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!

Time!

It's been a while since I last posted, partly due to our holiday and also a lack of free time due to work and various other activities.  I thought I would share some of my favorite holiday snaps over the course of the next few posts (may take a while if the gap I've just had is anything to go by), so here goes!

This image is of Times Square in New York.  It was bitterly cold and in the background you can see steam rising from the subway vents.  I loved the way the lights almost make up for the fact that it is dark, making it just possible to get a handheld shot without too much trouble.

The image was taken with my 18-55mm lens and my EOS7D at 18mm, f4.5 and 1/200th.  I managed to get the ISO as low as 400 so avoided the shot noise of higher ISOs whilst maintaining a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the motion of the people and cars and not have any hand induced blurring.  Had I remembered to actually carry my monopod whilst on holiday I could have taken this at slower shutter speeds and a narrower aperture which would have given interesting motion blurs of the cars and people and sharper long range focusing.

Post processing has been relative light.  I have cropped, and removed a distracting advert on top of a building in the background that looked like it was floating in mid air and then added my watermark.

If I were to do anything differently I would have shifted my position to the right to make the flag poles more evenly placed, it would have been great to use a wide angle lens but alas I didn't buy it until after I took this shot!

I loved the challenge of getting the exposure right for the bright lights of the advertising boards and yet not losing the foreground to the depths of shadow.

Autumn Approaches

With autumn rapidly drawing nearer I thought a couple of shots of frosty things would be fun to share.  I don't feel either of these are truly perfect but I like them none-the-less.  Both shots were taken in December 2010 at around 1100.  The light was probably fairly flat, but I can't say I remember taking these two!

The first image is of some nettles, I liked the way the frost made the patterns stand out on the leaves.  They were shot at f6.3 and 1/200th of a second at ISO 400 using my long lens at maximum zoom of 500mm.  I can't remember why this combination, but it seemed to work!  I didn't use any flash and was using my old EOS450D.  The lowish f-number (as low as I can get on that lens with the selected zoom) nicely blurs the background.

Post processing on this consisted of cropping to remove some distracting leaves below and converting from RAW to JPEG.  If I was to take this again then I would carry out a little gardening as the distracting nettles I've cropped out have meant I have lost the tip of the lowest leaf.  I would also have removed the nettle from the top corner and the large leaf on the left.

My second image is of some old, overwintering plant.  I'm not sure what it was!  I liked the monochrome effect of the image, it's hard to tell but it is actually brown and grey, not a true black and white!

This was shot using almost the same settings as the one above but a slightly quicker shutter speed of 1/250th of a second.  Post processing has been very minimal to this, only adding my watermark.  The problem that I see with this image, apart from the branch to nothing on the right, is the fact that the top of the shoot is out of focus.  A wider depth of field should have been used to keep the whole plant sharp.

Spring Signs

A little late/early depending on your point of view, but as we're starting to head into the closing months of the year I thought it'd be nice to have a snapshot of what we will be able to enjoy again soon!

On a rather chilly January morning I spotted the first signs of new growth for the coming spring whilst walking in the Ivel Springs nature reserve in Baldock!  I liked the way the almost monochrome ground cover was in sharp contrast to the green of the new shoots and so I decided to make this even more extreme, by turning it into a black and white background whilst maintaining the bright green shoot.

The original shot before post-processing.

This image was shot on my old EOS450D and hand held to allow me to get low enough to the ground.  To cut out all hand shake I took the image at 1/125th of a second and to make a limited depth of field I used an aperture of f/6.3.  Due to the pretty poor light, it being an overcast day under the cover of trees I had to use an ISO of 800, about as high as my old camera would go before the image became unacceptably grainy.  I used my long telephoto at its maximum zoom of 500mm so I could shoot from the walked area around the path and not damage any other new growth in the area.  I had no flash unit with me so had to rely on the natural light, I'm not sure flash would have been useful anyway for the image I had in mind!

