migrant|roo

The World's First Race Across the Internet is over! It took an extra huge (have you had enough hyperbole yet?) effort from Mattias, Dezza, Igor, Greg and Mike and I over the past couple of weeks to pull this one out of the bag, and it's so hugely satisfying that people enjoyed it so much. FFS, I got 74 comments on a single post! All the well wishes and thanks is really appreciated by us all - it was brilliant watching the buzz around the race during the past week and I'm immensely proud to have been involved in building such a unique and fun piece of work.

Oh - have you checked to see if you made the top 500 on the Balloonacy Leaderboard?

So, with the past 3 months being so busy I can't believe it's the summer!

This weekend just gone I've finally got back into the kitchen, cooking:

• Asparagus with german smoked ham and chili and balsamic glaze
• Linguine with chorizo, king prawns, red onion, pepper and basil chili oil
• Barbecued mackrel with roasted Mediterranean vegetables

I've got heaps of nice photos of them, I'll be posting them on Friday or Saturday, hopefully whilst out in the garden in the sunshine drinking a cold one.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photos I've taken recently:

I saw a technique using home made tilt-shift lenses a while back, using , but not having one around I followed a quick tutorial on recreating the effect of a tilt-shift lense on a photo I took from a helicopter in New York.

Original

Post processed

I jacked the saturation and white balance right up to give it a more artificial, plasticky feel.

I have a new toy! It's this new lense for my camera:

Sigma 30mm 1.4, which makes it a perfect every-day and portrait lense, giving gorgeous background-blur (aka "bokeh").

It's an absolute beauty, I laboured and reviewed for 6 hard months before splashing out on it, but just look how amazing the photos are:

I promise this will make me sort my Flickr account out.