No updates for months, I know. Terrible. But now’s as good a time as any to get back to posting. This is the first in a series of images that I’m producing for t-shirts.

I had a strategy for covering this match. The strategy was to not cover the match at all. I knew that most papers would have their own photographers there getting action shots, so my approach was to get photos of the supporters and send them out to all the papers on spec. Here are some of the photos of fans arriving, and from the early minutes of the game…

Towards the end of the game, with a win for Dundee United looking certain, I went in to the Dundee stands to get pictures of the celebrations. Got some cracking shots…

The story was about a glider that had crashed in a forest. By the time I reached the gliding club’s airstrip the rescue was over and the injured pilot had been airlifted to hospital. So there was no possibility for ‘action’ shots. Fortunately, though, the wreckage of the glider was still at the crash site. Unfortunately, reaching the crash site would require a 5-mile hike up and down several steep hills, with no paths, on my own, and with my heaviest lens.

For a while it looked like someone from the club was going to fly me over the crash site, but then that didn’t happen. So I donned hiking boots and gaiters, and prepared for the epic hike.

But a nagging thought was troubling me. As much as I wanted to get "the shot" of the crashed glider, as much for my own pride as anything else, I knew that the pilot hadn’t been seriously injured so there was a distinct possibility that the story would be dropped. And it was getting late, so it would be very late by the time I got back with the pictures. So I called both papers that I was doing the pictures for, explained the situation, and the decision was made that I wouldn’t go for the crash shot.

So it was an hour of photographing gliders taking off…

Gliders landing…

Gliders on the ground…

Gliders with big hills in the background…

Vaguely artistic shots with dramatic dead space, an attempt to show scale…

The gliding club sign with a hill in the background…

The gliding club sign with planes taking off…

And a shot of the hill that I’d have had to hike over, or around, to get to the crash scene…

Will the story even run in tomorrow’s papers? We’ll see. But this is the first job I’ve ever come away from without getting the killer shot. Doesn’t feel good, but it was the right decision.

Here’s the final render of the animation created in the tutorial:

I love this candid photo of Jordan’s mum Kerry presenting the winner’s trophy to Motherwell captain Stuart Carswell. Clearly visible in the full-size photo is a tattoo on Kerry’s forearm which has Jordan’s name and his date of birth.

Photo was done for Monday’s Press & Journal. Hopefully they’ll give it a decent show.

Update: Here are some more photos from this match:

This young pitch invader was more interested in catching his runaway crisp packet than he was in watching the match between Edinburgh Accies and Northern Ireland police team PSNI:

One player reacts to the promise of a free beer for the first streaker:

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve walked out of a highstreet phone shop, disappointed by devices that promised so much but turned out to be flimsy toys with sluggish software and unresponsive touchscreens.

Anyone who has similarly quested an escape from Apple’s grasp will know my pain!

The problem, you see, is that the iPhone is close to perfect. It feels solid, it looks pretty, and its screen responds to the slightest gesture.

But it is hobbled by Apple’s super-tight approval process that, for example, blocked Pulitzer Prize-winning work by satirist Mark Fiore, and kept customers waiting an astonishing 20 days for the popular Opera web browser to be allowed on to the device.

(Fiore’s work was eventually approved after much public outcry, while Opera rocketed to the top of the iPhone app chart with more than one million downloads in 48 hours.)

The latest, and most enticing alternative to the iPhone comes in the form of the Desire by Taiwanese mobile phone specialist HTC.

With HTC’s announcement on Friday that its next handset, the Incredible, will not be launched in the UK — and presumably not on the Continent either — it is likely that the Desire will remain as the iPhone’s main European rival for some considerable time.

Hyped as the world’s first superphone, the Desire is fast, beautiful, and its touchscreen is every bit as tactile and responsive as that on Apple’s handset.

At the heart of the Desire is Google’s Android operating system so it is near-infinitely customisable.

It is also out-of-stock across much of the UK after delivery flights were grounded by the volcanic ash cloud.

