BIRDS 116 – MUTE SWAN 5 (MONO)

 

 

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Immature Mute Swans, moving slowly away while keeping me cautiously in view, on Cripps River.  I’d come upon a family of these birds on the river bank and, keeping quiet and still, started taking pictures.  I looked at them, they looked at me and then, unhurriedly and gently, they made their way down to the water’s edge, and slowly moved off upstream.

This is a jpeg generated and cropped in-camera from a raw file, using the Graphite profile, with no further processing in Lightroom.  Because my blog has a white background, I’d wondered about adding a thin black border in Silver Efex Pro 2, but then decided to leave these birds floating within a wider whiteness.

Other recent bird pictures are here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 .

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it – recommended.

Technique: Z 6 with 70-300 Nikkor lens used in APS-C mode to give 450mm; 3200 ISO; in-camera processing of the raw file, including use of the Graphite profile and cropping; no further processing; Cripps River, at Eastern Moor Bridge, on the Somerset Levels east of East Huntspill; 25 Oct 2019.
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SOMERSET LEVELS 420 – ENTRANCE TO A FIELD

 

 

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Field gate, with baler twine.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it.

Technique: Z 6 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 185mm; 800 ISO; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid v2 profile and selectively desaturating colour; Capture NX2; Tadham Moor, on the Somerset Levels southwest of Wedmore; 25 Sept 2019.
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I AM THE LIGHT

 

 

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I am The Light

above

The Crossing of the Striped Horse
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OUTER SUBURBS 138 – GARDENS IN SUBURBIA

 

 

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Front gardens >>> tasteful modern Minimalism perhaps >>> or yet another example of the ongoing subjugation of All Things Green to convenience and The Age of the Car?

Click onto the image to open another version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it.

Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 250 ISO; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid profile; south Bristol; 19 Aug 2019.
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BRISTOL 154 – KING WILLIAM AVENUE

 

 

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The wonderful exterior colour of the King William Ale House, a favourite watering hole of mine in Bristol city centre.  An old pub, with good beer and comfortable seating – just the place for quiet  afternoons of decadent imbibing and good conversation by those of us in the retired classes.

Click onto the image to open another version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it.

Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 400 ISO; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid profile; rotation; Capture NX2; King William Avenue, Bristol city centre; 1 Oct 2019.
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OUTER SUBURBS 127 – ROADSIDE WOOD

 

 

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Piece of wood beside a road, washed by early morning sunlight (apologies to those anticipating sylvan delights beside one of Her Maj’s broad and stately thoroughfares … ).

Minimalism, and an image dominated by the upper right to lower left, precisely parallel diagonals of the built environment, with which the trends of the unbuilt environment – the wood and the shadows – do not conform.

Click onto the image to open another version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it.

Technique: TG-5 at 25mm (equiv); 250 ISO; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid profile; south Bristol; 25 July 2019.
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ARCHIVE 420 – PARKED CAR 5

 

 

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Sports car, Wells, Somerset; 1 May 2005.

Ninety degree anticlockwise rotation moves the wheel to the bottom right of the shot, with the door handle, bodywork and shadow now forming strong features dipping steeply left.

The wonderful yellow of the car’s body produces strong contrast between the silver and black wheel and the other picture elements.

There are earlier images in this Parked Car series here: 1 2 3 4 .

Technique: F6 with 80-200 Nikkor lens.  Fuji Provia 400 colour slide film push processed to 800 ISO.

UPDATE 2015: there was a time when I photographed quite a few of these automotive abstracts – this one was done 10 years ago –  but they’ve gone somewhat off my radar these days.  But I still like this image, I still see it as I did then, as an artificial object with deep inherent beauty – and I wonder if, were I to be processing this shot now, whether I’d be tempted to try and “clean” the small amounts of dirt off the bodywork at upper right.

UPDATE 2019: one from an arty(!) period way back: push processed colour slide film – Fuji Provia 400, my go-to film, a really good all rounder, wonderful quality at 400 ISO, but pushable to 3200 and even 6400 ISO  –  and paired with the last of Nikon’s professional film SLRs, the F6.

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BRISTOL 150 – PARKED CAR 4: STRIP OF REFLECTED LIGHT ON A CAR DOOR (MONO)

 

 

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Early morning, low angle sunshine beside the railway station, and the door of a parked car is hit by a stray beam of bright reflected light.

A Minimalist image, presented in black and white to make it more so.  There’s really very little to see here – just the door handle and the narrow gap between the door and the rest of the car’s bodywork, both rendered in sharp focus; and, at bottom left, the lower edge of the door and the shadowed road below it.  And, finally, the bright band of reflected light, presumably coming from a nearby sunlit window pane.

This is the camera catching and preserving a tiny part of a much larger scene during a brief moment in time.  In itself, the scene is insignificant but, as always, it is good to see it, it is good to look at our surroundings, rather than just casually glancing over them while thinking of other – possibly equally trivial – things.  It is always good to engage with Reality, even mundane Reality, in this way >>> and the more so if you have an interest in the visual world.

There are earlier images in this Parked Car series here: 1 2 3 .

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to enlarge it further.

Technique: Z 6 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 300mm; 1600 ISO; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Graphite profile; flipped; beside Temple Meads railway station, in central Bristol; 10 May 2019.
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BRISTOL 148 – LITTLE KING STREET

 

 

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Morning sunlight casting shadows across a façade.

Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that image to further enlarge it – recommended.

Technique: Z 6 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 300mm; 1600 ISO; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid v2 profile; Little King Street, in Bristol city centre; 10 May 2019.
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ARCHIVE 414 – THE COLOUR OF THE SEA BENEATH A SMALL BOAT

 

 

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A small, blue boat rides at anchor – a very simple image, that’s really all there is to see.

The only solid facts are the simple, elegantly curving lines of the boat.  Beyond them, the sea’s surface takes on a silvery hue where the light catches it. But in the craft’s brief shadow, this paleness disintegrates and fragments as, approaching closer to the graceful blues of that wooden hull, the emerald greens of the sea deepen and, gently but firmly, draw us further in and deeper down.

Technique: X-T1 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 305mm (equiv); 400 ISO;  St Ives, Cornwall; 21 Sept 2016.

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