January 2008

New Links page

I have added links to the links page (handy, I know ). A copy of the new info is below. This is a page I’m sure will be updated a lot and perhaps might be breaking up in some way:

My Sites

New Squashy Frog Photography
www.squashyfrog.co.uk
- The new site (the one you see here) is located here at the moment, soon this will be the main site and move over to .com. But for now it’ll stay out of sight from most people until it’s nearer completion.

Old Squashy Frog Photography
www.squashyfrog.com
- My photography site. My portfolio photos are here and is up to date. But this will be swapped with the new site soon.

Old Squashy Frog Photography Blog
blog.squashyfrog.com
-My current photography blog. This was set-up by me to document my progress from happy snapper to professional photographer. It’s been a bumpy ride but it’s finally got going. I upload my new photos here with lots of background detail. But as the site is due to be merged into the site site entries have mainly become quick posts of my favourite images from around the web as well as useful photography/Photoshop tips and tutorials I’ve found.

Kol Tregaskes
koltregaskes.com
- At the moment it is a very basic one page list of my sites (and not too up to date either). But this will have the WordPress/Revolution makeover like this new site has sometime after Squashy Frog is ‘complete’. It will become my sister photography site/blog.

E-lusion Limited
www.e-lusionltd.com
- My company site; created for while I was contracting in the telecoms industry. This will stay as the company site but, again, will have a new lick of paint at some point, though not for a while.

E-lusion
www.e-lusion.co.uk
- The fourth and possibly last site to have a facelift. This is currently a construction site and is basically a blank WordPress template. But I still have the old content available here and is (and will be) my personal site. Lots of info here already, though is a little out of date and very knackered-looking.

Flickr
flickr.com/photos/koltregaskes
- Where I store all my photos, old and new, good and bad. There are 1000s here and if you take a look at my profile and .best collection you will find my groups and portfolio photographs. I will continue to upload here as its a great community and by far the best photo-sharing service. It’s a place to view comments made about my photos and what other people think.

deviantART
koltregaskes.deviantart.com
– Da is where I store my portfolio photos and is the place to purchase merchandise such as prints and mugs. This is in need o a massive overhaul, both in the gallery and store areas, so expect a lot of photos and products to be removed and for a select few to be left and added.

My Friend’s Sites

Pixel Portrait
pixelportrait.co.uk [site does not exist any more]
- A computer graphics company from an ex-colleague from my days at The Bitmap Brothers (at the time a UK independent computer games developer of games such as Speedball, Xenon, Gods, Magic Pockets and Z). He has also worked for the likes of Codemasters and is a brilliant artist and website designer.

Mega Products
megaproducts.co.uk
- A web design, Internet authoring, and database solutions firm from my former colleague and boss at Warner Interactive/GT Interactive (publishers of games like Unreal and Oddworld). Another great web developer.

Qbranch
qbranch.co.uk
- Another former artist from The Bitmap Brothers, he has worked for such companies as Bullfrog and now provides a graphics services for the games industry.

Talkrocket
talkrocket.co.uk
- A fellow photographer who’s in the business of photographing weddings, he has created this excellent digital camera/photography site – where I’ll hopefully be writting on sometime soon. Check out his wedding photography site here. Yes we’ve used similar website templates.

New About page

Along with many additions to the brand new site, I’ve added a new About page.  A copy is printed below and expect this to be tweaked several times before it settles down.   New about details:

I’m a keen photographer who is learning all the time. Photography is a passion and a hobby that’s taken over my life. I really enjoy taking photos but feel I have a lot of room for improvement. Saying that I can definitely see I’m bettering myself as time goes by. I brought my first digital SLR camera in August 2006 but got serious in October 2007.I would like to eventually combine photography with my other interests; traveling, cycling & pencil drawing. I can’t imagine anything more ideal. My main genres are landscapes, nature, animal, event and sport but enjoy any style of photography and will continue to experiment and explore as many areas as I can.

