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.