It’s been a while since I’ve taken any photos so it was a welcome diversion to get out this weekend and wave the camera around frenziedly smashing the buttons and hoping for the best.

Aside from being overwhelmingly cute and funky, these Fiats are also absurdly specified as standard with all kinds of bluetooth and mp3 whizbangery taking place.

On to the pictures, because frankly no-one cares what I say.

This rig shot is a mixed bag – I’m happy enough with the composition and processing, but I’m gutted I forgot to put the lights on which would have looked much better.

In the latest installment of cars shot for Richard over at Performance Car Dreams I borrowed an Impreza WRX for long enough to take some photos of it.

Bonkers loud and 300BHP ensure it’s quite an event to drive, I was tempted to buy it myself but decided I’d stick with my little Fiesta for now until (if? when?) the fuel prices ever go back to a bearable level.

No silly, not horrible ginger swellhead Rex from big brother, but rather a Maxda RX-8, and a Golf GTI. See what I did there? Anyway I can’t think of anything funny to write so I’ll just put these pictures here and leave it at that.

These were taken for Richard over at Performance Car Dreams.

Occasionally I like to furiously smash the keyboard on my computer in the pursuit of creating something moderately interesting. I feel a sense of achievement having made something which will be looked at by literally as many as several people.

I also like free things, and I constantly marvel at the stuff that people are willing to give away for nothing. For instance, whilst digging around for free gallery viewers to use in a web page, I went to have a look at what the latest version of SimpleViewer is looking like, only to find the author Airtight Interactive has moved the game forward with several new flash gallery packages.

One that caught my eye was the TiltViewer package because not only is it all whizzy and 3D and makes my eyes and brain feel all nice, it also has a very cool feature in that it can display images using a live feed direct from a flickr stream. So I thought I’d give it a test. For those without a pathological aversion to flash websites, you can click to view my tiltviewer flickr gallery. For anyone that doesn’t like flash, you’ll have to make do with this image showing you what you are missing.

Hurts doesn’t it? I’ve only had a brief look at what else you can do – one thing is specify a tag from flickr so it only loads images with that tag – such as this Holga gallery or this Cars gallery

In other news, I had a comment and an email requesting a more detailed photo of how my suction cups attach to the metal poles for my car rig. Happy am I to oblige as I continue my one man crusade to lift the shroud of secrecy pulled over car rigs.

So there you have it – a hole into which you insert a pole. Then tighten a screw. This particular pole has a bevel cut out of it, but I’ve used some lengths of aluminium which don’t and it doesn’t need them, as long as the pole is 5/8th of an inch you will be ok. Also you should use solid aluminium not hollow, as it’s not strong enough and you’ll get loads of flex otherwise.

So Saturday lunchtime arrives and I find myself at a loose end, a quick call to Sami and an impromptu rig shoot is arranged.

For a while I’ve been thinking that Cheddar Gorge might lend itself to some interesting rig work. I’ve taken a couple of half decent car photos there before, like these Ferrari shots and I thought the grey gorge walls could work well with the red car.

I’m pleased enough with these all things considered, although I made more mistakes than I would have liked.

and a couple of interior shots I liked.

“There,” said the Mayor. “That’s that.”

I know it will probably come as a massive shock, but I’ve done another rig shot. Shocking I know, but there you go, and here it is.

Firstly what I like. It’s sharp and the rig was rock solid throughout. I love the colours, the composition is good and the photoshop work to get rid of the rig only took about 15 minutes. As I’ve seen other people saying they spend between 1 and 5 hours on an image, I’m happy with my results for a 1/4 hour session.

Perhaps for the right image I would spend longer but in this case I couldn’t see the point.

Now the bad things. This was done in a car park which you can clearly tell by the white lines, so it’s not quite as good all round as the Fiesta one I took from a similar angle. Presumably I could get rid of the white lines by editing them out, heck, I might even give that a go at some time. Which goes some way to proving my earlier comment that I couldn’t see the point to be a big fat stinking lie.