Along with photography I’m working with Photoshop and love fine-tuning and manipulating photos. I’ve found Photoshop very easy to pick up and use but, again, there is lots to learn.

I have been a regular visitor to flickr and have a large collection of photos, ranging from pure holiday snaps to my recent portfolio shots. For a selection of my images head over to my.photography collection.

I’ve created a several groups, the main ones are: -

World Tour: Do Before You Die:
flickr.com/groups/dobeforeyoudie
(a group of photos that’ll inspire people to travel the World)

Wonders of the World:
flickr.com/groups/wondersoftheworld
(a group of photos you think are ‘wonders’)

British Isles & Ireland:
flickr.com/groups/britishisles
(a group for anything relating to the British Isles and Ireland)

Learn by Picture:
flickr.com/groups/learnbypicture
(a group to post your photos to get feedback and advice from others)

How-to by Photograph:
flickr.com/groups/howtobyphotograph
(a group to post images and their details of how they were created for others to learn from)

Tutorial by Picture:
flickr.com/groups/tutorialbypicture
(a group to post images that are photography tutorials)

So please pop along, share you photos and post your discussions.

I also have a deviantART page where you can buy prints, etc. of my work, have a look here at koltregaskes.deviantart.com

My photos have been used by various people, such as a outside broadcasting company, a major credit card and potentially one photo will be used for a Royal Mail stamp in the UK for Summer 2008. So if you are interested in using my photos or my services please contact me. Finally, enjoy my site!

1. Frosty leaf, 2. Turn on the stile, 3. Bird of Prey, I am not, 4. Candle light, 5. Wimbledon Tennis Championships 2007, 6. Purple sky, 7. Perfect Kaz, re-visited, 8. Branch in the sunrise, 9. Captain’s armband, 10. Pond near Skinners Farm in Edenbridge, 11. City Hall, 12. Rally car racing at Goodwood Festival of Speed, 13. Gorillas at London Zoo

Personal site moved

A quick note to say I’ve moved my personal site – E-lusion – to the following URL:

http://www.e-lusion.co.uk/old/

What you will find at the normal home page at e-lusion.co.uk is a blank WordPress template site. This is in preparation for an overhaul which will see the old site be replaced with a brand new site and all the content updated. What you will find on the new site once completed is basically what you see on the old site; my favourite websites, my ‘essential’ software, articles such as Internet security, PC buying advice, plus top 20 lists and links to all my ’social-media’ and ’social-networking pages which you’re free to take a look at. The site will hold lots of other handy info, so will be a great general resource.

I’m expecting the site to start to form sometime after Squashy Frog is complete in about 2 or 3 months time. So sorry but don’t hold your breathe on it.

My photo to appear in local newspaper

I entered three of my recent photos into a photography competition in our local news paper, The Kent & Sussex Courier. The competition is run in association with the Tonbridge Camera Club and a lady from the paper e-mailed me on Monday to say they want to print one of my photos in this week’s paper (out on Thursday 31st January 2008). I’m over the moon and can’t wait to see my photo in the paper tomorrow.

Here’s the photo:

Click to see a larger version.

No Import

Hi again,

From a lack of response from WordPress support I take it that I cannot import all my old blog entries from my Serendipity blog to the new WordPress blog. So this will mean that we start afresh. A pain as I would have liked all the old photos here but good as I really would like to re-write most of the articles I wrote before.

So expecting some familiar (though updated) articles to appear in the next few weeks.

Kol Tregaskes
Administrator/Photographer
Squashy Frog Photography

Welcome

Hello!

This is a quick post to say hello and welcome to my site. Out with the old Serendipity and PixelPost sites and in with the new all-in-one WordPress/Revolution site. If you’ve somehow found this site now you’ll see that it’s very much in the construction process. I uploaded the new site early January 2008 to the UK domain during the implementation process. Once all the basics are set-up and I’m happy to go the old photography site and blog will be taken down and replaced with what you see here. So if you bear with me I will be working on the site over the coming days, weeks and months.