On paper, the Desire is the first serious challenger to the iPhone’s reign as king of phones. But how does it compare in use?

Red faces

The failings of the Desire hit you within minutes of first using it.

Its screen is bright and colourful indoors, but almost unusable in sunlight. This severely hampers all aspects of the phone, from sending texts to web browsing, to taking photos.

The touchscreen intermittently remains active during phone calls and it’s too easy to press the on-screen buttons with your ear. I’ve accidentally hung up on people dozens of times.

Sound quality during calls is noticeably worse than the iPhone. Both the earpiece and the speaker produce a feeble, tinny sound with a background hiss.

Used indoors, the Desire’s vivid screen is great for most apps, but when viewing photos or web sites you realise that the screen is severely over-saturated. People’s faces become beetroot red.

Open Android

Web browsing is a joy. Pages render quickly and accurately.

When you zoom in on a web page using the familiar un-pinch gesture, the Desire neatly re-formats text to your screen width for easy reading.

Built-in Google chat is a surprise boon, offering a free and instantaneous alternative to text messaging between friends.

The phone is advertised as a hub-in-your-pocket for social networking, yet support for Facebook and Twitter is incomplete and unreliable, at times missing entire blocks of messages.

Thanks to the open nature of the Android operating system, there is a myriad of alternative apps to replace the standard ones.

Antiquated list-style text messaging is easily upgraded to a free iPhone-style app with familiar speech bubble conversations.

There are superb free apps for Twitter, note taking, reading news feeds, and almost anything else you may want to do with a phone. Facebook apps are thin on the ground and quite poor, although a full-featured official Facebook client is persistently rumoured to be on the horizon.

Some free apps include advertising but this is unobtrusive.

Cumbersome

There has been much criticism of Apple not allowing Flash on the iPhone.

Flash on Android phones is far from perfect, as it is slow and more things don’t work than do work, but more robust Flash support is promised soon.

General use of the Desire is not as smooth as that of the iPhone. The on-screen keyboard is more fiddly and auto-correction is often silly. The optical trackpad is randomly useless, and stops working entirely if you try to use the handset in even light rain.

Many functions require a press of the menu button to bring up a list of options, whereas on the iPhone there would be a button on the screen. This extra step makes the Desire feel a little cumbersome.

Battery life is appalling. With moderate use I have to charge the Desire twice each day. The phone loses around a fifth of its charge just sitting on the bedside table overnight.

Not for everyone

With the Desire’s catalogue of weaknesses, you may be surprised when I say that I have no interest in going back to the iPhone.

Refined and slick Apple’s handset may be, but unless you take the risk of unlocking it (so-called jailbreaking) you will always have Apple acting as master and commander.

In contrast, it feels like I own the Desire and I can do what I want with it.

Certainly the Desire is not for everyone.

The poor performance of the screen in sunlight will put a lot of people off.

Most people don’t want the hassle of finding alternatives to the lacklustre built-in apps.

Perhaps most telling is that I’ve been using the Desire for a week now and it has begun to reduce my casual phone use.

With the iPhone I would fill downtime and dog walks by web browsing, checking Facebook, reading tweets and texting. The Desire’s poor performance in daylight and fiddly on-screen keyboard have made these pastimes more of a chore than they should be.

Whilst the Desire is flawed, for those of us who want a non-Apple superphone it’s certainly good enough, and crucially its open nature affords it the potential to be much better.

ps. Seeing as this is still vaguely a photography blog, here’s a set-up shot for the photo in this review. Nothing special, just a few sheets of A4 copier paper and a couple of erasers taped to the backs of the phones so they could stand upright. Ambient exposure was set for the phone screens and the flash was bounced off the ceiling with just enough power to over-expose the white paper.

But they had been ordered to issue fines anyway so that’s what they did.

On principle I can’t pay that fine. Yes I could just hand over my £30 for a quiet life. But I refuse to be punished for a council’s failure to put up road signs.

