Composition
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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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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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Just look around you.
As we move into the darker and colder days of winter it’s easy to fall into bad habits and stop looking for images, or say, “It’s all a bit grey, so I’ll leave my camera at home”! Remember though, even if you don’t go out much, there are still loads of photographic subjects, some even right at your feet. One birthday gift I had was a fabulous cheese selection with vintage port and an olive wood cheese board. The wood looks to have been “spalted”. That’s where it’s been attacked by fungi and developed fascinating patterns in the grain. I looked closely at the wood and found areas that resembled…
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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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5000 reasons to take pictures
Last year I went to the athletics at the excellently-run Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. They had some curious rules about the size of lenses that spectators could take in. No lenses longer than 12 inches were allowed. I’m guessing they were concerned about people using long telephoto lenses and taking close up images to sell to agencies. I use MFT cameras, so get longer telephoto “reach” with my smaller lenses. I contemplated taking my Olympus 40-150 f2.8 Pro lens with its 1.4x teleconverter, which is less than 12 inches long overall, but was a bit concerned someone would apply the spirit of the rule rather than the wording, so I…
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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…
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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…