Black & White
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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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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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Landscapes are better in bad weather
Living, as I now do, in Worcester, the Malverns Hills are now a local place to visit. Although they are called hills, some of the peaks are high enough to be classified as mountains. Once such is Herefordshire Beacon at 1109 feet above sea level. It’s the site of British Camp, a huge Iron Age earthwork complex. The earthworks give a curious silhouette to the hill, and it looks very man-made. The views from the Malvern Hills are wonderful. Elizabethan diarist John Evelyn called it “one of the godliest vistas in England”. There are three cathedrals visible on a good day, but it doesn’t always have be a good day.…
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It’s getting closer…
Blimey, it’s getting awfully close to Christmas again! One thing I did a couple of Christmases ago was to go to the Worcester Cathedral Christmas Tree Festival. There were loads of decorated trees in the Cathedral cloister. Some were from schools, some from charities and some from commercial organisations. Most were fab! Here I’ve used my mobile’s Silky Water mode, (yes, again!), and walked as fast as I could down the cloister. I had to wait till there weren’t too many people. I like the combination of warm orangey lights and cooler blue lights. This is rather closer to home; well, it’s actually at home. We had some Xmas lights…
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Same subject, different views.
On a trip to Pembrokeshire one landscape feature really stood out. It was the Valero oil refinery at Pembroke. It was tempting, in a landscape that has fabulous coastal scenery, to ignore it as a photographic subject, but it’s such a prominent feature it’s worth a closer look. Looking at it from the Angle peninsular the refinery stood out against a cloudy sky. It had nice directional lighting from the right hand top side. I isolated it using a 150mm telephoto lens, which has added some perpective compression. A bit of HDR treatment and a B&W conversion gave a moody look. From the summit of the highest point in the…