In my opinion this matter was handled in wholly the wrong way by the two police officers on duty, although I accept that it wasn’t their fault as they were merely "following orders". It’s the orders that were wrong. The person who issued those orders was, in effect, ordering his officers to intimidate and punish law-abiding members of the public for absolutely no reason.

I thought you may like to know what progress has been made…

Sadly, not very much progress at all.

I wrote to Strathclyde Police, explaining why I didn’t think the fine should have been issued, and including photographic evidence to show that the road markings and signs didn’t exist.

Click here to read my letter.

They wrote back, saying that they can’t discuss the matter as it will be reported to the Procurator Fiscal for consideration of prosecution.

Click here to read the police response.

This whole incident has made me lose so much confidence in the police.

I just wish it had never happened. I wish I could have continued in my blissfully ignorant belief that the police don’t really do things like this to people.

The sickening theme running throughout has been that the police do not care that I haven’t done anything wrong. The officers who issued the ticket knew that the bus lane wasn’t marked and didn’t have adequate signage. They even advised me not to pay the fine!

Why the hell is someone in authority at Strathclyde Police wasting valuable time, money and human resources on prosecuting people for driving in an unmarked bus lane?!!

Meanwhile pirates get DRM-free copies that work perfectly and don’t do any damage.

I had three choices: (1) buy the game but then download the pirate version to play, (2) don’t buy the game and just pirate it, or (3) don’t bother with it at all.

So I stopped playing PC games. I still buy games on the PlayStation 3 but not nearly as many as I used to buy on the PC, so the games companies are losing out.

I’m finding that a similar situation is developing with movies…

Last night my girlfriend and I went to see Dear John, a film we’d been looking forward to seeing since we saw the trailer a month ago. We went to the Vue cinema in Inverness.

After we’d bought our tickets, the guy behind the counter asked if we’d like to pay £1.30 extra per ticket to get VIP seats. These are big, comfortable, leather seats in the middle of the cinema. As it happens I only had £4 left after buying the tickets, so either we took the VIP seats or Katie had her ice cream. It is a brave man that denies a girl her ice cream. No VIP seats for us

But I had noticed that the car park was nearly empty so I asked the guy who was serving us, half-jokingly, would it be okay for us to just sit in the VIP area if there was nobody else there. He said no, they have VIP seating monitors who go in to the theatre during the film and check to make sure people in the VIP seats have VIP tickets. If we didn’t have the tickets then we’d be removed.

Fine. We took our regular tickets and went to see the film.

In a theatre with maybe 20 other people, we had been allocated seats over at one side. So I guess if you don’t pay the extra for VIP seats, you don’t just take pot luck on finding a good seat — you actually get put in bad seats. Nice.

The film was great. Better than I expected, in fact.

But a lot of it was spoiled by the half dozen kids on the back row who were constantly talking and, for some reason, rattling boxes of sweets. All the way through a 2-hour film.

The previous film we went to see, Shutter Island, was similarly spoiled by noisy people.

Interestingly, in a cinema that forbids you from sitting in an unused VIP seat, nobody bothers to enforce a NO DICKING AROUND WHEN OTHER PEOPLE ARE WATCHING THE FILM policy.

Now I write this as someone who has wanted to write for film from an early age, and who still wants to one day. I love film. I totally appreciate that films need to make money or there won’t be any more films, and the world will be a darker place. (Literally, when the projectors are turned off.)

But I’m feeling more and more like it’s not worth going to the cinema. You get charged extra to see a film in 3D, you get charged extra for a nice seat, you get punished with bad seats if you don’t pay the extra for a good one, you have to put up with kids ruining the film and nobody from the cinema makes the slightest effort to go up to them and ask if they could please SHUT THE F*** UP because they’re annoying everyone else.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, if I feel this way, there are probably quite a few other people who feel this way. So maybe cinemas need to buck their ideas up a bit before we all start pirating films and put the cinemas out of business.