Taking Photos

I love waking up early on Sunday mornings.  They're usually the quietest time of the week, when everyone else is asleep, and I can potter away doing chores (or, more likely, muck about on the computer).

This morning when I got up the sunrise was giving some interesting colours to the sky, and so I decided to pop out and take some photos by the river.

Obligatory "the camera is turned round the wrong way - oh well, I'll take a photo anyway" shot

Most of the photos are of the Humber Bridge, which I wrote about a couple of years back when it was Bridge Day (interestingly Bridge Day is coming up again soon - possible source of content for bloggers!), in short the bridge is the fifth longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, linking the north and south banks of the River Humber together.

Bridge

Bridge

Bridge from a different angle

Not a bridge

Google+ Auto-Awesomed my 2013!

The thing I love about Google is how it does cool stuff, and half the time it just quietly does something brilliant without shouting about it.

I already love how it automatically backs up my photos to Google+, and then sometimes does a thing called "Auto-Awesome" on them.  I've already talked about Auto-Awesome on a previous blog post, but basically it takes your photos and does cool stuff with them, like making a collage, or an animation.  Apparently something it's been doing over Christmas is taking photos with snow in, and animating the snow.

Anyhow, what they've done is take key photos from my Google+ albums that were taking in 2013, slapped a bit of music onto them, and made a video.  It's quite cool (and interesting what photos they've picked - pulled pork sandwich from Rebels Smokehouse being one!) and I'm quite pleased on the whole the photos that have been picked out.

You can see the video Google+ made in its original high-quality here, or click on the video below for a low-quality version.

Has anyone else had one of these videos made, and if so what did you think of your video?  Was there a key memory missed out?  And what was the strangest photo included!  Pop a reply in the comments if you feel the need.

Wiki Loves Monuments UK competition

Wikimedia UK is supporting the Wiki Loves Monuments competition, where across the globe (and in the UK for the first time this year) in September people take photos of the world's historic monuments and upload them to Wikimedia UK.  Wikimedia UK, if you're not aware, exists to help collect and distribute freely available knowledge, and is linked with Wikipedia.

The competition is really straightforward, on the website they give you a very short guide as to what to do and what monuments they accept photos of, and then you go off, get some decent photos, and upload them with a bit of a description!  Nice and simple.  If you do have a go do read the guide, common photo errors, and the rules, I fell foul of not reading the photo errors before I went out and a lot of the photos I took had a lovely big church sign in it, with lots of phone numbers and information on there which causes problems. Must try harder in future!

My first uploaded picture is available at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Andrews_Church,_Kirk_Ella.JPG - to get this picture it was a bit tricky, as St Andrews Church in Kirk Ella is surrounded by lovely trees, which are great but get in the way when taking photographs.  The only way I could get a shot was by laying on the path in front of the church, taking the photo there, and breathing in so that my belly didn't get in the way!  (Bit of a subtle hint for myself to get some exercise - which the Pedometer Challenge I'm doing shortly should help with!)

Anyhow, that's my first picture, but I hope to be getting a lot more up before the end of September!  If you're getting involved do let me know what photos you're getting!