When I bought the lens that this image was made with (the Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 fish eye) I had intended to spend the whole winter using it for shots like this, but things didn’t exactly go according to plan. It got used a few times and, as correctly predicted by a number of people, it went back in the box (until being rediscovered for use on my infrared camera).
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For most of the year running up to the December that this picture was taken it was quite marshy around this tree in Cossington Meadows, making it difficult to get to – not that I didn’t try, I just got a bit fed up with having to cycle home with wet trainers after each failed attempt. This cold spell made reaching it possible though as the ground was rock solid.
A funny photo this – it’s not glossy or romantic, doesn’t feature a killer composition or great light, hasn’t been tarted up to make it look like a work of art and doesn’t ask the viewer to question their very existence – but it still causes me great happiness because it reminds me how great it is to see the changing seasons and to be able to experience them rather than watching their passing from a car window on the daily commute.
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It’s not really blossom, but it’s what it reminds me of – and I didn’t like “Bridge” as much as a title.
Spring seems to be a good time for infrared photography – the trees are still bare enough to be visible but they also provide delicate dots of bright white leaves.
This is from a location I’ve visited regularly in the past, not far from home, but I normally visit for the (relative) beauty of it rather than to take pictures of discarded metalwork. I’ve always been fascinated though by this bridge just being dumped here, and it made a good choice as an item for a themed exhibition later in the year so I popped along with the IR camera to see how well the metal would stand out from its surroundings.
A shot from the last significantly cold morning so far this year, in late January. It’s seemed so wet and mild for the past few weeks, which no doubt will please many people as it perhaps signals the approach of spring, but I like cold mornings with comparatively late sunrises.
I usually photograph these trees from the other side of the lake but I was looking for something different this morning – the light hitting the frost on the fence and the shadow covering the path caught my eye.
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Watermead Park, while there were still leaves on the trees. Seems like a long time ago now, but it was taken just a couple of days before the first snows and winter arrived.
As the sun was setting around 4pm and the weather had been reasonably dry I’d been postponing my lunchbreaks and taking them later in the day so that I could cycle around Watermead Park in the hour before sunset. This mix of light stopped me in my tracks and was the first of a number of shots I took this afternoon, before the light faded.
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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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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.
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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