Two views of Old John, Bradgate Park

 landscape  1 Response »
Jun 182010
 

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.

Old John with rocks in the foreground, Bradgate Park

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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Old John in Winter, Bradgate Park

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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Sunset at Cropston Reservoir

 filters, landscape, sunsets, water  No Responses »
May 252009
 

Sunset at Cropston Reservoir

This was the first sunset I ever really paid attention to – and the first one I witnessed with my camera. I hadn’t previously been aware of just how much the light changes before and after the sun goes down and being there was accidental – I had actually gone to take pictures of some boats I had noticed there earlier in the week.

I’d just taken delivery of some new filters – a light blue grad and a light tobacco grad, both Kood – and was keen to try them out. After getting the shots I wanted I started to wander back to the car when I noticed that the sun had finally disappeared from view and there was a slight ripple moving across the otherwise still reservoir.

I used both filters here – the tobacco one at the bottom and the blue one at the top. Technically I should have included some foreground but the colours in this were pleasing enough for me to not mind its exclusion.

Technical details:- 0.125 sec (1/8s), f/8.0, 21 mm

Spring Afternoon

 textures  No Responses »
May 022009
 

Spring Afternoon

Earlier in the year I set myself a challenge in order to improve my photography and broaden my horizons a bit – I’d seen this concept mentioned in some old magazines that were passed on to me. I find it can get terribly difficult to think of things to photograph so I decided to combine two of my favourite past times, cycling and photography.

The idea was that I would attempt to find something to take pictures of each time I went out – it didn’t matter what – just anything that took my fancy.

On this occasion I was taking a short cut across some fields. It was early spring and despite the sunshine the ground was a little too wet for cycling, let alone lying on, so I got pretty soaked getting this shot.

Spring Afternoon

Despite having the features I wanted, the shot didn’t capture my feelings at the time – the warmth of the first sunny day of the year, the freedom of being out doing what I wanted to do. It needed to be more fluffy and dreamlike and fortunately I knew exactly what I was going to do.

A friend on Flickr produces some fine textures for layering and I already had one in mind that would add the tone I was looking for to the picture.

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Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

 landscape  1 Response »
Apr 262009
 

Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

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In a number of previous posts I’ve mentioned just how much difference a few minutes can make to a scene. The above shot was taken on the first day of a recent holiday in Cornwall whilst we waited for our accommodation to become available.

I’ve become more interested in black and white than colour photography just recently and it seemed the perfect style to capture the old harbour. The sunlight was patchy at the time and I got the shot I was looking for, looking out to sea through the railings (see below), however just as I was preparing to move on the sun broke through the clouds and lit the scene perfectly. It was impossible to ignore the combination of colours in front of me so out came the red filter I’d been using and in went the ND grad to improve the sky.

Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

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.

Curbar Edge Stone Circle

 filters, trees  No Responses »
Apr 092009
 

Two photos today, both from the same location, Curbar Edge Stone Circle in Derbyshire.

Curbar Edge Stone Circle

I was lying down when I took this, as I often seem to be now when taking photos. I’d never really thought of it before, but since dispensing with the tripod it gives that extra bit of stability and allows you to get shots that look a bit different from everyday snaps.

I had originally intended this shot, along with all the others from that day, to be in black and white and they were all taken with either green or red filters attached, but there was something about the distribution of colour in this one that made me decide to tint it (and the other shot here).

As with Shimmer a green filter and an ND4 grad were used and then a magenta tint was added in post production.

This second shot was taken slightly earlier, whilst I was waiting, and as I’ve mentioned in another post shows how much difference a few minutes can make to a image.

Curbar Edge Stone Circle

Whilst the grad filter is slightly too low and darkens the top of the frame a little too much the subject lends a wistful air to the shot, which lead me to decrease the saturation. I think this gave a much lighter feel, a child lost in contemplation on a warm sunny afternoon (probably wondering why a grown up is lying on the floor)

Shimmer

 filters, trees  No Responses »
Apr 062009
 

Shimmer

My discovery of filters and their uses has increased my enjoyment of photography immeasurably. Some ND grads were recommended to me for use on skies as an alternative to using HDR. These filters are grey and have no colour cast (the ND stands for Neutral Density) and they stop a certain amount of light entering the lens – the “grad” bit refers to the fact that they are graduated, so part of the filter is clear and lets all the light pass through, but some of it is dark and lets less light pass through. Basically they allow you to make the sky less bright, which allows more detail to be captured elsewhere in the photo, such as the ground.

The shot above, which was taken in Watermead Park, Birstall, was taken with a combination of Cokin ND4 grad (P121M Grad Neutral Grey Medium) and Kood Green filters. (The Kood filters are much cheaper than the Cokin ones and possibly there is a difference in quality, but as I’m just an amateur and trying these things out for the first time I’m not overly worried at this stage – besides I get 3 Kood filters for the price of the Cokin Light Tobacco filter that I was about to buy for £30)

The green filter is really for use in Black & White photography but I find its effect can be pleasing in colour if a red tint is added in post production to calm the green down a bit. Obviously it’s possible to alter the all the different colour levels in Photoshop to get the same or similar effect, but for some reason I don’t find it as enjoyable. Using them on the camera also seems to help me with ideas – I’m actually looking at contrast and texture more than colour and am divorced from the beauty of the scene.

This was how the image looked when it came from the camera – it’s a bit “green” but it allowed me to see how the final image would work.

Original

The image below shows the importance of waiting at a spot for a few minutes – when I arrived there was a breeze and no pleasant reflection in the water :)

Other