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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…
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I spied a spider – or four
OK, I know they aren’t insects, as the tags might have you believe, but spiders are great subjects, as long as you can get close enough to them. One of my favourites, as we see them round the house a lot, is the Fleecy Jumping Spider. They are really very small. Females, like this one, can reach just 5mm long. I’ve used my Cygnustech flash diffuser to give lots of soft light, and focus-stacked nine images to give better depth of field. This one’s on a vertical white-painted wall. This one’s on the same wall, but I lit it with an LED torch almost parallel to the wall’s surface to…
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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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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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Happy Christmas!
As it’s less than a couple of weeks till Xmas Day I thought I would take the opportunity to wish you all a “Merry Christmas and a Phabulously Photographic New Year”. It’s been an interesting year for me, with lots of in-person and Zoom talks and well-received Macro workshops. I’ve already got talk bookings for 2026! This is a macro bokeh shot of an Xmas tree bauble. Not only is there foreground bokeh but there’s also wider background bokeh. It’s like differential focus, but it’s all actually out of focus! Our neighbour over the road has a log-burning stove. One quite windy day it was smoking quite a lot, 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 Third
The Macro workshops I’m running locally are happening very soon. To help with those workshops I asked OM Systems if they would lend me one of their fabulous 90mm Pro Macro lenses, and they very kindly obliged. You can see the OM Systems range of camera and lenses here. I have no commercial relationship with OM Systems, I just love their cameras and lenses. It’s a super sharp lens that has a native 2x life-size magnification ratio. I, of course, wondered what it looked like when it was out of focus. I tested that on a cold morning when our windows had condensation on the inside. Shooting from the inside…
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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…