The leaves, they are a changing!

This autumn has been a bit of a strange one.  This isn't simply because I spent some time in the southern hemisphere and am getting confused with spring!  You may have noticed that things aren't behaving like they normally do, Halloween was the hottest on record at 23 degrees, September has been the driest on record and even now, in November (admittedly early November) I can happily walk around in a t-shirt!

One of the things that is most noticeable about this autumnal oddness is that the trees are not behaving normally, many are still very green whilst others have turned and lost most of their leaves.  This was very apparent at a walk that we went on just yesterday at Stourhead and I thought that this oddness would be a good subject for my next blog post!  What I think is happening is that some trees know when to change due to the length of the day and other know when it's time to change by the drop in temperature that we would ordinarily have seen a while ago.  Because this hasn't happened the trees that change due to day length have gone already whilst the others remain nice and green.

But enough with the science and onto the photos, yes photos, I have two that I like well enough to share today!

First up is this one which I like because of the range of colours, the autumnal reds and yellows and then the bright greens.

I took both of these with my Canon 7D and my 10-20mm wide angle lens.  This was taken at 18mm f13 1/100 at ISO 400.  In post I let auto enhance run riot and then carried out a bit more tweaking to make the final image; auto enhance added a curve adjustment in the green channel, increased the vibrancy and brightened the shadows, I took this further by adjusting the vibrancy still further and choosing to auto set the white balance.  I'm not sure I'd do anything different with this shot but I would like to go back again when the leaves are properly changing as I think it would probably make the picture even more bright and vivid.

My second picture makes me think of being a kid again and kicking through fallen leaves and I liked the colour of the golden leaves on the floor which contrasts with the bright green of the trees.  This was taken at 10mm with the same exposure settings as the picture above.

Again in post I let auto enhance have a play and then tweaked further.  The auto enhance again added a curve enhancement in the green channel and brightened the shadows.  I added nearly a full stop to the exposure (0.8) but then applied a global dodge to reduce the amount of burn in the sky.  If I took this again I may play around with getting down closer to the ground to give a kids eye view.

Blue Monkey

To return to my stated main theme of wildlife I thought I would now share a wildlife photo; it seems so long ago since I last posted a wildlife image!

This is a blue monkey, photographed on a wall at the Ngorogoro Sopa lodge in the evening.  The sun was on its way down and so the light is coming in almost horizontally lighting up the front of the monkey.  Myself and another photographer were working our way along the wall to get as close as possible without disturbing the monkey and I captured this shot as he (or she) was checking on our progress.

I shot this at ISO250 f7.1 and 1/250s with my long 150-500mm lens set at 150mm.  I like the way the light plays on him and the glint in his eyes.  I also like the way his eyes are complemented by the orange lichen on the wall.

Post has seen a slight toning down of the highlights and an increase in the vibrancy then a crop to put his eyes about 1/3rd of the way up the image and the addition of my watermark.

If I was to shoot this again it'd be great to remove the curling plant in the foreground (but you can't choose where a wild animal will sit!) and to shoot in landscape to get his tail in the image.

Inspiration

Having just joined a newly forming local photography group I have been inspired to actually try to do what I set out to do with this blog in the first place!

So for this month I have some photos from my honeymoon to share.  First up is the Ngorogoro Crater; this is a simply astounding place.  It is a 250sqkm volcanic caldera formed when a huge volcano exploded.  It's located in northern Tanzania and the floor of the crater lies at about 1800m making it free from nasty mosquito borne diseases and relatively cool.  This shot was taken from the Ngorogoro Sopa Lodge on the eastern rim of the crater looking to the west at sunset.

I used my orange tinted sunset filter to give the rose tint to the sky, although truth be known I think it is slightly overdone, however conditions for a red sky weren't great so it had to be forced.  The image was shot at ISO200, f13 at 1/10s with my 10-20mm lens set at 17mm.  To get such a low shutter speed I rested the camera on a wall and used the delay timer to make sure pressing the release button didn't cause any vibration; for the same reason I also locked up the mirror.

Post has seen me straighten the image and crop to make the top of the forest and the clouds on the right hand edge lie on the line of thirds.  I also tweaked the raw settings to sharpen the image and reduce the noise slightly (there was very little shot noise anyway due to the low ISO) and played with the shadows and highlight sliders to bring up the detail in the shadows and reduce the overexposure of the sky and clouds.

If I was shooting this again I would use a tripod and ideally wait for a day more conducive to red skies but alas I had neither my tripod nor time to do either so I am, in a way 'stuck' with what I have.

Hiroshima

Wow, it's been a long time since my last post!

I thought that I would share a photo from our recentish (November 13) visit to Japan.

