Trebarwith Strand, Cornwall

b&w, landscape No Responses »
Jun 032010

Trebarwith Strand, Cornwall

Taken on a recent family holiday to Cornwall.

This beach was a lucky find – we were just looking for sandy bits on the map because our eldest wanted to go to another beach before we returned home. This is a great location though – it has caves, great sand and a really dramatic rock structure at the entrance to the beach featuring enough rock pools to keep the kids entertained for hours (if the tide is out).

This shot was taken from one of the caves accessible at low tide on the south side of the beach.

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Posted by Andy at 7:59 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Scorhill Under A Stormy Sky

b&w, landscape No Responses »
May 112010

Scorhill Under A Stormy Sky

Not the first image I’ve published from the this location and almost certainly not the last.

Stone Circles can be very hard to photograph with pleasing results, possibly because they look very plain, but also because often they don’t stand out well from their surroundings. What looks fantastic in an isolated location can end up looking like just a few rocks stuck in a field when photographed.

The day of our visit to Scorhill though things were very different – the light was great thanks to bright sunlight occasionally breaking through thick black cloud, the ground was wet with puddles forming and the grass was dry, giving the stones chance to show up against the background.

All I had to do then was try to get the composition I wanted and keep the kids out of the frame :)

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Posted by Andy at 8:20 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Wet Withens, Eyam Moor

b&w, landscape No Responses »
Dec 162009

Wet Withens, Eyam Moor

We spent ages trudging through the heather on Eyam Moor trying to find this stone circle, in the end we found it by accident just after we’d given up. The sun, which had popped out from behind the clouds a few times during the afternoon, made a brief appearance to light up the heather.

I should perhaps have taken some shots of the stones, but I got distracted by the light on this piece of grass.

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Posted by Andy at 9:30 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Tree Tunnel, Watermead Park

b&w, trees 2 Responses »
Oct 202009

Tree Tunnel, Watermead Park, Leicestershire

This shot is was taken one lunch time in Autumn. I’d gone out a few days earlier in search of rich autumnal colours but I didn’t really see anything that I liked. When I found this scene I was intrigued by the light more than the colours and knew it could look really striking in black and white.

Unfortunately it was windy and the end result had some movement in, so I made a note to come back again when conditions were better.

This retaken effort was processed in exactly the same way as the original but fortunately none of the leaves are blurred :)

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Posted by Andy at 7:08 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Somewhere near Llanfairfechan on the North Wales Path

b&w, trees No Responses »
Sep 132009

Somewhere near Llanfairfechan on the North Wales Path

This image was taken during a short break in North Wales. The main purpose of the visit was for a family walk to the summit of Snowdon (and of course for me to take plenty of photos) but unfortunately the weather was too poor for either. In the end this was the only image I really liked from the trip, which was taken on the only really sunny day of the week, before the rest of the group arrived.

A Hoya circular polariser was used here to darken the sky and improve the contrast in the rest of the shot.

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Technical info : Sigma 18-200 lens at 18mm, 1/160s (because it was windy and I didn’t want the grass to blur), f8.0, ISO100

Posted by Andy at 2:52 pm Tagged with: ,

Groyne, St Bees

b&w, landscape No Responses »
Aug 242009

Groyne, St Bees Beach

Not the only shot from this location on my blog, but my favourite of the two here (and of the 10 or so I took) – taken just a few minutes after the previous one.

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Posted by Andy at 9:50 pm Tagged with: , ,

Frosted Barbed Wire

b&w, hdr, landscape No Responses »
Jun 102009

Frosted Barbed Wire

Another old image that I was never entirely happy with. This was taken on chilly morning excursion out at Beacon Hill with Dan and was one of the few shots I got – the rest being spoilt by the lens misting up all the time.

Whilst I liked the original image at the time I thought the contrast could have been better.

For this newer version I went back to the original shots (3 exposures, each 2 stops apart) and reprocessed them in Photomatix. This resulting image was then desaturated and had contrast adjustments.

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Visit http://www.hdrsoftwaretutorial.co.uk/ for tutorials and a discount code which will give you 15% off the purchase of Photomatix.

Posted by Andy at 11:52 am Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Birstall Weir

b&w, hdr, long exposures No Responses »
Apr 252009

Birstall Weir, Leicestershire

After six months of having a camera I decided it was about time I went through my previous shots and tidied them up, both in terms of organisation and correcting past mistakes. A couple of people commented on this image recently – I was really happy with it at the time but my preferences and skill have changed somewhat since taking it so it became the first one to have a bit of a facelift.

At the time it was taken I was interested in the effect it was possible to create with running water and Photomatix, and even though the shot was taken during the day I still managed to get managed to get a 2.5s exposure by choosing a shaded location and a small aperture.

The three bracketed shots (at 0.6s, 1/6s and 2.5s) were then combined in Photomatix and the resulting image was desaturated and had some contrast tweaks to enhance the molten glass look.

Posted by Andy at 7:36 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Harbour Wall, Mevagissey

b&w, filters No Responses »
Apr 192009

Harbour Wall, Mevagissey

It seems I’m currently “very into” black and white photography – although to be fair, it’s something that I’ve always liked when other people have done it but never really bothered with it myself.

With the advent of digital photography I think B&W has got a bit of a bad name for itself – tools which can greyscale an image mean that it’s an easy way to attempt to salvage a flawed colour image (not that I don’t convert my own colour images sometimes also). The shot above however was achieved using a Cokin P003 red filter, with the image then being desaturated and the contrast tweaked slightly – which took about 30 seconds at most – the ideal amount of processing time when you’ve got a lot of photos to work through :)

Why desaturate? Why not just shoot in black and white mode on the camera? Well, if I was shooting in jpeg mode it might be a good idea but as I’m shooting in raw mode, when I get the images into Lightroom they will be red again anyway so there seems little point. It doesn’t really help for reviewing the shots on the camera either as the black and white preview displayed on the camera seem quite different to what I see in Lightroom. Besides, I’ve got used to previewing the red images now – once you’ve learned to trust your manual exposures it’s not that much of a problem.

Using an external filter isn’t without its problems though – the main drawback with the red being that you lose 3 stops worth of light so you end up having to make sacrifices in either ISO, shutter speed or aperture (or a combination of the three). Shooting at ISO100, f/11, 1/250s isn’t going to be an option unless you are taking a picture on the surface of the sun so I usually end up at ISO200, f/8, 1/100s – not ideal, but as an exercise in learning to take control of your camera in its manual mode I can heartily recommend it.

Fortunately many DSLRs now have the ability to simulate the affect of certain colour filters built in to their Monochrome picture options – certainly the Canon range do. These can be used without any loss of light, but only have an effect if shooting in JPG – raw images remain unaffected by them.

Posted by Andy at 11:59 am Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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