Composition
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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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Boy meets gull
I recently popped down to the River Severn in Worcester to get some bird images. As it was a sunny day I took my OM System OM-1 and 100-400 lens. I knew I would need a fast shutter speed, and at 400mm the lens has got a maximum aperture of just f6.3, so it needs quite a bit of light to avoid having to use a very high ISO. I found a place on the west bank near the swan sanctuary and waited. The most active birds were the herring gulls, so I concentrated on them rather than the swans. The light was falling from directly behind me, so it…
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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…
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Just how much lens do you need?
At my August 2025 Worcestershire Open Studios exhibition I met a very interesting photographer called Tej, who really pushes the envelope when it comes to imaging. One thing he does is to remove his camera lens and use a cheap magnifying glass held near his camera to produce images. The resulting images can have large blurry areas, bright colours, interesting shapes, and spectral lines. My normal technique for producing abstract images involves defocusing a lens to give similar areas of colour and shape. Here I’ve used a high-quality macro lens, defocused, and made an image of the edge of an LED light source. I recalled that I had some loose…
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A midweek miscellany
Today’s post does not have a single theme. It’s a mixture of images, each of which has its own story to tell, each of which shows an area of my photographic interest. Here’s a shot from a town’s bonfire night celebrations last year. They had fire-eaters as a diversion before the main fireworks event. It was hard to get into a good place to have a clear view of the fire-eater, and also hard to choose the right moment to press the shutter. I was pleased with the flame on this one. A nice tight crop to the corner and editing out some background distractions made the composition work better.…
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Helios – and a sunflower
A few weeks ago we went to to Coventry to see the Helios art installation. To quote from the National Trust’s website, “Helios, a seven-metre sculpture of the Sun, has been created by artist, Luke Jerram. It’s been made from 400,000 photographs of the Sun’s surface and observations by NASA to replicate swirling solar winds and sunspots.” This installation was outside in the garden of Charterhouse, Coventry, and it was fascinating to see how people interacted with it. I used the wide-angle lens on my Pixel phone to get a good view of the differences between those who chose the sun and those who chose the shade. There’s a bit…
- 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…