Architecture
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The light is back.
There’s a large, ruined, country house about half an hour from us. It’s called Whitley Court, and although the house is ruined, (after a massive fire in the 1930’s), the gardens and fountain have been restored. The light was very strong, and it cried out for the contre-jour technique, where you shoot with the light coming from behind the subject. I had taken my Lumix TZ100 travel zoom compact with me, so it was a test of just how much I could control the exposure to give the look I wanted. This shot of the fountain is a good example. I set about 3 stops of underexposure to expose for…
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Kelpies!
Because we were weather-delayed flying to Shetland we had a couple of days to fill. Some of that time was spent with a trip to see “The Kelpies”. Kelpies are mythical shape-shifting water horses inhabiting lochs in Scottish folklore. These Kelpies are a pair of monumental steel horse-heads between the Scottish towns of Falkirk and Grangemouth. The sculptures were designed by sculptor Andy Scott and were completed in October 2013. They stand next to the M9 motorway and form the eastern gateway of the Forth and Clyde Canal, which meets the River Carron here. Each head is 30 metres high and weighs 300 tonnes. They are positioned either side of…
- Abstract, Architecture, Black & White, Bokeh, Composition, Creative Photography, Fine Art, ICM, Landscape, Macro, Mobile, Movement, Snapseed
Worcestershire Open Studios is nearly here!
The final preparation for this weekend’s opening of my exhibition as part of Worcestershire Open Studios (WoS) is pretty well done! Images are up, lights are installed and tested, mounted prints are in their display boxes, greetings cards are sorted, and signage is all done. Even the sun is getting in on the act and saying, “Here’s where you need to come to”! If you follow the directions that are found here, you should see a house like this one – only the right way up! There will be signs and green bunting to help you find it. This one of the key images in my exhibition. If you want…
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Corner to corner
Recently we went to the North of England for a short break. One place we stayed at was Halifax, and the Piece Hall was a highlight. If you are anywhere near, just go there. It’s fabulous! A stereotype of the North is that the streets are cobbled. Well, some are of course and the textures they produce in the sunshine are irresistible subjects. This cobbled Halifax street cried out for a low angle image, and I used the image frame corners to help with the composition. I am a big fan of using frame corners. The Ashton Memorial in Lancaster is also a fascinating place to visit. It dominates the…
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Worcester Balloon Festival in three styles
Last weekend was the Worcester Balloon Festival. I took a wander down to the site to see what was happening. I had my Huawei Mate phone camera and my Olympus E-M10 Mk3 with me. I decided to try and show different treatments of subjects at the Festival. There was a very large inflatable slide there. I went in the early evening and the sun was getting quite low on the horizon. It was picking out the structure of the slide with a golden colour, and that gave a lovely contrast against the blue sky. It has to look of a modern office building about it to my mind. Later on…
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Architecture – getting smaller, then more poignant
Photographing architecture can be a matter of recording the whole building in its context, showing how it interacts with the land around it. It can also be about showing the smaller things, such as a part of the building, but also what happens to buildings once their original purpose has gone. The film director Wes Anderson has a thing for symmetry. OK, this image doesn’t show his pastel colour palette, being black and white, but the symmetry is there. It’s the 1896 Conservatory in Wolverhampton’s West Park, and I’ve used the Panorama setting on my Pixel 7a to record that symmetry. The technique makes the front of the Conservatory appear…
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May miscellany
No real theme this time, though you could argue it’s a people picture sequence that goes; close-up, full length, multiple figures. The close-up is of a person’s eye shot with my super useful Bauhn clip-on mobile phone macro lens. The lens has a built-in ring light, so it’s great for adding light to areas when the phone shadows the available light. I like the reflection of their eyelashes in their cornea. This is a bit of street photography in the delightful Pitville, a part of Cheltenham. This Barbie mural on the side of a building in Pitville Park, was really long. It’s a bit of an odd subject, as it’s…
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Signs of the previous Leap Year.
OK, so 2020 was the previous leap year, and we all know what started happening then. Those days though are already starting to seem like another world; one with real restrictions and real fear. One thing that happened in the UK during the Covid epidemic and lockdown was the sudden proliferation of signs telling us how we should behave. Lots of those have completely gone now, and I think it’s important that the traces of those remaining are recorded. To that end I am making sure I photograph Covid signs whenever I come across them. This is on a bus shelter in Ledbury, Herefordshire. It’s a plastic film telling us…
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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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Pylon the pressure
On a walk with a friend on a lovely sunny day we came across a large electricity pylon. The appearance of pylons divides people, but whether you like them or not it’s worth looking up and seeing if there are any images to be found. The sun was shining through the glass insulators on the pylon. I used a couple of stops of negative Exposure Compensation to try and keep the highlight detail in the insulators, and this had the bonus effect of darkening the very blue sky. It was worth waiting till a small cloud had moved away so it was a plain blue background. Sidebar: there is a…