Movement
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A bit of garden wildlife
You don’t have to go to exotic places to see fascinating wildlife. Sometimes it’s there in your own back garden/back yard. We have a wheelbarrow stored upside down in our garden. On lifting it recently my wife found these two Common toads (bufo bufo) side by side. We’ve seen individuals before, but two together was unusual. She called me over and I, of course, went and got my OM-1 camera with my OM System 60mm macro lens. A quick focus-stacked set and they were captured for posterity. Sweet! On a Scabious flower just yards away some real drama was playing out. The female Flower Crab spider had previously caught a…
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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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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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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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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.…
- 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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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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Welcome to 2025!
Firstly, HAPPY NEW YEAR! I know we are nearly a week into the new year, but it needed to be said. One of the photographic highlights of the Christmas period was the Christmas Tree Festival at Worcester Cathedral. It’s a fabulous display of lots and lots of Christmas tree decorated by loads of different organisations. There are, of course, lots of tree lights to be played with. Here I’ve chosen a tree that had lots of lights on and used OM System’s “Live Composite” mode set on a 1/2 second base exposure. I rotated the camera in a circle during the exposure. There are some interesting colours and shapes, and…
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November randomness in red and blue.
It being November, it’s compulsory for UK photographers to take and then post a fireworks image. This one’s taken using “Live Composite” mode on one of my Olympus cameras. I set the base exposure to 1/2 second, and then left the camera to take quite a few images whilst I gently moved the camera around. It makes the firework look much more impressive than it was. On a recent visit to Birmingham I popped in to the “Victorian Radicals” show at the Art Gallery. As well as having paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites, there were some textiles and wallpapers by William Morris. One was in a frame behind glass and other…
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Macro musings – Part the Second
I’ve recently purchased a Cygnustech flash diffuser to help with my macro photography. It came from Australia pretty quickly, and was custom-made for my flash, lens, and camera body setup. My home-made diffuser was OK, but not quite good enough. One of the issues with using an on-camera flash for close-up/macro photography is that the direction of the flash is wrong, as the light mostly goes past the subject. The other issue is that light from a bare flash head is very directional and gives hard shadows and specular reflections. For shiny insects that’s not good lighting. The diffuser solves the problems by directing the light to the subject and…