Landscapes
Landscape photography is what I spend most of my time doing, mainly because there is so much wonderful countryside close to where I live. If I have any free time I’ll usually be following footpaths, visiting local reservoirs or taking the family out to the Peak District for the day as an excuse to take yet more photographs.
Some of my landscape shots are available to purchase as prints - details on how to obtain them can be found below the relevant images.
One of the most boring and time consuming tasks that comes with any serious amount of photography seems to be dealing with the large amount of files (and the amount of disc space that they take up). I try to keep two backups of all my images - at the moment I’m finally archiving them all to DVD, chronologically, but I’m also taking the opportunity to get rid of some rubbish and duplicates.
Often I’ll take a couple of shots of something and then notice a distraction in the frame, or I’ll increase the exposure time to get a little more light into a scene. At about 15MB a time all these extra shots add up and despite going against the “never delete your raws” mantra, hanging on to all these extra versions doesn’t really serve any great purpose, other than helping Western Digital stay in business.
The above image is from January 2010 (I’m about 6 months behind with my tidy up at the moment and my progress is constantly hampered by the arrival of new images which I’ll briefly scan for favourites and then ignore for a few months) and was taken on a frosty morning out with John Houghton
This was one of the last shots that I took with my Canon 450D and despite having been back since with my other camera, this was my favourite sunrise shot from this location - mainly due to the good fortune of the cloud picking up the pink glow of the rising sun, which is then also reflected in the ice.
Technical info: ISO100, f/16, 11mm, 1.3s, Cokin ND4 soft grad
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Posted in landscape, sunrises.
Tagged with canon 450d, clouds, cokin, filter, sunrise.
Two views of Old John, in Bradgate Park, taken less than a month apart in December 2009.
There are so many dreadful images of this building, and it is such an uninspired choice of location perhaps because it is so often photographed, but I still see it as a bit of a challenge.
This is my favourite of my shots that feature Old John - I prefer the building to be in the distance, that way its slightly easier to hide how uneven the structure is - even then I have to spend a long time trying to work out if my shot is level.
The heavy cloud cover here (and use of the Cokin ND4 soft grad) allowed me to get a nicely balanced exposure, retaining a lot of the rich late autumn colour.
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No photographers collection should be without at least one picture of Old John in the snow 
This was snapped on the way back to the car after an early morning start. I’d never really noticed this path before, but the light sprinkling of snow picked it out perfectly.
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Posted in landscape.
Tagged with bradgate park, canon 450d, leicestershire, old john, sigma 17-70mm, snow.
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 in b&w, landscape.
Tagged with b&w, beach, cornwall, sea.
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 in b&w, landscape.
Tagged with clouds, dartmoor, devon, standing stones, stone circle.
It seems a long time since I posted any new photos - there are a number of reasons for this
- I’ve been on holiday
- I’ve been too busy taking them
- So many other things to do
I think I’ve got a decent crop of new images now so time-permitting I’ll be posting a lot of new ones over the next few weeks.
This was taken during a gloriously wet and windy holiday in Cornwall in late March/early April. Much to the kids annoyance we always like to cram in a few quick visits to some stone circles. Most of the time these places don’t make for good photographs but today everything was just right.
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Posted in landscape.
Tagged with dartmoor, devon, standing stones, stone circle.
Another one of many images taken using the Canon f/1.8 50mm lens when I first got the Canon 5D. I’d had the lens for a while but I never really liked using it on the 450D - the 1.6x crop factor of that camera made it the equivalent of an 80mm lens and that was too long a focal length for me. On the full frame 5D however it was a revelation - very sharp with very little distortion and aberration. A great value little lens.
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Posted in landscape, trees, water.
Tagged with 50mm, leicestershire, snow, water, watermead park.
A couple of old shots again today, as I continue working though last year’s images with a view to making some of the better ones available as prints (and just generally sharing some of the others that had been languishing on my hard drive).
These were both taken on an overcast afternoon on a footpath just outside Brocks Hill Country Park in Oadby, a few days after I’d got my Sigma 10-20 wide angle lens. I find it hard to ignore the combination of crops, tractor tracks and trees and many of my images from this time were similar to this, as I tried to find a composition I liked (and I imagine there will be a few this year also).
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Posted in landscape, trees.
Tagged with cokin, crops, leicestershire, nd grad, sigma 10-20, tree.
A small amount of snow just before Christmas gave me the ideal excuse to get up nice and early on a Sunday morning to go to Bradgate Park. When I arrived, long before sunrise, there were only two sets of prints leading into the park from the Old John car park - someone taking their dog for a walk.
The sunrise itself was rather uneventful - a cloudless sky, a bit of a glow and then the sun appearing - not really my favourite. Perhaps I could have made more out of it if I’d prepared (or had more imagination) but it was pleasant enough just to be there in the fresh snow.
While the light was still good I headed to one of the places I’ve been meaning to visit at daybreak for sometime and got the shot above. This is just as it was taken - no filters, no post processing, just good old fashioned sunlight.
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Posted in landscape, sunrises, trees.
Tagged with bradgate park, old john, snow, tree, winter.
Despite the media hype about the “big freeze” we had very little snow really in Leicestershire this January - although I tried to make the most of the 3 or 4 decent snowfalls by nipping out early in the morning each time to get a few shots. It was worth it too, not just because I got some good shots, but because I’m a big kid and you can’t beat getting to the snow before everyone else
Purchase print at RedBubble | imagekind
Posted in landscape, trees.
Tagged with leicestershire, path, snow, trees.
Purchase print at RedBubble | imagekind
Two old images today, both of the same subject, taken on the same day.
When I got my first DSLR in late 2008 I didn’t really consider just how much space all these raw files where going to take up, and I certainly didn’t think about organising the files - each outings images just went in a folder and I processed the ones I liked the most. As you can imagine, when you use the camera a lot it doesn’t take that long before this gets messy, so towards the end of 2009 I started having a bit of a tidy up. This also gave me chance to review images that I’d missed first time around - things that I’d overlooked in favour of different compositions.
The day these photos were taken was a bit of a breakthrough day for me - prior to that I’d been trying too hard to become “a photographer”. I was too obsessed with composition and trying to take “great photos” but I hadn’t the learnt the things that I now find more important, the non technical things like enjoying the beauty of your surroundings and trying to capture some of what you feel in the scene.
The photo below was the one I chose from this scene at the time but when going back through the shots I found the one above, with its open space and gentle ripples, which I now like far more. It just goes to show how important it is to review your old shots
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Posted in filters, landscape, water.
Tagged with boat, cropston, leicestershire, print, reservoir, ripple, water.
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