Travel
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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…
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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…
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Hay unstacked
Yesterday afternoon I had a wander round Hay-on-Wye prior to giving my “Close-up and Macro Photography” talk to the local camera club. Hay is a very attractive town, and has the world-famous Hay Festival every year. Hay is well worth a visit. Being me, I was on the lookout for the curious corners and quirky bits, rather than the tourist views. Here’s a bunch of those fairly useless stirring sticks you get at some coffee places. They were just lying on the pavement. I thought the found arrangement had a sort of Zen look to it. A quick edit in Snapseed to boost the contrast and edit out a couple…
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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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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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Textures of Gower
Just had a week down in wonderful Gower, South Wales. It’s got fabulous coastal scenery, wildlife*, and a really wide range of habitats. Being me, as well as enjoying those things I was on the look out for textures and patterns; I found some too. The bus to Rhossili from Swansea has a turning area near the church. It couldn’t really go much further without driving into the sea. There’s a bus shelter there and someone, or something, must have hit the roof of it quite hard as the reinforced glass was shattered. There was a fab pattern of random cracks overlaying the internal wires. A quick move to…
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It’s all about the light direction.
When you see a potential photographic subject it’s worth looking all round it to see how it’s affected by the changed in light direction. It can make a huge difference. Take this large dandelion sculpture in a fabulous Gloucestershire garden. I chose a viewpoint where it was lit by the sun from directly behind. It gave a lovely silhouetted contrast to the seed head “parachutes”. I had only just found it, and would have preferred to have been there an hour or so before, so that I could have got the edge of the seed heads away from the background trees on the right-hand side. I was just leaving another…
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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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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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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…