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So on Saturday I went and photographed some flowers and petals and stuff.

Which was all very nice, and nobody got manhandled by bunch of police officers.

Jules Mattsson, on the other hand, is a photojournalist, so on Saturday he went to take some photos of the Armed Forces Day parade. Here's how it went:

Note the veritable  smörgåsbord of pseudo-legal bullshit offered up as cause for his detention. There's coverage of the incident on the British Journal of Photography, here, and also advice for photographers here.

I've experimented with merging multiple photo exposures together a few times now. Four years or so ago I managed to cobble two photos from a Pentax *ist DL together with the help of a lot of layer masking, and the result was okayish. In 2007, and armed with a copy of Photoshop CS3, I managed to bodge two handheld shots of the Eiffel Tower together into this:

.. which I still quite like, despite it being rather rough around the edges. This weekend, though, I've been testing Photoshop CS5, which includes an improved "Merge to HDR Pro" tool that can attempt to automatically remove some of the blurring caused by objects that move between exposures. And so armed with that, a tripod and a camera body that can auto-bracket exposures, I gave it another shot.

First I tried the docklands. Between getting harassed by a Barclays security guard and rained on a bit I did manage to get one shot of the dome:

.. and this shot of one of the docks, which came out fairly well:

But with next to no wind nothing served to test the ghost removal. And so to the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge, where it was blowing a gale and raining on and off. First I tried this postcardy shot:

.. and, as it turns out, the ghost removal worked a charm: without it this image contains three planes (top left) and a blur under the bridge where the boat was moving, but with the ghost removal option ticked both are sharp. For something a bit harder I tried some trees – these were blowing in a wind that was strong enough to smack me around the face with the camera strap:

Again, the tool did a fantastic job here – the trees are a tiny bit messy, but so much better than the green-blur-covered original. All in all, I was thoroughly impressed – getting a sharp HDR merge has gone from a task that takes a few hours to a matter of minutes on a fast computer. And although some HDRs can look really, really naff, I did get a shots that I quite like, including this:

And an elephant:

And a ruined church:

.. so the results don't have to be too lurid. All things considered I can't see myself using this technique that often, but for the occasional shot of buildings when there's a suitable wall or tripod available it could be a nice way to get a more complete image.

I spend far too much time on Flickr and a lot of that time gawking at photos shot on old-fashioned film. Flickr may have millions of users toting digital-compacts, and probably just as many who are unhealthily obsessed with their DSLRs, but it also has a really strong community of those who won't – and it's mainly won't, rather than can't – move from film to digital. And many of them take some really beautiful photos.

And you can see why. For one, some films seem to impart a unique look to photos that's at best time-consuming and at worst impossible to replicate on a digital image. I loved the look I could get from Provia in my F80, even if it did cost a fortune to process and posed serious questions about how much film it is acceptable to keep in a small home fridge:

Film also imposes some discipline that's helpful if, like me, you have a tendency toward crap photos. Each roll holds only a few shots, so you must compose each carefully. And then there's the cult-of-film aspect: unlike the millions of plebs who take digital snaps, film photography is, now, a more niche pursuit. Those with a liberal arts degree might want to to knock up one of those dichotomy lists so beloved of theorists and/or poseurs (digital/film, many/few, snapshot/art, blah), not that it would prove anything. But anyhow. I owned several film cameras, then sold my best to buy a DSLR because digital photography is, in every way, more practical.

And then on Sunday, while diving through cardboard boxes in pursuit of batteries, I found one of my film cameras: a "vintage" (old) 1973 Zenit E SLR. This camera was made in the USSR, designed with the aesthetic care and attention usually lavished on anti-aircraft emplacements and made from what I think is a solid chunk of aluminium. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be radioactive – it's got that "made before safetly considerations" look to it. And then, lurking in the bottom of the box, a spare roll of film. What better way to waste a sunny afternoon than to give it a whirl.

The Zenit has five shutter speeds (plus one for bulb exposures) selected via a dial that regularly falls off the camera and its light meter gave up the ghost some time ago. Probably before I was born, actually. Remarkably the results came out pretty well exposed, and a few of them look OK. I quite like the soft background and colours on this:

while Hunter survived his visit to the 1970s, too:

And there's no denying that using the Zenit is strangely fun: the viewfinder makes everything look like a 1980s Thames TV broadcast viewed on a slightly frazzled Trinitron, all colour-cast and barrel distortion, and there's an amazing mechanical KER-CHUNK noise when you press the shutter accompanied by the whiz of the speed selector spinning around and doing its best to remove the skin from your hand.

There's also something undeniably neat about taking photos with a camera that requires not a single battery: the Zenit could probably survive a nuclear blast and still work (in fact, it'd serve as a handy hammer should you need to take part in civilisation-rebuilding). Truth be told, everything about taking photos on film again was enjoyable. So will I start lugging the Zenit, or perhaps a more practical film camera, around along with the D80? No chance. And here's why:

Dust. Gets. Fucking. Everywhere.

