Happy Christmas Everyone!
May your Christmas be full of joy, happiness, care, compassion and love.
With love,
Alex Smithson
Tag: Full
Want to Know How I Create My Photos? Read This.
I love photography as much as lot of you do, considering how fascinating the subject of photography really is, but how have I been able to produce my most recent collection of photographs? Well, I can tell you.
For the photos I’ve taken and published on here, I have taken my photographs most recently below ISO-400 and on ISO-400, and I have found my photographs have improved over the course of time, because I’ve been making sure to take my photos at different exposures, as well as adjusting the light balance before I take my photos.
To get photographs similar to mine, these are the settings that I recommend.
ISO-400 or below.
Exposure Bias: 0, -0.7 or -1
Focal Length: 55 mm or more depending on the camera make and camera lens, for example, Nikon or Canon.
Make sure your metering mode is either of Centre Weighted Average, or of a metering mode that will allow you to take your photos with clarity, as you will want to make sure this helps you when you need to focus your camera’s lens on a particular subject, object or item.
Also, one strong recommendation I will make that will most definitely benefit those of you wanting to take the best quality photos is to set your photo size to the NEF/RAW format, because your photos will be much bigger and will also be full of detail.
If this has helped you out, then please let me know, and if I have missed any important details out that should be here regarding photography, please let me know by submitting your feedback below. All feedback is much appreciated.
Alex Smithson
Quote of the Day #3
“Life’s full of hurdles. It’s overcoming them and believing in ourselves that matter. Just be you, believe in yourself and also be yourself, that’s all that matters.” – Alex Smithson
Life Experience | My First Ever Ear Infection | Have You Ever Had an Ear Infection Before?
As you might recall, I took the rest of last week off from blogging and from college as I was off sick due to a diagnosed ear infection in my right ear, which left me in nothing but untold pain. To talk further in detail about my life experience, I will give a run-down as to what I experienced over the course of last week when I had the ear infection.
On Monday 30th November, my ear started to ache after using the cotton buds, which I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to use to clean your ears with, and it started to feel more painful during my English lesson, and by the time I got home, my ear was in pain, and I couldn’t hear pretty much almost anything.
The following day (Tuesday 1st December), I felt a lot worse than I did, as the pain didn’t go for a while, and just continued to get worse, and whilst I was in college, I had been in so much pain that I couldn’t concentrate on one of the things I needed to do with my group, so I took a 15-minute break at 10:45 AM, which is our first break, and that kind of helped me to forget the pain, but after the first break finished, the pain got a lot worse and was too much to handle, and as a result, I was advised to go home, to take some paracetamol or ibuprofen, and to have a lie-down even if it meant using Olive Oil in my ear. I left college early as advised, and I got home, but as the pain got too much for me, I ended up falling asleep on the sofa, and I didn’t wake up for the best part of two hours because the pain just got to me. My parents had to nudge me to wake me up as I was in so much pain.
As a result of the amount of pain I was in, I had to go for an emergency appointment down at my local doctors, and my doctor looked in my right ear to see if I had an ear infection, and the inside of my ear was inflamed, to which my doctor diagnosed me with an ear infection, and I was prescribed an antibiotic Otomize Ear Spray, which I would have to use up until yesterday.
Because I was home for the rest of the week as a result of the ear infection, I did find that having this ear infection put a drain on my energy, as I wasn’t able to concentrate on most things properly, and the ear infection felt like as if someone stuck up to 5-10 warm pins in my eardrum, to cause me so much pain.
For the rest of last week, into this week, I continued to use the Otomize Ear Spray and the Olive Oil, and although my ear infection was completely gone before this Monday, I continued to use the spray and olive oil until early Friday morning just to be on the safe side, to make myself absolutely sure that it would never come back again.
I feel 100% better now, as my ear infection is gone, and I don’t have any pain, which is the result I wanted, and I must admit, I can hear a lot clearer now after almost two weeks.
The only tip I can give to those of you who might use cotton buds on a regular basis, don’t use cotton buds, because it will push whatever you’re trying to get rid of further into your ear, and is not the advisable method to use. Always use Olive Oil or Otex, whichever one you think is more preferrable. Also, and this was a contributory factor to the ear infection I recently got rid of, don’t have your music on too loud as it will cause more of a buildup that can, if your ear is left untreated for a certain period of time, cause an ear infection. I’m only relaying this as this is what my local doctors advised me.
Before I conclude, I will leave you with three questions:
- Have you ever had an ear infection before?
- Is this the first time you have ever experienced having an ear infection?
- How long did your ear infection last for?
Alex Smithson
© Full Credit: Ear Emoji Created & Designed by The Unicode Consortium, who specialise in designing Emojis for all major companies, such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Ubuntu).
Monthly Roundup: May 2015
As May rounds off on a good note, I will take a look back on the articles I have published on Mother Nature over the course of this month.
