual learning environment to schools and colleges.

Check out The Growler

The BIPP comes to Wilmslow

A very successful evening was had by all when the Chief Executive of the British Institute of Professional Photographers came to talk to selected members of the Lindow Photographic Group about the institution.  Issues regarding membership, copyright, model rapport and professionalism in photography were all covered. 

Arrangements are underway for the BIPP to return to give members considering membership a group portfolio review.  Watch this space for dates!

Too busy to blog.....

It's just 2 and a bit weeks before Richard's off to fly a desk again, but there's plenty happening in the meantime:  - a visit from the BIPP, 
submissions to the RPS,
a chat with a bride about her forthcoming wedding photography,
lots of lovely high definition virtual tours for Sandhole Farm Wedding barn and stills for Heaton House Farm wedding barn (wedding season is well underway!), not to mention plenty of top photography tips to add to the blog (thanks for the idea, Steve).

and it's only Monday.......

By the way, if you wonder what it is that Richard gets up to on his hush hush weekends away, have a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011cr8f, a BBC 2 programme from last night. Can't you just see him with pipe and 1940's accent.....

One more from the archive.

Another hi-resolution scan. This one taken a couple of years later in 1984 on Ektachrome 100, with available light and fill in flash. Not by me, but by my brother, of yours truly, half way up the 240 foot daylight shaft in Alum Pot, Yorkshire.  He was the one who taught me to use a camera at the tender age of 15.  I remember sitting in our bedroom together as he extolled the importance of using manual in photography (sound familiar?).  In those days you used to be able to wrap your camera in a plastic bag, shove it in an old ammunition box and take it down caves where it would get wet and muddy, but the results were worth it!  Not sure I could do the same with today’s cameras.

P.S.  If you are wondering what the big black thing is in the middle, it is a huge boulder that is lodged half way down the shaft.

The first seeds of Weston Digital Imaging

Uncovered my old negative album the other day and it was interesting to revisit those very first pictures I took.  This is one of my first, taken way back in 1982 at the tender age of 16, of kids playing around the pond on Hartshill Bank in Stoke.  Taken with my first camera, an Olympus OM1n with a 50mm lens.  I even processed the film myself in the shed in my parents garden!  Funny to see the subject matter I was looking at then and how 29 years later I'm scanning the negative through on a high resolution digital scanner, sitting at my computer with not a whiff of fixer to be had.  One thing’s for sure, in all these years I'm still as passionate about photography as I was then, it’s just that I don't use it as a means of chatting up girls anymore!