random… very random

So we finally got married!

Wow, May was probably the most incredible month of my entire life!

The actual wedding was bloody amazing - everything we worked so hard for went according to plan and the weather helped us out. I’ve dumped a load of photos and a couple of videos of the proceedings on to the wedding website - drop by and take a look.

Yve and I spent the honeymoon in a place called Caherdaniel, right down at the bottom left of Ireland on the Ring of Kerry. What a fantastic place - the drive through Ireland just got better the further south we got.

If you’ve never been, go…

I promise you’ll not regret it!

Wooo!!!

I’ve just had the strangely exciting experience of seeing one of my photo’s on the Flickr Explore page (http://flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/?). To celebrate this dubious honour, I just had to take a screenshot.

According to Flickr Scout, I’ve reached #223 in the Interestingness chart - probably not that meaningful in the grand scheme of things, but at the moment ’tis a source of pride for myself! Just think of how many images are uploaded to Flickr each day.

Update - Blimey, actually getting into explore seems to make a bit of a difference - I’ve had a shed load more views than I would normally expect, and the Interestingness ranking for that picture has just reached #92!

Update #2 - Good grief, left alone for a couple of days and the picture is racing up the rankings and is now #38! I know this is a fairly meaningless metric, but it sure is entertaining.

There are about a million reasons I tend to not go out at night. Feeling tired after work, just having “one” too many beers or just general lethargy. Tonight, the weather is absolutely awful - the wind will literally take your breath away, but Scooby just wouldn’t chill out, so Yve and I wrapped up and headed out for a trudge in the dark.

Grabbing the camera on the way out of the door was a last minute decision, I certainly didn’t expect to get any images, but on the walk I found a few bollards where I could anchor the camera for the 30 or so seconds needed to get any kind of exposure at all.

I love the anticipation with viewing a night exposure for the first time. Waiting around for what seems like an eternity trying to hold the camera still whilst the wind and rain do their best to introduce extreme camera shake. When you finally get to look at the LCD it could be completely black, or completely blurred, but just sometimes an image appears that just defies reality - the lights of a distant town illuminating the clouds and fantastic colours that just appear from nowhere.

Yve still thinks I’m mad though…

We’ve found the perfect band for our wedding!

They’re called Gothic Chicken and Yve, Ed and I went for a night out in Weymouth last night to check ‘em out.

These guys are brilliant. They do a really authentic psychadelic set, with classics from the 60s and some of their own material. They’ve even got a real Hammond, complete with whirling Leslie cabinet. They were tight, and great fun - pretty much perfect for the occasion.

Check out some photos from the gig here.

I used the gig opportunity to have a practice at some low light gig photography - believe me, it was really dark in there so I had to open the aperture all the way and push the ISO way higher than I would normally like, shooting at this sort of setting without flash is a massive challenge and there is an absolute ton of noise in the images but I’m quite happy with some of the pictures and I definitely learnt a lot!

Jump
Originally uploaded by Mike Kneller.

Nothing he likes better than jumping!

The best thing about the Christmas break is that there’s nobody around when we go for our walks. The weather was a bit bleak for good nature photography, so I satisfied myself by snapping Scooby in action.

Floodwater
Originally uploaded by Mike Kneller.

I still haven’t got good photos of rain, just its effect.