Post-processing was, surprisingly, very simple.  I copied the active layer to give me my working layer that would become the black and white bit; then I used the magic extractor tool to very carefully select everything but the bright green bit (in more technical speak I made the bright green the background (negative) and the rest the foreground (positive)).  Once the selection was made I simply clicked the convert to black and white and bingo, once flattened the image was finished.

The final image.

If anything is wrong with this it could possibly be argued that the image doesn't follow the rule of thirds, it's very close in height but centrally placed across the screen.  I see no problem with the way it is composed, in fact I would say the centrepiece is not exactly central, put that right with a crop and I'd be happy!

Roll on spring 2013!

Sunny Shillington

The church at Shillington sits on an area of raised land meaning that it is clearly visible from every direction.  I was hoping to get a shot of it with a moody sky behind and the sun lighting the church up.  On the day I chose to make the trip to take the shot the clouds weren't quite as moody as I hoped for, but the sun was nicely lighting up the fields in front of the church.

The farmer who owns the field by the side of the road was kind enough to give me permission to enter his field to take this shot, my thanks go out to him for giving me that opportunity!

I took the image on my 7D using a tripod for stability.  I shot with an aperture of F/22 at ISO500 and 1/250th of a second.  I wanted to make the whole image sharp, but had forgotten I'd set a fairly high ISO on a previous day's shoot so I could have gotten away with a slower shutter and larger aperture if I'd remembered! I shot using my 18-55mm lens at 30mm.

In post processing I carried out a but of a fake HDR routine to brighten the church slightly, I couldn't get the full HDR effect as the camera moved very slightly between shots, even using a tripod and so the images didn't exactly overlay.  I also sharpened the church and tractor slightly and cropped a little to get closer to the ideal thirds.

If anything I feel the tractor looks like it's motoring into nothing but there were distracting objects to the left which meant I had to position it where I have.  I also think the church is a bit grainy, possibly as a result of the higher than optimal ISO.

Perfect Poise

One of our favourite reserves for a walk when we lived in Southampton was Winal Moors on the very edge of Winchester.  Not only could you get great views (almost guaranteed on every visit) of water voles but there was a whole host of other wildlife.  It was there that this photograph of a banded demoiselle was taken.

I was attracted to the metallic blue of these and thought that it would work well against the green of a leaf, so when one sat on a leaf just in front of us I wasted no time in snapping this shot:

This was taken on my old EOS450D at f8, 1/200th of a second ISO400 using my 70-300mm Tamron f5.6-6.3 Macro lens at 300mm.  In post processing I have removed a couple of white blemishes from the leaf under the insect and behind it, however I was unable to accurately remove the bits of fluff on it and behind it's leg.  The image has also been cropped to come closer to the rule of thirds and remove an annoying leaf on the front right.

If I were to do this shot again I would re-position myself slightly to give more room to the top right for the insect to look into.

Spectacular!

Last October we took a trip to North Norfolk for a night to go and see the Snettisham Spectacular.  It certainly didn't disappoint, spectacular by name, spectacular by nature!  If you intend to visit I strongly recommend staying overnight to avoid an excessively early start, depending on tide times, as naturally an early morning or late evening display is best for photography so pick your date carefully and hope for good weather! I would also advise getting there early as there were a good couple of hundred people lining the shore when we were there and you don't want to end up with a line of blurred heads in shot, or maybe you do...

The spectacular comes about from a quirk of the geography around Snettisham.  Snettisham sits about 10 miles north north east of Kings Lynn on the North Norfolk coast.  The reserve is a fairly long, but easy flat walk from the car parks and consists of a couple of lagoons protected from the sea by an earth bank.  Good shots can be had of some of the participants in these lagoons after the spectacular is over.  It is what is the other side of this bank that is the interesting part however!

