August « 2010 « Blog: Photography by Dan Santillo

August 31, 2010

Gower 2011 Summer Exhibition

The last 5 days have been very busy as it has been my annual Gower photo exhibition in Mumbles. I was joined by local photographer Emma Jones who also displayed some of her work. Over the 5 days I have met a lot of very nice people, chatted about a variety of topics, learnt a bit more about my star trail photos from an expert and sold a lot of photos! It has been my most successful exhibition so far and I will be booking next year’s dates later this week. In the meantime, I have my Christmas Exhibition coming up on the 10th and 11th of December (more details later) and am pleased to announce that I will be joined by Emma once again. As always, I left a comments book for people to write in if they feel inspired to – here is a small selection of the comments:

“Some of my favourite places captured perfectly”
“Lovely pictures egspesaly (sic) the big Three Cliffs one”
“Very impressed. One of the best local exhibitions I have seen”
“Breathtaking talent, Dan and Emma. Awesome exhibition”
“Inspirational and evocative photos”
“Excellent exhibition – well done and most enjoyable”

I included the misspelt comment because it’s interesting how many children want to write a comment – I think the girl that wrote that was about 7 years old!

Whilst at the exhibition I tried something I’ve wanted to try for a while:

2011 Gower Photographic Exhibition

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August 23, 2010

Struck by Lightning

Tags: lightning damage. microchip, micro chip — Dan Santillo @ 6:42 am

It never happens to you, right? We’re at home and hear the distant rumble of thunder and see a flash. It’s misty so we can’t see much but we go into the porch to watch the lightning (after I unplugged the computer). It’s a pretty intense storm and the following conversation takes place:
Paula: Wouldn’t it be nice if the lightning strikes in front of us so we can see it.
Me: It won’t happen as there are trees behind the house higher than us.

The next bit of lightning hit our house! Paula saw a thick blue and white spark on the wall of the house, the thunder was at exactly the same time as the lightning and a large click was heard inside the house. I thought a fuse had tripped, but all the electricity was fine. The I noticed that the lights were off on the ADSL router and I couldn’t get it to power up. It felt pretty hot and smelt hot too. So I turned the computer on, but it wouldn’t switch on – as I mentioned before, all the mains circuits were working. Eventually it powered up and I soon discovered that it had also sustained damaged through the ethernet port that I forgot to disconnect. The ethernet port no longer works, which is fine because I have wireless and also have ordered a new ethernet card for under £7. But, more alarmingly, my 12Gb RAM won’t run at 1600Mhz anymore and is stuck running at 1066Mhz instead. I’m hoping the ionised air inside the PC has just wiped from non-volatile memory settings in the BIOS, but I’ll find out soon…

Out of interest, I took the router apart (I’m now using my old router that was in the loft) and after a bit of searching saw the damage… So naturally, I got my macro lens and extension tubes out. The first photo isn’t cropped at all! The second photo is heavily cropped to show the detail.

Lightning damage inside ADSL router

Lightning damage inside the ADSL router

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August 18, 2010

Fresh From The Garden

Tags: close up, fresh, fruit, home grown, macro photography, organic, veg — Dan Santillo @ 7:54 am

It’s good to set yourself a personal project every now and then and this year I set myself the task of photographing all the fruit and veg we grow in the garden using my macro lens. At then end of the year, I will make up 10×10″ canvases of them all to hang in the conservatory to make a very colourful (and fruitful!) wall. Here’s a sneak preview of the project so far.

All from our garden this year so far

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August 3, 2010

Worms Head on Gower

Tags: Gower, Outdoor Photography On the Web, Rhossili Bay, worms head — Dan Santillo @ 1:12 pm

I’ve just had the preliminary flick through this month’s copy of Outdoor Photography and saw that they’ve featured my website in theie On the Web section, and a very good write up it is so thank you Outdoor Photography :-) This made me think that I ought to update my blog as I haven’t posted for a few days. It’s currently August, and I don’t much like August and don’t really go out and take new photos. Locations are packed with people, traffic can be a pain and kids are running around – I prefer to be on my own, or at least one of a couple of people, on location. And I also have my exhibition coming up later this month which I have to prepare for and print, mount and frame photos. Here’s a sneak preview of a photo that will be in the exhibition (26th-30th August, Ostreme Centre Minor Hall in Mumbles, Swansea). I took it in May 2005 but was never happy with the result. Given 5 years more experience in processing photos, improved software and some new Digital Asset Management software (I’d forgotten about the photo) I have reprocessed it. Some surfers were a little concerned when I took this photo as it appeared I was peaking through the grass at them!

Worms Head, Rhossili Bay, Gower

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