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Just how much lens do you need?
At my August 2025 Worcestershire Open Studios exhibition I met a very interesting photographer called Tej, who really pushes the envelope when it comes to imaging. One thing he does is to remove his camera lens and use a cheap magnifying glass held near his camera to produce images. The resulting images can have large blurry areas, bright colours, interesting shapes, and spectral lines. My normal technique for producing abstract images involves defocusing a lens to give similar areas of colour and shape. Here I’ve used a high-quality macro lens, defocused, and made an image of the edge of an LED light source. I recalled that I had some loose…
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A midweek miscellany
Today’s post does not have a single theme. It’s a mixture of images, each of which has its own story to tell, each of which shows an area of my photographic interest. Here’s a shot from a town’s bonfire night celebrations last year. They had fire-eaters as a diversion before the main fireworks event. It was hard to get into a good place to have a clear view of the fire-eater, and also hard to choose the right moment to press the shutter. I was pleased with the flame on this one. A nice tight crop to the corner and editing out some background distractions made the composition work better.…
- Abstract, Architecture, Black & White, Bokeh, Composition, Creative Photography, Fine Art, ICM, Landscape, Macro, Mobile, Movement, Snapseed
Worcestershire Open Studios is nearly here!
The final preparation for this weekend’s opening of my exhibition as part of Worcestershire Open Studios (WoS) is pretty well done! Images are up, lights are installed and tested, mounted prints are in their display boxes, greetings cards are sorted, and signage is all done. Even the sun is getting in on the act and saying, “Here’s where you need to come to”! If you follow the directions that are found here, you should see a house like this one – only the right way up! There will be signs and green bunting to help you find it. This one of the key images in my exhibition. If you want…
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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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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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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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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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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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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…