Abstract
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Reflections on a trip to Birmingham
Living in Worcester means I am not too far from Birmingham. It’s just half an hour on the train from Worcestershire Parkway to Birmingham New Street. That station has a lot of glass panels all over it, and they make for a useful source of reflection images. I was lucky enough to be there on a cloudless day with lots of sunshine. The colours of the surrounding buildings against the blue of the sky were fabulous. Isolating just a small section of the reflection made the image into an almost painterly abstract. Above one of the entrances there’s another lot of glass panels, and the sunshine gave strong shadows. The…
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Autumn Acer Abstracts
Recently I went to the fabulous Autumn Garden at Queenswood Country Park near Hereford. One feature of that part of the wood is the Japanese Maples. They were in full colour and looked fantastic. It was a sunshine and showers day, so there were lots of water droplets around. I had my Olympus macro lens on, so set my camera to manual focus and defocussed the image. I concentrated on a small part of a maple that had dissected leaves. The shapes and colours of the leaves, and the water droplet highlights, made for a very pleasing abstract composition. I had my trusty Huawei mobile with me and couldn’t resist…
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There’s a storm a brewin’…
We recently had a one week holiday down in lovely Cornwall. As our plan was to do as much coastal walking as possible, it was somewhat weather dependent. Luckily, all except one day was pretty good, and a few days were marvellous. The bad day was the day of Storm Agnes. For a few hours in the afternoon all manner of wild wind and rain happened. Going across the River Fal on the King Harry ferry was entertaining. While the storm was developing the sky began to look very ominous. It was clear that there was a lot of air movement. It was fascinating to watch. I took a shot…
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Sharpness is overrated
Now that Autumn is very much here we are getting dewy mornings and low-angle sunlight. Photographically that combination is too good to miss, so today I popped out into the garden with an unusual lens combination on my Olympus E-M5 Mk3; a Sigma 30mm f1.4 and a 10mm extension tube. My idea was to set the lens on f1.4, completely defocus and see what happened. My first subject was a lovely red maple tree. The sun was shining on the water droplets on the leaves, and the defocusing gave fabulous complexity to the highlights, especially in the lower half of the frame. I’ve bumped up the saturation as bit to…
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Curses, foiled again!
Yesterday I fitted some foil insulation to the ceiling of our cellar. It’s a 200 year old house so yes, we have a cellar. The foil is to help stop the room above it being so cold. I popped the roll of foil down on the kitchen floor and it caught a ray of morning sunlight. I loved what the sunlight reflections from the foil did to the kitchen floor, so it was out with my phone to capture it. The rays look a bit like the rising sun. A touch of editing to taste in Snapseed and it was done. Whilst I had the phone out I tried a…
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It’s show and tell time soon.
In August I am taking part in Worcestershire Open Studios (WoS) for the first time. In WoS artists of many types open their studios for everyone to come and look at and to talk about their work. I’ll be open from 11 am to 5.30pm on the 19th/20th and the 26th-28th. It would be great to see you there! Take a look at the WoS website here. I’ll have examples of my Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) work, (like the image above), my Bokeh work (like the image below), and many more. ICM is a method of producing images that are abstract and impressionistic. I’ll be more than happy to talk…