During our Venice Carnival Photo Tour we spend most of our time concentrating on the Carnival itself - the models, the costumes, St. Marks Square, and so on - but we also spend a couple of half days photographing some of the other wonderful places in and around Venice. One of those is Burano, 'the colourful island' - and I'll post some shots from there soon - while the other is the island of Murano, famous for it's glass.

We're extremely fortunate to have access to the Nason Moretti factory and while we're there we split into two groups: one photographs the glass blowing, the other the showroom, and then we rotate.

I can't say I'm 100% happy with this one - the reflection on the glass shelf could have been cleaner - but as I only had twenty minutes or so to find a shot, set it up, and shoot it I'm reasonably pleased with how it turned out.

As always, let me know what you think.

I shot this one back in December of last year, and in case you're wondering about the subject: it's an M3 Submersible Tractor Unit.

This was taken at the DIFC during my Shoot the City workshop at this year's GPP Fotoweekend event, and even though I blogged a similar shot back in 2009 I thought this one was worth sharing too as a) it's taken from a slightly different vantage point (the original shot is now impossible as the window is hidden behind a recent extension to the building), and b) features one of my students.

We're now half way through Gulf Photo Plus 2012 – I've done my Shoot the City workshops and a Creating Dramatic Images postproduction workshop – and, as always, it's turned out to be a fantastic event. The students are great, I've met up with a lot of old friends, and have had the opportunity to hang out with some great photographers.

This afternoon I'm heading out to the desert for the first day of my Landscape workshop, but thought I'd post this one today. It was taken at the third and final location for my Shoot the City workshop, the Four Points Sheraton hotel roof bar on Sheik Zayed Road. Unfortunately, or, more accurately, unexpectedly, it was freezing cold and windy when we got there. As we were all just wearing t-shirts this made it quite uncomfortable, so we didn't stay long, but the upside was that the bar was closed to the public. Normally there are quite a lot of people milling about so this shot wouldn't have been possible. Well, it would, but there would have been lots of blurry people and tables in the shot. As it was it was just us and the howling Siberian wind ;)

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8.18pm on 5/3/12 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 16mm f/9.0 30s aperture priority +2/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 Topaz Detail minor transformation

Not exactly a festive shot, but it was taken on Christmas Eve :)

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11.18am on 24/12/11 iPhone 4 ProCamera f/2.8 1/200 80 no Photoshop CS5 Topaz Denoise 16x9

This was taken during the third day of our recent Faces and Places Photo Tour to Istanbul during a boat tour up the Bosphorus. I took quite a few shots during the trip, but this ended up being my favourite.

I've also added this shot as this week's Mini-PSD.

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5.57pm on 10/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 16mm f/8.0 1/100 aperture priority -1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor

The Lumix GF-1 is a great camera for taking out when you don't want to lug the rest of your gear around, but one of the things I keep forgetting to think about is the 4x3 aspect ratio. The reason I mention this is that I often compose the shot using the LCD then subsequently decide that the image would look much better cropped to 3x2. Often, this isn't an issue - I just need to crop off the top or bottom of the image - but this wouldn't have worked for this shot as I would have needed to lose some of the T-shirt. So, instead, I stretched the right-hand edge of the image.

In other news: I published our latest Critique Slot Screencast a few days ago. If you're interested, take a look at the following link.

.../tutorials/online/critique_slot_screencasts.php

If you were a visitor at around this time last year you will probably remember that I posted quite a few shots of the Dubai International Financial Centre (The Gate #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). When I shot it last year I was working on a project for a local gallery, and thoroughly enjoyed the shoot, but I certainly didn't expect to be shooting it again this year.

A couple of months ago though the DIFC got in touch as they'd found my 2008 images and wanted to licence them. They also asked me to spend another three days shooting the building and the Gate Village (comprised of shops, restaurants and galleries). So I've spent the last fews days shooting, and have a couple of thousand images to work through over the coming weeks. I probably won't post quite as many as I did last year, as I'm hoping to shoot some personal material while I'm here too, but I did think that this one was worth sharing.

As with a lot of my recent stuff, it's a seven-shot HDR, but in this instance it was processed with FDRTools rather than Photomatix Pro.

As always, let me know what you think, even if it is to tell me that you're totally fed up with me posting HDR images :)

Over the next week or so I'll be posting at least five more shots of the DIFC, but most of those concentrate on the building itself. While I was there though I thought I'd shoot a few HDR self-portraits, of which this is the only one that worked out.

Interestingly, it was constructed using FDR Tools rather than Photomatix Pro. I've only had a quick chance to play with it, but it seems to produce more naturalistic results than Photomatix while being more flexible than Phtoshop's Merge to HDR facility. When I've had a chance to use it a bit more I'll let you know what I think.

I haven't posted the EXIF data, but the seven shot sequence was shot at 70mm, f/8.0, with a 1 EV spacing.

