I was lucky enough to make my first trip to Portugal at the beginning of May 2009, travelling through Coimbra and Porto. I didn’t get as much of an opportunity to take photos as I’d have liked – it was the annual student 1st May festival and Coimbra was packed with students and tourists, plus trying to herd small children and take photos simultaneously presented its usual challenge.

So I tried something I’ve experimented a bit with before – taking photos through the car window. The traffic was bad enough, and Coimbra’s one-way system complex enough that we spent a good while stationary in traffic with some photo opportunities. This is one of the better ones – fortunately our hire car had cleaner windows than our own car!

The old post office building is 1930′s style (I love 1930′s architecture) and was naturally fairly monochromatic, with white stone and black lettering. The car windscreen had reduced the contrast quite a lot though so I added a true monochrome layer in Gimp and set it to overlay mode to increase the contrast. I quite like the graphical effect of this even though the composition isn’t that great. I have a bit of a leaning-vertical issue here as well, but didn’t go to the effort of correcting it, maybe I should have done.

Then a few weeks ago I came back to photography. Not sure what the trigger was, but I was able to look at the project with a fresh eye and you know what, in amongst the dross there’s some stuff there that I actually like, and I can see what I learnt from my few months of 365ing.

So now I have to decide what to do with my blog. I like photo-blogging, and I like being able to write a bit more about the photos than I’d normally put on Flickr. But I just can’t even try to go back to 365ing with my current work and family commitments, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. So I’m going to carry on posting when I can, just picking out a favourite photo or two. I’m doing this mainly so I can keep a record of what I’ve done and how much I’ve learnt, but if anyone else ever stops by then I hope you like it and feel free to leave me a comment.

The tree outside our house is preparing to blossom. I’m planning on taking a photo every day to record the event.

It was a beautiful sunny day, but I spent all of it, sunrise to sunset, indoors in a place were cameras weren’t allowed. So here is a picture of our curry dinner instead.

It was really tricky to get the white balance right here (shot on an overcast evening) – the camera autowhite balance was much too blue and I found it difficult to get the contrast in the yellows how I’d seen it in the garden.

Yes, it was one of those days…

I think this is the female that’s nesting in our garden. I’d been adding compost to the veg patch and was hoping all the worms would tempt the birds out of their cameraphobia, but they remained shy – I’m sure they were all out the minute my back was turned though.

Last week’s tulips, still going strong although now wide open.

I passed the pussy willow I shot a few weeks ago today and got a much better shot. Now it’s in full blossom, but still with a few furry bits at the ends.

Taken with the SAL1870 kit lens at 70mm. I actually quite like the bokeh, it’s not as good as with the minibeercan or the 50mm prime though.

Not just any piece of cloth but my Indio Gingko limited edition Didymos baby wrap. Baby Irian is becoming less and less tolerant of me taking photos when he’s around though, hence the prevalence of late-evening-when-the-kids-are-in-bed shots recently. Sigh. Hopefully the longer evenings and my return to work will make it easier to get a bit more creative with natural light shots soon.