The above photograph shows the chandelier in the Great Hall, a new extention to the main Orient Entrance of the Trafford Centre. This is the world’s largest chandelier and was designed by English lighting consultants, and then the design was sent to China for manufacture; assembly and installation were done by local contractors. The chandelier has three levels of plant walkways inside, is around 11 metres wide and 15 metres high, weighs around five tonnes, and has more lighting control systems than most shopping centres. As previously discussed on this site I have somethin of a love hate view of the Trafford Centre shopping mall. It is convenient to have hundreds of shops under one roof with easy transport links, but it is things like this chandelier that just seem completely pretentious and unnecessary.

This evening I had a barbeque with my close friends at my parents house. Last summer they had a conservatory built on the back of their house. I had never seen a conservatory with a proper glass roof before. Almost all the conservatorys I see have horrible plastic roofs that don’t let as much light through. As you can see in the above photograph, the glass ceiling looks great, especially with the complementary light fitting.

I am moving out of my flat in a couple of months so I don’t mind showing you this photo. Taken on Sunday this was a day long experiment taking inspiration from the new Joe McNally book I am reading at the moment called “The Hot Shoe Diaries”, which covers how to get big light from small flashes such as my Nikon SB-800. I wanted a photo of my desk for the record, but showing the great view out of my window over Manchester city centre.

Taken during the day there was too much light coming through the window, so I waited till dusk. In the end I had the camera on a tripod and used my Sigma 10-20mm super wide angle lens (hence the extreme distortion in the window frame). With the flash I had it on rear sync using the 80-20 method of pointing the flash head at the ceiling and bouncing it down to spread the light. I used a small piece of mount board to act as barn doors to keep the flash from reflecting off the window and into the camera’s lens.

All in all I am very pleased with the result but wish the window was a little clearer. There is no Photoshop processing on this apart from a quick resize for this website.

The Royal Exchange Shopping Precinct is small but perfectly formed and is situated beside the Royal Exchange Theatre in the heart of Manchester city centre. The above photograph was taken as I walked around this area of the city with a group of students from University. I literally didn’t look through the lens when grabbing this snap shot (something I don’t recommend but I was in a rush to keep up with my friends).

Using Lightroom and Photoshop on the computer I cropped and straightened it then brought out a lot of the shadow and highlight detail of the RAW file to create a more hype realistic image otherwise known in the photography world as HDR or high dynamic range.