State of Play

I was catching up with last week's Sunday Times and saw an article on the upcoming release of 'State of Play' with Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck and Helen Mirren. The initial reviews look promising, but it made me want to have a look at the original series.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/stateofplay/

I'd forgotten just how good a piece of TV it actually was, a really great cast of actors and characters and superb piece of writing from Paul Abbot.

Remakes tend to be utter pish, so I'll reserve judgement but it might be worth a look, especially as it's directed by Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, Last King of Scotland).

Behind the wire (again)

Not a lot to say about this shot, other than I liked the way that it turned out. Had been out to meet my mate Kenny for a beer and to watch the football and spotted this car park behind a building on George St.

Ocean Terminal

Messing with Bokeh

Still trying to get to grips with my 50mm f/1.4 which, takes a bit of getting used to, it's incrediblly difficult to get sharp images from it.

It's capabilities far outweigh my skills at the moment, but it's good fun. Nice to tout around a fairly light, compact lens for once too. It's opened up some nice possibilities taking my SLR in the office with me.

London

Little trip to London this week for a meeting with a client at the Gherkin, what an amazing building it is, both inside and out. I could handle spending some more time in there.

Second shot is of the Lloyds Building reflected in the building opposite.

Red Riding

Is it just me, or was this series a bit shit. I wasn't convinced the books (which were superb, in my opinion) would be adaptable for TV. I think I was right.

St James Centre - Lumix LX3

So I finally succumbed and stumped up for the Lumix LX-3. First impressions are that it's absolutely amazing. This shot (click to see it bigger) is as it came out of the camera, not Photoshop whatsoever.

It's really nice that Panasonic look like they've actually asked photographers what they want from a high end compact camera when they were upgrading from the LX-2. I always really liked the LX-2, but let's face it was shit at the long end of the zoom and even shitter in low light situations.

The LX-3 is a different story, they've stuck with the 10.1MP format, which is nice, who needs 14/15MP in a compact camera? It's always seemed completely and utterly pointless to me and looking at the results from the Canon G10, the noise reduction required to service that level of MP renders a lot of the images unusable.

The zoom range is interesting too, Panasonic have limited the zoom to something like 24-60mm which makes me think that this is designed for serious photographers who already have their DSLR and range of lenses and are looking for a decent walkabout compact for everyday use. That's certainly what I was looking for, something small enough to comforatbaly pocket but still with the quality to post to a blog or another website.

The results so far are nothing short of staggering.

Plus it opens up a whole new world of camera geekery http://www.lx3-photography.com/search/label/LX3%20ACCESSORIES not of course, that I needed another one. I'm going to enjoy this though.