That's the shot of Hunter in Lightroom, and each circle is a dust spot correction that I had to add to remove the assortment of crap, crud, grime, hair and fluff that my film scanner picked up. And that's on a negative strip straight from the lab (there's one, conveniently, across from my office). Argh. And many of the other frames were far, far worse, to the point where I couldn't be bothered to clean them up. If it weren't for Lightroom's tools I probably would have just given up and chucked the film out.

So that's quite enough messing around with stips of chemically-treated plastic for now. I've packed the film scanner away again, and put the D80 back in the bag with a 4GB card (400 JPEGs – luxury. In my day, etc). But I won't be throwing the Zenit away – I'll come back to give it another try. Next summer, maybe.

I really should learn to use a camera properly; you know, buy a book or something. Instead I've been slowly working things out over the years, which is satisfying but often frustrating in a "wish I'd known that when I was in…" kind of way. Case in point: lately I've been having problems with lens flare.

Having attended a lovely wedding at which I was pretty much unable to photograph anyone inside because of the dark (can't afford an external flash to bounce and my zoom lens is large enough to obscure the built-in one) I decided to buy a simple, bright lens. In the end I picked up a really old Nikon E 50mm f/1.8, and it's great: almost twice as bright as the zoom, and easy to focus because it was made in the days that auto-focus didn't exist. It's also tiny – on the D40 it barely protrudes beyond the prism/flash housing – and stupidly light. Oh, and cheap. Cheap is good.

The problem, though, is flare. Point my modern zoom lens, with hood, pretty much anywhere other than directly at the sun and you'll get a clean picture. When pointing the 50mm lens pretty much anywhere outdoors I was getting the most amazing light effects: blobs, swooping arcs, upside down headlights in the sky where they'd obviously reflected somehow inside the glass (there are probably technical terms for these things, but I don't know them). Sometimes they're pretty, mostly they're a pain.

Anyhow, today I finally figured it out, and the answer is simple: just stop the lens down. At anything wider than f/4 you get crazy flares. f/5.6 or higher and things get better. Stop it all the way down to f/22, if you can, and there's no problem even with bright light sources in the frame. The photo above was 5 seconds, f/22 at ISO200.

So, there you go. Simple. And it only took me three sodding weeks to figure out. Nuts. For my next trick, maybe I'll learn how to actually take some interesting pictures.

I found this collection of 2008 photos, presented in comparison to originals from the Twin Peaks pilot episode, quite fascinating. You may or may not agree :) Also, you can still stay at The Great Northern (although, as befits a hotel perched over a waterfall, it's not cheap).

"Internet ad spendings up, you say? I should probably put some clothes on and go to work"

Actually, I feel the Guardian's pain. Every so often over the last few years I've found myself digging through stock photo libraries looking for a photo of somebody using a notebook computer – often with the dreaded keyword "lifestyle" involved, too – and I've discovered a few rules:

1. Men use notebooks up in high-rise offices. Usually three or more men surround the notebook, grinning and pointing like amused chimpanzees. Ties will be loosened and there will be venetian blinds in the background, or an empty office space that resembles an unfinished airport terminal.
2. Women often use notebook computers wearing pyjamas, or, even more commonly, an oversized (normally white, possibly man's) shirt. They often do so on a bed (see above) or a large beige sofa of the type that nobody in the real world owns because they are larger than a normal living room. Sometimes a lone female notebook user will be surrounded by the braying pack of berks described above, grinning and tapping the keyboard ("SEND HELP STOP AM SURROUNDED BY PACK OF STOCKBROKERS STOP")
3. Male or female, the notebook users in stock photos often strike poses presumably chosen to demonstrate victory or success (both arms raised, punching the air etc). The result is to make them look like lunatics or, worse, marionettes.
4. Occasionally the person will clutch a dollar bill in one hand, or stretch it out between both hands with a smug grin. This applies to pretty much any kind of stock photography.
5. No matter when the photo was taken, the notebook in question will always look as ancient as a quill pen and bottle of ink.

Up next at this rate, the top ten reasons why I hate Microsoft Word.

Several things about this poster annoy me. Not least of which is the fact that it's a horrible, blurry PDF that appears to have all the image quality of an GIF image saved by Microsoft Paint, but that's beside the point.

More importantly, there's the suggestion that anyone taking notes in public, or heaven forbid taking photographs near a CCTV camera (so, on any fucking street in Central London, then) is a terrorism suspect that should be reported. Of course, who else might wander around London with a camera and scribbling notes? Me. And just about any other journalist who works in this city. And anyone who enjoys photography or writing as a hobby, for that matter.

More specifically: I know writers who have spent time making notes on CCTV cameras (when writing an article on the data protection implications of private CCTV, and the oft-ignored laws that govern them). I also know photographers who have spent time taking photos of said cameras, and the warning signs that accompany them (again, for the same articles). Put enough of these stupid posters around town, and anyone attempting this kind of perfectly legitimate and, in fact, important journalism is likely to find themself being reported to the police as a potential murderer. Showing a press card might help explain matters, but how is this going to help the snap-happy tourist who finds him or herself in the same situation after clicking away near the National Gallery?

There are already enough crazy regulations about where and what one is allowed to photograph in London (I came across this when testing a DSLR for work – two shots in Charing Cross station and I was swooped on) without inciting an army of would be "citizen warriors" to report anyone with a camera or a biro.