One of the places I most wanted to see was Hiroshima.  Cold war history has always fascinated me, and this is possibly one of the places that gave birth to the cold war.  The city itself was pretty nice and apart from knowing its history you could be forgiven for thinking it was not too spectacular (although you'd have to avoid any museum and not head to the river when there to escape its terrible past!).

One of the things that sticks in my mind about the events of the 6 August 1945 was the bomb damage assessment photos showing a ravaged city apart from one or two buildings.  The A-bomb dome is one of those and after many years and much arguments was saved as an everlasting memorial to that day.

There were many ways to photograph the dome but this is the one I settled on to share, I wanted to create a feeling of being there that fateful morning, so I tried for ages to get a photo using the sun to simulate the detonation.  Now I must confess before any history buffs jump on me this photo was actually taken from the direction of ground zero (some 100m behind me) and so is not a very good reconstruction!

To create this effect I used my sigma 10-20mm on my 7D and shot at ISO100, at f13 1/125 with -2/3 exposure compensation.  This allowed me to expose the brightly lit parts of the building and foreground well whilst maintaining the deep shadows behind and gave a tolerable burn out in the sky to simulate the fireball.  Post has been simple, a crop and addition of the watermark.

The Japanese call bomb survivors hibakusha and they have a simple saying: "I met with the A-bomb".  Visiting the city and the peace gardens and museum is a strangely numbing affair and perhaps I felt a minute part of how the people of the city felt that morning, perhaps this photo will do the same for you.

Abstraction

Whilst in Sydney we visited the Opera House on a gloriously sunny and rather warm day.  I wanted to capture the magic of the sails but didn't want to take the standard tourist shot of the whole swan shaped visage (although I did take several of them)! I decided that I was best to try to take some abstract shots of the building and settled on this as being one of my favorites.

I shot this in aperture mode at f4.5 (to give only a small section of the roof in sharp focus) on my 18-55mm kit lens at 25mm.  Even with the ISO set to 100 due to how bright the day was I still needed a shutter speed of 1/1600ths of a second in order to not over-expose the image.  The image was taken using my EOS7D.

Post processing of the image has only seen the addition of my watermark.

I really like this image, the depth of field is suitably shallow, although the focal plane is about halfway through the image vertically at the bottom and so could maybe have been pulled a little to the right (it is not however vertical due to the pitch of the roof).  The focus in the distance is suitably soft without losing the structure of the building or the patterns in the roof.  Some people may say that the sun spots detract from the image but I think they convey the brightness of the day and add interest to what was otherwise a very flat blue sky., I could have used a graduated filter (if I'd carried one out with me) to reduce the over exposure to the top of the roof but I don't think it would have done much for the image so am happy to leave it as is.

Summer Mill

I am fortunate to have some of my photos on display at the Stotfold Water Mill which is located on the River Ivel just on the edge of Stotfold in Bedfordshire (http://www.stotfoldmill.com/).  In August of 2011 I was allowed to go to the mill before opening to take some shots inside in the hope of getting a few good ones to share with them for use in their brochures and leaflets etc.

One of the photos I took was this one, shot with my old EOS450D at f11, 1/200ths of a second at ISO200 in RAW and on manual.  I used my 18-55mm kit lens and balanced my tripod precariously on the edge of the river bank to get the shot as close to straight on as possible.

In post processing I dulled down the exposure of the whole image a bit before using the magic extractor to select the white washboards of the main mill building which I then brightened to give the impression that the building was catching more sun than reality.

If I could do anything differently with this shot it would be to use a boat to get in closer and have a clearer view of the building!  Also I feel the chimney is sloping slightly to the left, although to my eye the roof-line looks flat.

Round the World

As part of a highly recommended three day tourist bus package we got tickets to visit three New York landmarks.  One of the places we chose to visit was the UN.  We had a fascinating tour led by a Japanese member of staff in full traditional dress.  The tour was excellent and well worth it and this was one of the images that captivated me during our time here.

I liked the simplicity of the display and the way that the chips and scuffs in the paint suggest at the harsh life of a UN peacekeeper.

I took this using my 18-55mm lens on my EOS7D at 18mm, f5.6 and 1/30th of a second at ISO4000 due to the low light in the museum area.  There doesn't appear to be a huge amount of shot noise but the large aperture has softened the focus on the far edges of the helmet.  If I had my flash gun I could have avoided some of these issues but it wasn't high on my list of items to take on our trip!

Post processing was a simple crop and addition of the watermark.

Apart from the soft focus as discussed above the main issue I have with this image is the fact that due to time constraints on the tour I couldn't set the white balance to the correct setting so the white is slightly cream coloured, it's so bad that no matter what I have tried I can't seem to correct it so I've left it as I originally shot it, maybe I need a return trip and to set the white balance correctly!