There have been two quirky stories about Tesco in the news recently, one about them banning shoppers from wearing pyjamas and another about a 24-year-old woman being asked for ID because she wanted to buy a slice of quiche.

We had our own run-in with a strange Tesco policy the other night. My girlfriend Katie wanted to buy some non-alcoholic cider, but the self-service checkout refused the sale because it was apparently classed as an alcoholic drink which can't be sold after 10pm:

Now you might think this is a simple computer error. After all the product does clearly state ALCOHOL-FREE right there in big writing on the front label.

But no! The manager of the store got involved and told us that the product is correctly classed as an alcoholic drink because, according to the (very) small print on the back of the label, it can contain up to 0.05% alcohol. If he authorised the sale, he said, he would lose his job and be hit with a £5,000 fine.

What's really bizarre, though, is that I was able to go and pick up a can of Shandy Bass, which contains TEN TIMES as much alcohol (0.5%) and the self-service checkout was quite happy for me to pay my 49p and leave with the product:

My second project for learning 3DS Max was to design a fairly simple object with non-standard, non-symmetrical geometry, and build it exactly how I envisaged it, ie: working out how to create a specific structure in 3D, not just pulling a shape in random directions until I eventually found something that was nearly right. I'm going to want to do this commercially one day, and sooner rather than later, so I need to be able to work to a designer's exact specifications.

I decided to create a perfume bottle, as this would involve a few other challenges to keep things interesting, such as making a semi-opaque glass material, and putting a logo on the bottle. And I made it a bit harder for myself by displaying the perfume bottle on a satin sheet, draped over a block, which involved learning about 'cloth' materials in Max. So quite a tricky project for a beginner, but I'd say the result is fairly good. Click to enlarge:

Here's how the scene looked in Max:

Note that the logo isn't simply 'typed' in to the scene. It had to be created separately as a texture and added to a plane, which was then meticulously manipulated to fit the shape of the bottle. There may be an easier way to achieve the same effect, but here's what I did:

The litte ridges at the bottom of the bottle were produced using a displacement map. But if I had applied that map to the whole of the glass material then it would have created weird ridges all over the top and bottom of the bottle, so I only added it to a 'ring' of faces around the bottom of the bottle. That introduced a new challenge: Manually editing the texture co-ordinates (UVs) for those faces. That was a lot easier than I expected.

Designing the satin sheet was fun as Max includes material simulation, so I only needed to create the flat sheet and then tell Max to drape it over the box. I'm not 100% happy with the satin material I created as it looks a little too much like plastic to me, but the intricacies of material design aren't the priority at this stage.

I've always been interested in 3D visualisation, and I've dabbled with several design packages over the years, but it's only recently that I've committed some serious time to learning the skills needed in this fascinating area of creativity.

Over the last few weeks I've started to get competent with basic geometry creation and manipulation in 3DS Max, and I'm even scratching the surface of material creation which turns out to be a lot harder than I expected.

I'd say it's about time that I unleashed my first render for the world to see. This is the result of a self-assigned challenge to produce a vaguely realistic diamond and light it appropriately. I took it a step further and rendered a scene with several diamonds, some basic coloured objects, all on a reflective surface with bump and displacement maps. The render was produced in mental ray.

Click to view a larger version:

Here's how the raw scene looked in 3DS:

The goal of this project was primarily to learn about creating the different materials and then light the scene using traditional photographic lighting. The scene has three key lights, all behind the objects, including two hard spotlights at either side. This was because glassy materials look better with light coming through them, rather than bouncing off them. There's one fill light in front of the objects.

Here's exactly the same scene, but with more dramatic lighting, simply by bringing the main backlight down to just above the objects. (And no lens flare! Yay!)

Same scene with the original lighting, but with the coloured shapes replaced by wooden blocks and a less-than-perfect chrome ball:

Next I want to produce something with more complicated geometry.

I mentioned before (here) that I'd written a piece about the computer game Field of Glory for the Press & Journal and the Daily Mail newspapers. The much longer and more in-depth piece I wrote for PC Format magazine is in this month's issue:

I had a rare couple of days away from news photography at the weekend when I did the event photography for the Aviemore Sled Dog Rally, which was run on snow for the first time in 15 years. I photographed most of Saturday and Sunday so there should be photos of most of the people and dogs who took part, although I didn't do the early morning stages as it was too dark.