1.5.2015 – I welcomed you all back to Mother Nature for a month that would begin on a relaxing and delightful note. As we have been getting a lot of good weather recently, which is a first in a while, the Whitsun holiday was just around the corner, despite the fact there was a bit of a chilly breeze, which I was fine with. I also announced that there would be a 6th Case Study included in my third book: “My Journey Through a Lens”, given the fact that this book had just recently crossed over the 300-page target mark.
Also on this day, I published an article that focuses on the YouTube Vlogger, Alfie Deyes. As I share my love for YouTube, I wanted to dedicate this article to Alfie Deyes who, over the past few years, has taken to YouTube to upload videos to his YouTube channels, one of which is a gaming channel, while the other two are based around his life, as well as a lot of the funniest things that he has done with his girlfriend, Zoe Sugg (a.k.a. Zoella), and their little pug, Nala, who is so cute.
7.5.2015 – On the 15th April, I took a trip up to the Victoria & Albert Museum (a.k.a. the V&A), as I went with my class to take some photos that I could use to stick into my A3 Sketchbook for my UAL Level 2 Art & Design Course, and because of the fact I took those photos, this gave me the chance to showcase my photos here, and as well as that, I had thought that this trip was a lot more interesting than the previous one, given the fact that this museum had a lot of interesting works, artefacts, and not only that, some, if not, a lot of model designs that focused on certain building elements, such as the Model of the Crystal Palace.
17.5.2015 – This day was an absolute honour for me to talk about the YouTuber, Joey Graceffa. On this day, I published a special music feature article about this YouTuber, as Joey released his music video: “Don’t Wait” to the world on the 16th May, which had instantly blown me away, given the fact that it had so much sentimental value, and also a lot of meaning to it. Just days before Joey Graceffa released his debut memoir: “In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World“, he officially came out as gay to the world. After a few years of speculation from a lot of his fans, he officially announced he was gay before the release of his book. As I support him and everyone else entirely that are gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender, I wrote this:
I support the LGBT Community entirely because for those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, I believe in equality, LGBT equality and gender equality entirely, no matter what sexuality the person is. I respect all of those who have come out and expressed their sexualities to the world, because everyone in this world deserves to be treated equally, no matter what sexuality they are, and everyone should be respected for who they are and also be treated with the full respect that they deserve. – Alex Smithson
Joey Graceffa’s music video: “Don’t Wait” is available now to watch on YouTube, and if you want to buy the song, it is now available for purchase via the iTunes Store, Google Play, and any other major music outlets that offer the song for purchase. If you want to watch the music video, please make sure to head to the “Related Articles” section below to view the article, or, if you want to get to the video a lot quicker, it can be found on the sidebar under “YouTube Music Favourites“.
31.5.2015 – As it was almost a year since I left school for good, I wanted to take a look back on yesteryear, given that my nostalgia for yesteryear has been really strong. I chose the colours, Purple & Green, as they are how I sense nostalgia, as those two colours combined symbolise my own nostalgic views with reality.
Until then, thanks so much to all of you for a fantastic month, and I’ll see you all in June!!!
Alex Smithson
Related articles
A Cold, Wet Start to 2014
Following the New Year’s Day fireworks on Wednesday, I wanted to get some photos of the rain, but instead, wanted to go for a more difficult, hard-to-focus view-point by using my iPod touch’s 5 megapixel camera to capture these photos. I also recorded some video clips using the iPad mini (1st Generation), but noticed while recording the first clip that the bolt of lightning quickly appeared and disappeared in the space of just a split second.
In honesty, what I thought would be the last of this weather, well we were not prepared for this, because after the first bout of this horrible weather came and went, I hoped the first bout would be the last we see of it, but oh no, we have got this second bout of horrid weather, and now the UK is expected to get more of it over the next couple of weeks.
Below are the photos I took yesterday of the weather, but instead focused the iPod touch camera on the raindrops. It was a hard job to focus the camera on the raindrops, but was worth it. The photo of the raindrops works perfectly as an iPad wallpaper or iPhone/iPod touch wallpaper. I have also provided 2 screenshots of how well the raindrops wallpaper works on the iPad mini, and 2 other screenshots of the same wallpaper on the iPod touch.
Feel free to download the photo of the raindrops on the glass anytime. I have also just finished uploading the video for this blog post “A Cold, Wet Start to 2014”. It’s available to watch now in Full HD for your viewing comfort :-).
A Preview of the Wallpaper “Raindrops on the Glass” on the 1st Generation iPad mini – Landscape Mode
A Preview of the Wallpaper “Raindrops on the Glass” on the 1st Generation iPad mini – Portrait Mode
A Preview of the Wallpaper “Raindrops on the Glass” on the 5th Generation iPod touch
A Preview of the Wallpaper “Raindrops on the Glass” on the 5th Generation iPod touch
Droplets of Rain on Glass
Droplets of Rain on Glass
Droplets of Rain on Glass
Droplets of Rain on Glass
Droplets of Rain on Glass
Droplets of Rain on Glass
Droplets of Rain on Glass
Thank you for viewing this blog post.
-Alex Smithson