The area sits right at the bottom of The Wash and as such has some huge mud flats.  When the tide is out mud flats can be pretty boring, but it's what happens when the tide comes in that makes Snettisham special.  As the water levels rise the waders that were once spread out across the mud get pushed into tighter and tighter areas that are closer and closer to the beach.  As these areas shrink more and more birds get squeezed in running towards dry land and eventually taking flight as they are scared by predators or run out of mud in mesmerising displays.  A good pair of binoculars allows you to get a good view of the waders running in what appears to be organised chaos, but, given the right light, when they take to the air binoculars can be ignored and the display of light on the birds as they twist and turn in marvellous synchronicity provides a truly amazing sight!  I only wish that I had a good quality video camera to truly capture the spectacular and so that you could hear the noise of thousands of birds passing over head.  Unfortunately I don't, so it will have to just be photographs!

Both images were shot with the same EOS7D and my Sigma 150-500mm lens at f9 1/400th ISO320.  I think I should have dropped the shutter speed and upped the f-number to make the whole image a little sharper.  I was more interested in trying to watch the spectacular display and capture the motion of the flock than making sure all my hundreds of images were pin sharp!  I think I managed to capture the motion nicely by using the way the light played across the flock as it twisted and turned.  Post processing involved spot healing to remove a couple of birds that were not fully part of the flock and in the case of the second image cropping to remove someones head!

Hear me roar!

Just near to where we live is Woburn Abbey, it was here that we were lucky enough to watch the red deer rut in October 2011.  After a few nerves about whether we would be able to find deer on the limited footpaths we were treated to some excellent views and some close encounters.

This magnificent specimen was in full vocal flow as we walked along one of the few paths you are allowed to follow on the estate.  I loved the way he was framed by the trees and so I heavily cropped the image in the dark room to accentuate this natural framing.  I have also carried out a small amount of sharpening as I seem to struggle getting pin sharp images at range on my super-telephoto.

This was shot using my Sigma 150-500mm lens at a distance of some tens of metres at 500mm.  Even so the image has quite a large amount of wasted space, hence the crop.  It was shot at 1/160s f6.3 (perhaps a source of the soft focus) at ISO160.

If I were shooting this again I would try to increase the ISO setting to allow for a smaller aperture to try to improve the sharpness, although I am very happy with the focal length so this would have to be a small adjustment.

"Twixt sea and pine"

As for the last couple of years our summer holiday has been to the North Norfolk Coast.  The light railway is a must during our holiday to this area (more on this at a later date) and this year we got the chance to see the railway from a different perspective during a visit to Sheringham Park. This shot showing the famous pines and sea of the quote "Twixt sea and pine", a catch-phrase of the North Norfolk Railway shows both the Coastguard Cottages and Weybourne Mill.  I took this from the top of the Gazebo in Sheringham Park on a very overcast, but quite bright, day.  I used a graduated filter to add interest to the sky and captured the steam train as it passed over the coast road with a good head of steam up as it chugs up the hill towards Weybourne Station.

It was taken using my 18-55mm kit lens at 53mm, f11 1/125s ISO400.  In post processing I have straightened the horizon by a couple of degrees and cropped to try to fit better with the rule of thirds and remove some distractions from the foreground.  If I were to change anything (other than picking a nicer day!) I would try to reposition myself to cut out the annoying tree top in the bottom right and try to work a bit better on the framing to get closer to the ideal thirds.

First share!

So, for my first share I thought I needed something special.

A few weeks ago now my girlfriend asked me if I would like to join her checking some dormouse boxes with the Bedfordshire dormouse group.  I must point out I was accompanied by a licensed dormouse ecologist, had permission to take photos and permission to be on the land we were using, which for obvious reasons shall remain secret.  Dormice are an endangered species and very rare, so please do not go looking for them without being with a suitably trained person, otherwise you could face a hefty fine!

Now, to the photography:

I took the image at 1/60s, f6.3 at 50mm with my 18-55mm kit lens on an EOS7D at ISO400 in aperture priority.  I chose the lowest f-number of the lens to blur the person in the background whilst keeping the mouse in focus.  Naturally I didn't use flash.  In post processing I have done a small amount of fiddling with exposure and a tiny bit of sharpening.

If there was anything I would change it would be to re-take the image a little closer remove the tips of the fingers which I feel are slightly distracting.