Please watch this space for more for more news and details.

Kol Tregaskes
Administrator/Photographer
Squashy Frog Photography

Day out at the London Eye

Again, very old news but they are worthy of an entry. It was my brother’s 28th birthday (December 2006) and I decided to take him and my Mum and Dad out for the day. We had a meal lined up and a boat trip down the Thames. We also have tickets for the London Eye. Have a look at some of the pics I took of the Eye itself:

 

And these were taken when we were going around:

 

 

You could use this as a guide to the City of London. If you click on the thumbnails above and then the link to the Flickr pages I’ve added lots and lots of note boxes to the photos to list what everything is. Anyway the trip…

 

We went up to London Waterloo for a mid-morning timeslot and walked along the South Bank to the Eye. We got a snack to eat in Country Hall as we were a bit early. We then collected our booklet from the desk and joined the queue. The timeslot didn’t seem to matter, we probably could have queued straight away. It was a fairly long queue but moved steadily. After a security search we stepped into a pod. Now you would have thought it would stop and let you on. But no it continuously spins so we literally did hop on (when it lined up to the floor for a mere few seconds!). About 15 or so people got on and the door closed behind us. Then we were off!

 

The trip around was steady, you weren’t tumbling around the pod but you wished it lasted a little longer. Of course the best bit was when we were at the highest point. I think you get an idea from the photos what you can see. But I reckon if it was a clear day you could see a whole lot further. The weather wasn’t great but the ride on the Eye was amazing!!

 

We thoroughly enjoyed the day and recommend it to anyone. Tip though, try and go at the not-so-busy times else get a fast track ticket so you don’t have to queue. Expect to have your bags searched before you get onboard and be prepared for it to be busy as the Eye and the surrounding area are very popular.

I hope to go up on the Eye again one day, perhaps a night trip next time.

More photos are of the London Eye from this trip and others are here.

My experience of the UK flooding in 2007

I thought I’d post my experience of the major floods that hit the UK last Summer. This was written on 20th July 2007:

Well I had an interesting day yesterday (as did many others in the UK). I was working out of the Newbury Business Park [West Berkshire, South England] yesterday (not my usual place of work). It had been raining (and raining *hard*) since I woke up at 5am. News filtered through the office at about 1pm or a little earlier that Vodafone’s HQ [I used to work for the telecoms company] had been evacuated as it was flooded and had lost power. People were being sent home because if they couldn’t get home now they would definitely not be able to later.

So I decided to bugger off once it was likely that everyone would be sent home. I stood at the bus stop for 20mins waiting for the VF shuttle bus but nothing. I could hear police and ambulance sirens going back and forth but couldn’t see the road. I overheard form his phone call that the guy next to me had been there for 40mins so definitely something was wrong as shuttles are normally bang on time. The rain stopped just before 2pm so I chose to walk to the train station and by just walking around the corner I could see why there were no buses – cars, lots of them, not moving at all and all the way down the A4 road! I carried on towards the station, on route to Newbury station a colleague walked by saying Thatcham station was completely under water [the station near my home] so I headed for Newbury station to check if I could get home but found this…

You can just about see the track, so that’s a whole lot of water. Guess what, I had to walk home.

I’ve walked home before with a broken bike and also along the canal (there and back) and normally took an hour and a quarter but this was something else. The A4 was only slightly moving when I returned to it to get home. The side coming from Thatcham was fine but heading towards it was near-static. I decided to go down Lower Way [road] as it’s a shorter route to my home near [Thatcham[ station but this was one of the pics I took while going down it.

