Creative Photography
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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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Spring has sprung
It’s nearly May, and here in leafy Worcester everything wild is going at a very rapid pace. The birds are singing like mad, and creatures like toads are well out of hibernation. I found this one perched on top of an old tree stump in the garden. The stump is covered by our wheelbarrow – upside down – and I’ve seen a toad on the tree stump before. I had my OM System 40-150 Pro lens fitted, which was perfect for an informal portrait. The eyes are good and sharp, which is an important thing in portrait photography. I’ve been experimenting with capturing small insects in flight. It’s really hard…
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Pixel-lated water
Like most people these days, the camera I carry about with me all the time is the camera that’s part of my mobile phone. I’ve got a Google Pixel mobile, and it’s got an excellent camera and camera software. One feature I like is the Long Exposure mode. It’s not as good for long exposure as my Huawei Mate phone was, with its fabulous “Silky Water” mode, but within its limits it gives great results. The trick is to keep the dot inside the circle! That tells you you’ve kept the camera still enough. These three images of moving water were taken using Long Exposure mode. I rested my hand…
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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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Happy New Year!!
I hope all my readers had a great Christmas, and that you are all set for 2026. I’ve already done my first two club talks. I’m looking forward to the next one, which is next week. A few days ago we went to the Worcester Christmas Tree Festival in the cloisters at the Cathedral. It’s a fab display over over 100 trees that have different themes. Some are from schools, some from companies, and some from charities. I took my OM-1 and my 9-18mm lens. Here I’ve set the shutter speed to a few seconds and walked quickly down the cloister. I love the light streaks from the closest trees.…
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Christmas greetings
Hey, it’s that time of the year again. The time where we celebrate with friends and family and reflect on our photographic achievements over the last 12 months. Reflect is such a good word, as this image is of some Christmas lights reflected in a water feature in Bristol. I wandered round Millennium Square yesterday evening before going to a performance of Handel’s Messiah at St George’s Hall. I had my trusty Panasonic TZ-100 compact camera with me, and it was perfect for unobtrusively capturing the colours and falling water. A friend gave us us a home-made Christmas decoration. It was made from an old CD, and it had holographic…
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“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”
OK, so it’s now winter rather than Keats’ autumn, but the mists thing is still true. Tied in with mists there are other sorts of wetness, such as rain and condensation, and even melted frost. Yes, I know this is a tenous link for some water droplet images, but bear with me! It rained a week or so ago, and one sunny morning some lingering rain droplets were sat on a twig of one of our Japanese maple trees. I liked the way they were in a fairly regular line, and there were some fab reflections/refractions in each drop, so I popped my 60mm macro lens on to my OM…
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Tripping the Light Fantastic in Worcester.
One of the things that’s great about living in Worcester is the active arts scene. It sometimes manifests itself as “Light Nights” events, where there are various art installations all to do with light. Recently there was one called “Bridges of Light”. Whilst not as extensive as other “Light Nights” it was still fun. One installation used three very bright single colour projectors; red, green and blue, to throw multi-coloured shadows of folks in front of them. Some times people danced, so here’s a multi-coloured twirl. One installation inside a church consisted of a large rotating drum with cut-outs of stars and cut-out wording. Using my phone camera on “Long…
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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.…