Afterwards, we gathered outside and the fire hoops appeared. It wasn’t really dark enough to get really effective long exposures, but I was quite pleased with some of the results – and at least the rain held off until we were packing up.

I had a really good time – a fun afternoon with a really nice bunch of people. I hope they’ll let me go back again sometime.

You can see the full set of indoor photos here, and the fire hooping shots here.

I have been busy behind the scenes though – I have a couple of new iPhone apps in development, and at least one of them is now pretty much ready. I’m just doing a little final tidying up of the UI, and then I’ll prepare it for the App store. More news on that when it’s ready.

Autumn seems to be settling in with a vengeance now, and it’s a little while since we’ve had a new photo up here, so lets have one to remind us of summer.

Taken what feels like an eternity ago, with a Polaroid back on my Hassleblad. Fuji FP-100C film.

One of the big things that’s been occupying my time recently has been my iPhone, and more specifically, learning all the ins and outs of iPhone development – Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, XCode, Interface Builder, Provisioning, iTunes Connect – I’ve done them all.

One of the hardest bits was actually getting on the iPhone Developer Program itself. It’s not that the process was especially difficult, but boy was it long. It took 72 days from filling in the initial forms to actually getting access to the developer portal – and almost all of that time was waiting for something to happen. I don’t know what the process behind the scenes at Apple is, but it’s certainly not speedy.

And once you’ve written your application and are ready to submit it to the app store, you have to wade through another batch of treacle. You submit your application, and then you wait. And wait. And wait. The developer forums abound with tales of woe, of applications being stuck in the review process for weeks, months even, only to be rejected on a technicality – which means you then have to resubmit and start the whole process over again. In the end, I got off quite easily – my application was reviewed and accepted in around ten days. It felt like a long time whilst I was waiting, but it seems far better than many others were experiencing.

So what was this application? It is, of course, a Utata application.

For those who don’t know, Utata is an on-line community, originally formed on Flickr, but also with its own web site.

The Utata app works on the iPhone and iPod Touch (with a wifi connection), and runs happily under both OS 2.2.1 and 3.0. It acts as a showcase for the huge variety of photographic projects that Utata run, allowing you to easily browse through the entries wherever you are. If you’ve never taken the time to look through the project entries, you really should – there is some absolutely stunning photography there.

The app is free download from iTunes, and you can open up iTunes to download it by clicking here.

The snow here has pretty much all gone now. Apart from the occasional small patch of grey white slush still lurking in a shady corner, all we have left are the photographs. I finally got a couple of films developed this week that were taken at the height of the snows with my Hasselblad. Mostly “meh”, but one or two that I quite like.

This was one of the first shots I took with my new extension tubes – the 10mm, I think. Sat on the back of my 80mm lens, it does a nice job of helping fill the frame.