After two late nights and most of today, I finally have 824 photos uploaded to a gallery, from where people can order prints in pretty much any format they can imagine, from small glossies to large canvases, t-shirts, mouse mats, cushions, and everything in between.

A small amount of every sale will be donated to the Husky Club. £1.25 for small prints and £1.75 for everything else. That probably won't make much of a dent in the club's running costs, but every little helps as they say!

Click here to view the gallery on Photobox

One of those rare times when I post a non-work picture just because I like it. Shot this frame today while doing event photography at the Aviemore sled dog rally.

Last week, on Friday night, I did something that I've never done before: A deadline review of a concert. The performance by South African guitarist Tony Cox started at 8:30pm and I needed to file the review and photos by 10pm for Saturday's paper.

I had actually turned down the job at one point because I didn't think I could make the tight deadline, but then I decided to bite the bullet so I called the paper back and asked if I could do the job after all.

Everything went smoothly. I had the photos delivered by 9:30pm and the review was sent at 10pm on the dot. I called to check that everything had got through okay, and then relaxed a bit while I re-read the review to judge it with a clear head. I was very happy with what I had produced, especially considering the time limit.

Sadly the version that ran in the paper was heavily edited. Two sections, which I'd been asked to write as a preview of a concert coming up on Saturday night, were removed. And in doing so, the person who made the changes made it sound like I was actually reviewing a concert that hadn't happened yet! There was even a comment added about a performer who wasn't at the concert. The whole thing ended up being a bit of a mess and an embarrassment.

The edited version isn't available online, but here's my originl version:

Review: Tony Cox at Cromarty Old Brewery

Unlike the great success I had with the frozen waterfall photos from Sunday, some photos I did on Saturday and Monday typify the gamble of working on spec.

On Saturday I went around Kingussie photographing some of the giant icicles that have formed after three weeks of sub-zero temperatures. These two photos show one of the largest icicles, hanging from the guttering of a shop, and the shop owner came to stand next to it for the photo, to give a sense of scale:

Neither photo, nor any of the others from around Kingussie that afternoon, were published in any of the newspapers that I sent them to.

And on Monday afternoon I headed up to Inverness to photograph a curling match that had been organised as a small-scale substitute for the Grand Match outdoor tournament on Lake of Menteith, which was cancelled due to safety concerns. The lighting conditions were bad but I got some decent shots:

Sadly not a single one of them was used in any of the papers!

Ah well. That's the gamble when you work on spec. Sometimes you win big, and sometimes you spend the whole afternoon taking photos that do nothing but take up space on your computer!

On Sunday afternoon I took a trek up the lower slope of Creag Dubh mountain in the Cairngorms to photograph people climbing a frozen 75-foot waterfall, nicknamed Oui Oui. Lots of papers used my photos on Monday, the highlight being the front page of The Scotsman with this picture of one guy climbing without ropes or any other safety gear to protect him from falling:

This was one of my favourite shots:

In addition to the one on the front page, The Scotsman also used this next photo inside the paper. They printed it the full height of the page, really showing it off and it looked great!

Other photos were published in The Sun, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Star. Here are a couple of wider shots:

And this was my office for the day. I had wellies on, totally unsuitable for how steep the climb was at the foot of the mountain, and I ended up doing most of it on my hands and knees. On the way down I often had to just sit on the snow and slide. I'm now getting kitted out with proper walking boots and crampons, should I find myself tackling any similar slopes in future!

…but sometmes the stories come to you.

I was heading out for a walk on Wednesday evening when a fire appliance went past with its lights and siren on, and stopped a few hundred yards away, at a junction where an articulated lorry was parked. So naturally I grabbed my camera bag and went along to see what was happening.

It turned out that the lorry's brakes had frozen on, causing a build-up of heat. Not an amazingly dramatic incident but a pictorial example of another way in which Scotland's freezing weather is affecting people's lives.

And last night while I was shopping in Tesco, a girl slipped on a wet floor and hit her head. What made this potentially newsworthy was that there were loads of trolleys lined-up in the car park with "caution wet floor" signs in each of them, to prevent people from parking near the store — so there weren't enough signs left to adequately mark the areas of wet floor in the store.

I talked to the girl and her mother immediately, and did a picture of them outside the store when they'd finished their shopping, with all the mis-used caution signs in the background. I think the story is in tomorrow's Press & Journal.