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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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Focus on your focus
Cameras these days are like science fiction devices compared to when I first started taking pictures. Back then everything was manual; setting the exposure, focusing, film winding. Now we have all these wonderful automatic tools at our disposal, and auto focus has come on in leaps and bounds since the first, rather clunky, iterations. That does not mean that it’s foolproof, nor does it mean that you should just let it do its work without any input from you. Here are three examples of different focus issues. Some auto focus systems need edge contrast to do their job, and when there’s not much edge contrast they can hunt around for…
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Up & Down or Side to Side?
In my “Movement in Photography” talk I mention the difference it makes to an ICM image if you move the camera in one direction, compared to moving it at right angles to that direction. Information at right angles to the direction of camera movement tends to get spread out, whereas information in the direction of camera movement is accentuated. Take these tree images as an example: In this first image I have moved the camera, (my mobile phone – 2 second exposure), in generally the same direction as the tree trunks. Although there is a bit of horizontal information, most of the image is of near-vertical shapes and textures. In…
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Through a glass darkly
I have a “deceptive” glass in my small collection of interesting glasses. A deceptive glass has very thick sidewalls, and thus holds much less liquid than it appears to when filled. In Georgian times coaching inns had them. A coach would stop, passengers would rush in for a quick drink and be given it in a deceptive glass. They paid for a full normal glassful of course! I looked at the glass with its thick walls and thought, “That might act as a lens”! My camera was fitted with the Oly 60mm macro lens, so I just held the glass up against the UV filter on the front of that…
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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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Autumn Acer Abstracts
Recently I went to the fabulous Autumn Garden at Queenswood Country Park near Hereford. One feature of that part of the wood is the Japanese Maples. They were in full colour and looked fantastic. It was a sunshine and showers day, so there were lots of water droplets around. I had my Olympus macro lens on, so set my camera to manual focus and defocussed the image. I concentrated on a small part of a maple that had dissected leaves. The shapes and colours of the leaves, and the water droplet highlights, made for a very pleasing abstract composition. I had my trusty Huawei mobile with me and couldn’t resist…
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Just look around you.
As we move into the darker and colder days of winter it’s easy to fall into bad habits and stop looking for images, or say, “It’s all a bit grey, so I’ll leave my camera at home”! Remember though, even if you don’t go out much, there are still loads of photographic subjects, some even right at your feet. One birthday gift I had was a fabulous cheese selection with vintage port and an olive wood cheese board. The wood looks to have been “spalted”. That’s where it’s been attacked by fungi and developed fascinating patterns in the grain. I looked closely at the wood and found areas that resembled…
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There’s a storm a brewin’…
We recently had a one week holiday down in lovely Cornwall. As our plan was to do as much coastal walking as possible, it was somewhat weather dependent. Luckily, all except one day was pretty good, and a few days were marvellous. The bad day was the day of Storm Agnes. For a few hours in the afternoon all manner of wild wind and rain happened. Going across the River Fal on the King Harry ferry was entertaining. While the storm was developing the sky began to look very ominous. It was clear that there was a lot of air movement. It was fascinating to watch. I took a shot…
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Sharpness is overrated
Now that Autumn is very much here we are getting dewy mornings and low-angle sunlight. Photographically that combination is too good to miss, so today I popped out into the garden with an unusual lens combination on my Olympus E-M5 Mk3; a Sigma 30mm f1.4 and a 10mm extension tube. My idea was to set the lens on f1.4, completely defocus and see what happened. My first subject was a lovely red maple tree. The sun was shining on the water droplets on the leaves, and the defocusing gave fabulous complexity to the highlights, especially in the lower half of the frame. I’ve bumped up the saturation as bit to…