I went out for a while this afternoon, but the weather was terrible and I hardly got any shots that I like. In fact, I only got this one – the rest are just grey cold shots of a grey cold landscape.

This one though, I like and, in case you're wondering, it is a straight photograph (with a bit of tweaking here and there).

I had hoped to put up a picture of Finley today as he fell asleep on the settee, snuggled up to all four of our cats. If the cats had all been asleep too, I might have got the shot, but they were far too interested in the camera to stay still long enough for me to get a decent shot ... which is a bit annoying. Next time Fin' has a nap I might drug the cats and drape them around him ;-)

Anyway, failing a 'young boy and his cats' shot, I raided the archives and found this one; a reflection of Blackpool Tower in a rather distorted shop window. A year ago, I would have loved this image – I had a big thing for reflections – but, for some reason or another, I'm not quite as keen on them anymore. What do you think?

First of all, thanks for all the great comments on yesterday's shot, they were much appreciated.

As for this one: I've been undecided about it, mostly for technical reasons. It's comprised of four shots and all were underexposed by at least a stop, and all of them are noisy, but the more I've looked at it, the more I like it.

It's still technically quite weak, but, for me at least, her expressions are worth recording. The four shots were taken from left to right. In the first shot she's paying attention and smiling, but by the time I took the second one her attention was wandering. By the third shot she was being silly, and by the fourth she was downright bored ;-)

Anyway, this is probably one that I'll try and reshoot at some point (maybe one each for all the kids), but for the time being at least I thought this one was worth sharing.

Oh, and all the shots were taken with same aperture and shutter speed, and all used flash (bounced off the ceiling).

I did think I might have to raid the ever-dwindling archive again today but Libby and I went for a short stroll this afternoon and I spotted this on the way home. It's been a while since I've done any reflection shots and I'm pleased with how this one turned out.

I'm not especially fond of football, or flags, but I thought I ought to put up at least one shot loosely related to the world cup ;-)

Like a good proportion of my fellow countrymen I spent a good portion of today engaged in that traditional UK bank holiday activity of Do It Yourself: in this instance, tiling the kitchen. And while there's always a sense of achievement when these jobs are finished, I'd much rather have Paid Someone To Do It For Me :-) All of which is a roundabout way of avoiding saying anything much about this shot. It appeals to me, in a subdued, imagine-a-story type of way, but beyond that there isn't much I can say.

Ok, so it's Batman today, Elvis tomorrow (and Selma Hayek at some point in the future). And to explain this one:

Batman is a fabric drape in a fabric shop (the fragmentation being the result of the folds in the fabric), the windows along the top of the image are reflected from across the street, as are the building and lone character in the bottom-right of the image; i.e. it's a straight shot of a partial reflection.

Oh, and despite it not looking much like a photograph, I'm really pleased with this one but suspect that it might well recieve a fairly polarised reaction: so, if you don't like it, please let me know why.

Well, here's number three in this week's portrait series: this time it's Camilla.

This is something of a simple image in comparison to the last four HDR images that I've put up, but a) I don't have any more to share with you at the moment (though may have by the end of tomorrow), and b) don't have anything else to put up anyway. That said, I do like the simplicity of signage such as this.

Oh, and just a quick reminder to let you know that John Washington's site is currently running at washingtonmedia.co.uk rather than johnwashington.co.uk. Apparently John has sorted out the mixup with his domain registration but it will take a day or so for the DNS changes to propagate.

Wife: "Is that Adolf Hitler through a prism?"

Me: "No, it's a reflection in a train window that I've been playing around with."

Wife: "I like it."

Over to you ;-)

To which I could add: telephoto zooms are not especially useful for train window reflection shots as you end up with a totally unrecognisable background. In future I'll probably stick to my 17-40 for this type of image.

I think that the thing I like most about this shot is the expression, or more accurately, the lack of expression, on the face of the guy in the center of this image. What's interesting about taking these sort of shots is that people don't realise they're being photographed, yet appear to be staring straight at the camera – at least for some of the time. And I guess that what I find especially interesting is that this is an expression, that under normal circumstances, you would never see; i.e. when we have eye contact with another person our faces are often animated – we put on a front, of one sort or another. Here, there's an absence of such an expression which, to me at least, makes this type of portrait quite unnerving. I probably could have put that better, but I guess you know what I mean.

Oh, and I'd be interested to hear which you prefer between this and yesterday's entry. For what it's worth, I can't decide between them but like them for quite different reasons.

And finally, I have nothing to put up tomorrow and am not sure that I'll be able to come up with much between now and then as our youngest two both have coughs and colds and, yet again, we seem to be coming down with it too. Not to mention the fact that they'll probably keep us both up for most of the night. So, if nothing goes up tomorrow, at least you'll know why.