Basically most of the lower part of Lower Way was like this. People had to walk up on the hill and on the grass to walk along the road. Cars were being turned back up and onto the A4!! A few cars and a van has been abandoned, stuck in the middle of this. It didn’t help that water was furiously gushing down from the hill in 2 or 3 places and that this was all right next to the sewage works (my soaked-through work shoes went straight in the bin when I got back). I had parts of my journey where I was walking in water well over my ankles.

It didn’t get much better once I got off this road and onto Station Road. This and roads off it were totally water logged and you could see people had just given up and parked their car anywhere they could and walked the rest of their journey. I think ti was 2 hours later (could have been a lot more) by the time I came up to my house. I was fearing the worse, thinking my house was flooded but thankfully it wasn’t and have to admit being one of the lucky ones

I didn’t go down to see but Thatcham station was supposed to be even worse than Newbury station. Going pass it this morning it was OK but the grass area at the front of the pub near it had 2 mini swimming pools in it. Parts of roads in my residential estate were still flooded and you could see a few houses with piles of rubbish from their homes sitting outside their doors.

Wow that was some rainfall!

(both these pics were taken with my N73 mobile phone)

UPDATE:

It was a terrible day and we are now told to expect this on a more regularly basis. I was told that Thatcham was one of the worst hit and aerial shots appeared on the BBC news the following days. When I left Vodafone in October I think the HQ was still not fully operational so that shows have much damage that day made.

Country-wide there are still people living out of caravans or temporary accommodation, flood precautions are still not in place in lots of areas but luckily we have not had a day like that since.

Day out at Goodwood Festival of Speed 2007

Last one from the ‘old news box’…

My brother and I went down to Goodwood Festival of Speed 2007 near Chicester for the middle day (Saturday 23rd June 2007). We were up early as we thought we’d either get lost like we normally do or we’d get stuck in major traffic. But the journey down was a doddle (apart from a little tour of a roundabout or two) and it’s was dead quiet. The flyer said to look out for signs to the event but we couldn’t see them though we did work it out in the end and rolled into the field/car park close to the top and thus the entrance. So a good start.

We timed it well as behind us we saw the masses starting to come in. After a quick sort around in the car (Neal eating a bit of left over pizza, yuck, and complaining he was cold) we walked up with tickets in hand. Going through the ticket barrier we walked up (there is a lot of walking up) and thankfully got to a food store where we had ourselves a small meal and drink. As soon as that was down us we carried on walking up and came to the old cars section. Great cars but some were still covered in rain spots, tsch.

Hidden nearby (though you could hear them from miles away) were all the cars getting ready for the day. We had a wander and saw old cars and some spectacular supercars. I’m no car enthusiast but this was great and the noise was fantastic!

It wasn’t long before a few started going out for their first runs, we were up close and personal at this point as they drove by and disappeared down to the start.

Eventually after watching some cars race up the hill, itt all cooled down so we carried on walking, yes you guessed it, up! Here is where all the exhibitions were, as well as a skate/BMX board, mini-concert stand (where all the food stands are – naturally we got a bite to eat, well a hot chocolate drink, and I mean hot) and the F1 paddock (which we somehow completely bypassed all day ). The main showpiece, though, was from Toyota. It was pretty amazing to see the set of cars hung up in the air like that.

As we carried on walking up we caught a few of the cars coming down the hill at incredible speeds. But the giant haystacks that protected us from the cars crashing into us were so high we couldn’t see a great deal. Tip: spending extra on stand tickets might be a good idea, though the tickets in general are very expensive. Saying that, we weren’t sure, but it did look like there was a free-entry stand. Unfortunately we didn’t investigate further.

We didn’t take the option as we went up, but at a certain point you can hop onto a tractor shuttle service that carries about 20 people a time up and down the circuit. It starts from about half way up then takes you all the way to the top where you’ll find loads of food stands and the start/finish point of the forest rally. What we did instead was walk it and found small pockets where we could see the main track (and the supercars) a lot clearer – so was worth the effort. We kept going until we go into the forest… and the rally.

