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Signs of the previous Leap Year.
OK, so 2020 was the previous leap year, and we all know what started happening then. Those days though are already starting to seem like another world; one with real restrictions and real fear. One thing that happened in the UK during the Covid epidemic and lockdown was the sudden proliferation of signs telling us how we should behave. Lots of those have completely gone now, and I think it’s important that the traces of those remaining are recorded. To that end I am making sure I photograph Covid signs whenever I come across them. This is on a bus shelter in Ledbury, Herefordshire. It’s a plastic film telling us…
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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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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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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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Landscapes are better in bad weather
Living, as I now do, in Worcester, the Malverns Hills are now a local place to visit. Although they are called hills, some of the peaks are high enough to be classified as mountains. Once such is Herefordshire Beacon at 1109 feet above sea level. It’s the site of British Camp, a huge Iron Age earthwork complex. The earthworks give a curious silhouette to the hill, and it looks very man-made. The views from the Malvern Hills are wonderful. Elizabethan diarist John Evelyn called it “one of the godliest vistas in England”. There are three cathedrals visible on a good day, but it doesn’t always have be a good day.…
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5000 reasons to take pictures
Last year I went to the athletics at the excellently-run Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. They had some curious rules about the size of lenses that spectators could take in. No lenses longer than 12 inches were allowed. I’m guessing they were concerned about people using long telephoto lenses and taking close up images to sell to agencies. I use MFT cameras, so get longer telephoto “reach” with my smaller lenses. I contemplated taking my Olympus 40-150 f2.8 Pro lens with its 1.4x teleconverter, which is less than 12 inches long overall, but was a bit concerned someone would apply the spirit of the rule rather than the wording, so I…