Black & White
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Gorgeous Gower always delivers
A week or so back I took a trip to Gower in South Wales. It’s a fantastic place, with very varied landscape and lots of wildlife. I took one of my OM bodies and a couple of lenses, but never used them. All these images were shot on my Google Pixel phone and edited in Snapseed. Rhosilli beach is a favourite place; it’s been voted as one of the best beaches in the world. I spotted a cool bit of driftwood and got low down and close to it. The wide aperture of my Pixel’s lens meant that only one bit of the foreground wood was in focus. The B&W…
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March miscellany
Recently I travelled to Jersey for a few days to judge the photography section of the annual Jersey Arts and Crafts Eisteddfod. It was an honour to be chosen as Adjudicator, and I was well looked after by the organisers. I was kept very busy writing individual assessments for each image, so I didn’t have much chance to see the sights. I was able to pop out early one morning and visit the harbour in St Helier. One striking thing was the sculpture called “Jersey Girl” at Liberty Wharf. It’s by an artist called Rowan Gillespie, and was unveiled in 2010. Very cleverly she is suspended by cables from just…
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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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The Eye of Sauron!
A couple of days ago I made a trip to Upton Warren nature reserve near Droitwich. It’s a haven for birds, including Avocets. There were some very obliging Reed Warblers that posed for my OM Systems 100-400m lens, but they won’t be featured here. I was looking for non-typical nature reserve images. The first is the Eye of Sauron in grass! Whilst this looks like a small-scale Andy Goldsworthy work, it was completely natural. Somehow the cobwebs have joined it into a cool eye shape. Using my 100-400 enabled me to throw the background out of focus, and the bit of debris on the background leaf rendered nicely as the…
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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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Hay unstacked
Yesterday afternoon I had a wander round Hay-on-Wye prior to giving my “Close-up and Macro Photography” talk to the local camera club. Hay is a very attractive town, and has the world-famous Hay Festival every year. Hay is well worth a visit. Being me, I was on the lookout for the curious corners and quirky bits, rather than the tourist views. Here’s a bunch of those fairly useless stirring sticks you get at some coffee places. They were just lying on the pavement. I thought the found arrangement had a sort of Zen look to it. A quick edit in Snapseed to boost the contrast and edit out a couple…
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Water, water, everywhere…
I recently judged a club photographic competition that had a relatively small entry. This meant that there was quite a bit of time to fill after the judging, so I offered to do a short, 1 hour, talk. I chose the subject of “Capturing water in camera”, as water seems to be something I take lots of images of. Water has so many forms; solid, liquid and vapour, and can be static or moving, deep or shallow, and it often does a fine job of reflecting what’s around it. In this case it was the harbour at Swanage in Dorset. There was a fabulous sunset, and the red was reflected…
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It’s all about the light direction.
When you see a potential photographic subject it’s worth looking all round it to see how it’s affected by the changed in light direction. It can make a huge difference. Take this large dandelion sculpture in a fabulous Gloucestershire garden. I chose a viewpoint where it was lit by the sun from directly behind. It gave a lovely silhouetted contrast to the seed head “parachutes”. I had only just found it, and would have preferred to have been there an hour or so before, so that I could have got the edge of the seed heads away from the background trees on the right-hand side. I was just leaving another…
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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…