For us this was the highlight of the day by far! I’ve never really watched rally car racing but we came away as massive fans! It was fantastic!! We found and stopped off at several points to watch the cars come down. The speed was amazing, the way they skidded around corners, dirt and rocks flying everywhere and all in the middle of a forest. Loved it!! This is where I captured the best photos of the event, the Sun was creeping out a lot of the time but overall it’s pretty dark though the pics came out well.

Sadly, though we of course didn’t know it at the time, it was one of the last times people saw Colin McRae race. RIP. He saw him fly past us at least twice – very cool!

:

We eventually got up top, had some lunch, be it with a bit of rain, and watched a few cars come through the start and finish gates. One or two of them show-boating at the end there.

Then we had to think about heading down (as that’s where our car was that would get us home). This time we did take the shuttle and it’s one of those more interesting rides in a vehicle. The seats weren’t too comfortable, the track was, of course, dirt track and bumpy but the journey was fairly slow and painless. A different way to see the forest methinks.

We were trying to get down the bottom in time to see the Red Arrows. We did but a few minutes before they were due we had a massive downpour of rain!! – I was so glad Neal brought his big golfing umbrella else we would have been soaked. It went on for several minutes and thought the Red Arrows would be cancelled but amazingly it stopped and actually started to clear. It wasn’t long after that the Red Arrows came out and did their stuff. Great display. Though it was cloudy and a lighter day would have helped see them, having them on a background of white cloud helped a bit with their smoke trails. Another tip, make sure you’re not standing behind a big tree, some of the display was lost as we were low down, we moved up a bit which helped a lot but positioning is key.

We thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience, especially the rally cars. I hope to go again and to see more rally rally. We were planning on going to the Wales World Rally Championship (the final round of the WRC) but we ran out of money by then (late November/early December and so it was canned. As for the FoS, we were there for the middle day, so we didn’t get to see the final rounds. Plus the likes of Lewis Hamilton popped up on the third and final day, so perhaps a 2/3 day ticket is needed next time.

More shots are here.

Goodwood Festival of Speed web site is:
htpp://www.goodwood.co.uk/fos/

I’m sure we’ll be there for the 2008 event.

Day out at Le Tour de France London Prologue 2007

I was up in London for the Saturday (7th July 2007) Prologue of Le Tour de France in London. I thought it was fantastic! Up very early I made my way to Marble Arch. At this point it was pretty empty and quiet, but as I walked around I found some people already placing seats along the course. There was still lots of spaces, though so I decided to walk it, from Hyde Park to the finish, boy that was a long walk. On my way I went through a very busy area where people were shouting and screaming to encourage you to buy their wares. Pretty much everyone was at the finish and I could hardly see the track. So I chose to turn back to find a better location.

Eventually I plonked myself in what I thought was a good position, a clear view of the riders coming round a bend with a bit of straight before me. Yep it was good, got a lot of good shots of riders practising. But I later found I was right next to the hospitably area and once the procession (a load a French cars and float-type trucks coming down the road at 100mph throwing all sorts of promotion junk at you or some nice ladies dancing for you – see below ) and the time trials started I saw very little. Hiding in their posh exec room they all flew out and completely blocked my view of the bend and straight.

So I was left with small gaps in the crowd, hence why my pics are of the cyclist side-on. I had to time my shots very well to get anything. And the resulting images are just a “handful” compared to what I did take – I got so many photos of just tiny bits of the cyclist in shot where I was either too quick or too slow with the release button. It was a good test though and luckily we had a nice policeman nearby and people seem chatty.

I didn’t stay all day, my legs and feet were aching from standing in one spot for hours but it was very cool and hope they do it again at some point.

Quick tip to the organisers though: more bridges over the track. I had to queue to walk over one and was there for 25mins!

More pictures came be found here.

Tour de France:
www.letour.fr/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_France

Tour de France London:
www.tourdefrancelondon.com/