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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…
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Macro musings
I’m running a couple of Macro photography workshops for a local photographic club soon, so what better subject than that for today’s blog post? At the workshop I will demonstrate how everyday objects are perfect subjects for Macro images. Here’s an example of such an everyday object. It’s the hook part of a Velcro strap on a wrist support I was wearing. I used a head torch behind the Velcro as my light source and this gave a cool spotlight look to the image. To my mind there’s a bit of “Blade Runner” grime/abandonment to it. The direction that the light comes from makes a huge difference to images. This…
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Pick up a penguin.
There is a sculpture trail in Worcester at present. It’s called the “Worcester Waddle” and consists of lots of penguins that have been painted in imaginative ways. It’s to raise money for St. Richard’s Hospice, and there will be an auction of the penguins later in the year. The auction of the previous sculptures, of elephants, raised a lot of money. One went for £36,000! One of the penguins represents a tourist, and it has a camera painted on it. Being a photographer I had to record the camera. I know that’s a bit meta, but there we go. It’s interesting seeing the juxtaposition of the penguins and the people…
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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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Worcester Balloon Festival in three styles
Last weekend was the Worcester Balloon Festival. I took a wander down to the site to see what was happening. I had my Huawei Mate phone camera and my Olympus E-M10 Mk3 with me. I decided to try and show different treatments of subjects at the Festival. There was a very large inflatable slide there. I went in the early evening and the sun was getting quite low on the horizon. It was picking out the structure of the slide with a golden colour, and that gave a lovely contrast against the blue sky. It has to look of a modern office building about it to my mind. Later on…
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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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May miscellany
No real theme this time, though you could argue it’s a people picture sequence that goes; close-up, full length, multiple figures. The close-up is of a person’s eye shot with my super useful Bauhn clip-on mobile phone macro lens. The lens has a built-in ring light, so it’s great for adding light to areas when the phone shadows the available light. I like the reflection of their eyelashes in their cornea. This is a bit of street photography in the delightful Pitville, a part of Cheltenham. This Barbie mural on the side of a building in Pitville Park, was really long. It’s a bit of an odd subject, as it’s…