Trees
In Leicestershire you are never that far from open spaces and a good supply of photogenic trees.
Watermead Park and Bradgate Park are only a few minutes cycle ride away from where I live away and there is no better way to spend a lunchtime than 30 minutes of cycling and a bit of photography:)
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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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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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.
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 
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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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
It’s funny how sometimes the last shot of the day, the one you aren’t really expecting to be that special, turns out to be the favourite. This was taken at the end of brief walk in and around Swithland Woods one lunchtime in February this year. It had snowed a few days before but it was all gone now, leaving water lying in the fields and paths. This still water had been my original reason for going out, but as I had a few minutes to spare and no shots that I really liked I ventured into the woods and noticed how the bare branches of the trees filled the view above me.
After finding a suitable spot and waiting for a plane to pass overhead I took 3 bracketed shots. These were then processed in Photomatix to produce a black and white HDR which I then toned Lightroom.
The title, which is borrowed from a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, was the first thing I thought of when taking the shot.
It’s amazing how frustrating taking pictures in the mist can be. I took quite a lot the morning I took this before I noticed just how much water was on the lens itself - it was also bitterly cold and the last thing I wanted was to keep taking my gloves off to clean the lens.
I liked the composition of this shot at the time but it sat on my hard drive for quite a while before I worked out what I wanted to do with it. In the end I added a texture to give some extra substance to the mist and did some minor editing between the two trees to increase the light there, as for me this was the focal point of the shot.
A signed, limited edition 42cm x 28cm print of this image is available at highonlight
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One of my first experiments with monochrome HDR photography and still one of my favourite images. This shot was taken about 30 minutes to an hour before sunset on a sunny but bitterly cold and windy winter afternoon out with Dan in Bradgate Park, Leicestershire. The angle of the sun lit up the grass, and the shadows added depth in front of the tree - I’ve been back to this location since but I’ve never found the light as favourable.
Three shots were used, each two stops apart (-2EV,0EV,+2EV). Processing was done with HDRSoft’s Photomatix Pro, with the black and white image then being split toned to give it an antique look.
A signed, limited edition 42cm x 42cm print of this image is available at highonlight
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“Winter Tree” was my first real attempt at creative processing, rather than just using Photomatix to make a shot look extravagantly real (I was going to put “hyperreal” here but I couldn’t bring myself to do it). The initial version was an accident - one of those rare “I wonder what happens if I…” experiments that gives a pleasing result. Unfortunately though my inexperience at the time though led me to overlooking some serious flaws with the original image - the contrast was all wrong and the image was noisy.
The poor contrast in the original version was due to my monitor being poorly set up - it was far too dark - and whilst the noise level isn’t that obvious in the version elsewhere on this site (http://www.andystafford.co.uk/winter-tree/) it is painfully apparent on the large version available on Flickr (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3340/3194854394_305882a0a9_o.jpg).
Why was the image noisy? Because my Microsmoothing setting in Photomatix was too low (0). It made the clouds look more dramatic but I didn’t see how badly it was affecting the quality of the image as I neglected to look at it at full size.
If I was ever going to make this image available as a print I knew I was going to have to go back to the original raw files and reprocess it. Details of this process can be found here http://www.andystafford.co.uk/winter-tree-and-photomatix/
A trial version of HDRsoft’s Photomatix is available at http://www.hdrsoft.com/download.html. Should you decide to buy a copy of Photomatix, feel free to use my discount code, “AndyStafford15″ which will give you 15% off.
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