400mm f14, a photo by Phil_Barker on Flickr.

This weekend I have managed to get some tickets for BTCC at Donnington park. To say I’m excited would be a huge understatement.

I’ve been wanting to photograph touring cars pretty much since I bought my first DSLR but have never found time until now.
I’m so excited I’ve even started planning where I want to take the photos from when I get there – but then I got a bit worried. Would my 70-200mm f4L be long enough? Could I get close enough to the track?

So my thoughts wondered onto teleconverters and I spent my lunch break reading reviews.
Mostly everyone on the internet seems to rip them to shreds and say you should avoid them like the plague because they ruin image quality. But I found a few reviews that said they do work if used correctly and that Jessops do a 2x teleconverter for only £79 that’s actually a re-branded kenko.

So I wandered down to Jessops and came home with one

First impressions were dissapointing – I tried to take some shots outside but it was very overcast and the auto-focus just kept hunting.
Also because the teleconverter doubles your aperture I was trying to take shots at F10 and there just wasn’t enough light for hand-held.
So I decided to try a few back to back shots on my tripod indoors. Again the lighting is poor but I cranked the aperture up to F14 (which is F7 on the lens in reality – smack bang in the middle of it’s sweet spot) and took a few shots

You can see them all on my Flickr account – but I have to say I’m really impressed. I couldn’t notice any loss in detail and it picked out a lot that the lens missed without the extender.

For £79 – well worth having in your bag. I’ll put up a follow up review after the track photography this weekend

I’ve finally, after 3 long years, managed to drag myself from the middle-of-nowhere village I lived in and back to Lincoln!

Commute has gone from 3hrs a day to a 7mile bike ride. I couldn’t be happier.
More time to spend with good friends, more time to do things I enjoy (like work on my car & photography), more time to go out with Leah and have a social live, and more time to code in the evenings.

I’m hoping one of the up sides to this is that I get time to put some of the PHP5/Zend blog posts online that have been trapped in my head for the past few months.
I’ve also upgraded my Canon 50D to a Canon 7D so there will no doubt be a lot more photos going up on my flickr too.

Bizarrely, for me, I can sign this blog post off by saying at the moment… life is good

I know it’s a bit early for one of those “what’s happened this year and what do I plan next year” type posts, but I started writing out a summary of my 2010 and realised it was entirely one massive rant

With the exception of my new job, absolutely nothing good has happened all year.

However, onwards and upwards. I have some HUGE plans for 2011 and some really exciting projects to work on.
I’ve decided as I have a lot I want to blog about that’s PHP coding related, and I’m planning on doing a lot more photography in the new year – that I don’t want to fill this site up with my mad autistic rants.

I’ve also decided I don’t like using twitter for all my personal rants so I’ve wiped my twitter account and renamed it. My new twitter is http://twitter.com/iamphilbarker

I’ve come to learn over the last 10 years or so that I deal with my ‘issues’ a lot better if I write them down and I used to use forums as-well as this site to publish my outbursts.
However I also realise that 99% of people reading my twitter stream or this site really don’t want to read about my long standing mental issues haha. So from this point onwards, this site and my twitter account are going to be remaining professional.
Stick around if you want to read about some of the projects I’m involved with in 2011

It has long been a pass-time of mine, no actually, a hobby of mine to try to educate “keyboard warriors” about how pointless it is to try to start fights on the internet and how it very rarely, if ever, gets your point across without making you look like an idiot.

This point has never been proven better than by the recent twitter campaign by @edvendetta.

It is my opinion that @edvendetta is an ex-employee of a coffee shop in Lincoln called Coffee Aroma who has decided to set himself up with an “anonymous” twitter account and try to expose his previous employer for alleged tax fraud.

I can’t even begin to explain where he went wrong in his attempted retribution but I can list a few points that come to mind.

Firstly, he chose to emulate the persona of the group “anonymous” who recently made it big in the press with their alleged hacking of Visa, Mastercard and others in support of wikileaks. He badly copied the anonymous manifesto, bastardizing it to suit his own campaign, and chose an image from V for Vendetta to represent himself.
When you turn to the internet to help you with a personal issue or vendetta against a company, as he did, the people you want on your side are the exact same people you will completely piss off by miss-quoting and miss-understanding everything that Anonymous stands for.

Secondly, he actually replies to everyone who tries to wind him up on twitter with ill thought-out responses, almost completely destroying all his own credibility well in advance of his big announcement.

Thirdly, he started by claiming he had facts he wished to publish to the world and to the local press. As his campaign continued he stopped mentioning the press (presumably after he read up about libel), and then started claiming he had allegations rather than facts. I think this destroyed what was left of his credibility.

Lastly, when he finally came out with his announcement accusing the owners of Coffee Aroma of tax fraud (which incidentally he did almost 50minutes early of his self-set timescale), his single request was that the people of Lincoln boycott Coffee Aroma as revenge for their alleged previous tax fraud.

So to summarize he wants us all to boycott a coffee shop forcing half a dozen current employees to become unemployed a week before christmas. That is his solution? It sounds a lot more like an ex-employee wanting revenge for the way he felt he was treated.

Coffee Aroma has and will be for the foreseeable future one of the best coffee houses in the UK, loved by hundreds. Their staff always great you with a smile on their face and make you a truly excellent cup of coffee. The atmosphere is warm and welcoming and for those reasons alone I, along with many others, will carry on going there. If a partner of the company has committed any fraud, it is for current and past employees to resolve with him personally. It doesn’t affect the coffee I drink, it doesn’t affect the atmosphere and most importantly it doesn’t stop the people who work in the shop from being lovely people to spend time with.

Punishing innocent staff to get a perverse revenge on a previous employer is just plain selfish.

Ed Vendetta – I hope one day overcome your cowardliness, remove your mask, and face the person who you have a grievance with like a man rather than attacking the very people that you should be protecting.