Looking at – and seeing – the world
July 27, 2020 4 Comments
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The Royal Mail, amongst trees.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 1600 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid profile; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Push Process N+3 preset and selectively restoring colour; south Bristol; 23 July 2020.
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July 19, 2020 15 Comments
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My long, early morning walks in Bristol’s outer suburbs are considerably added to by the wildlife I encounter. There are birds of course and, as an ex-birder (1967-2002), I enjoy seeing them all, even the commonest species, and there are always birds to see. But mammals are rather less numerous – although I had a close encounter with a Hedgehog this morning. Bristol is well known for its urban foxes, they’re seen more or less daily, and especially so on the days that households’ food waste is collected. And Grey Squirrels (originally from the USA) are always around, and indeed a pair lives around the large Hazel tree in our back garden.
Deer are also seen. Muntjacs (from the Far East) are often in our garden (sometimes with their fawns >>> and a pregnant female seen today promises more of those) and the native Roe, a larger deer, occasionally comes in too, which is a thrill. But my early walks pass an open field (recently proposed as part of the route for a new main road!) where Roe are quite often seen – and there have been a spate of sightings here over the past fortnight. I never carry any of the bigger cameras on these walks, just the little Olympus TOUGH TG-5, but its limited telephoto (100mm equivalent) is rarely of any use for wildlife.
However, yesterday, three Roes were near the field’s edge and, creeping up behind a hedge, I was able to capture this image. I’m a complete anarchist when it comes to cropping images, and this represents only about 10% of the TG-5’s minute frame. but here it is anyway. I had the TG-5 down at 400 ISO for greater quality – and I think this a tribute to this camera’s abilities. Yes, the Nikon Z 6 would have done much better, but then the Z 6 doesn’t fit in my trouser pocket and, furthermore, it is very considerably less robust.
Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – highly recommended!
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 400 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the Adobe Standard profile; south Bristol; 11 July 2020.
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July 16, 2020 8 Comments
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I enjoy lounging around in holiday chalets and caravans. Its a wonderful opportunity to sprawl back in comfort and enjoy the moment – and also a good chance to watch how the light interacts with things as the sun moves across the sky.
Here, with lighting from the left, a chair at the bottom of the stairs throws its shadow onto a rough wall. The woodwork at upper left is part of the banister of the narrow stairway.
This photo is something of a departure for me as its one of the few times that I’ve used my 50mm lens: most of my images use focal lengths far above or below this “standard” lens, which roughly approximates to human eyes’ field of vision. I ought to use this lens more often. It has a very useful maximum aperture of f1.4 and so is good in low light situations, and using the D800 in DX (= APS-C) format, when focal lengths are magnified by 1.5, I end up with a very useful – inspiring, even – 75mm f1.4 chunk of glass.
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Technique: D800 with 50mm Nikkor lens; 3200 ISO; Color Efex Pro 4; 11 Apr 2016.
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July 13, 2020 4 Comments
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There are earlier images in this Parked Car series here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 . Each will open in a separate window.
Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 250 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the Modern 01 profile; south Bristol; 31 Mar 2020.
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July 12, 2020 6 Comments
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Crumpled table cloth in the Cottage Cafe, Burnham-On-Sea, Somerset; 29 Aug 2011.
Whenever we go down to Burnham we never miss visiting the Cottage Cafe, which continues to serve up good food. This time, as we were demolishing toasted teacakes and a pot of tea, my eyes were drawn to window light flowing down over a discarded table cloth – and the Nikkor telezoom, that most useful of lenses, reached out and got the image.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: D700 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 300mm; 3200 ISO.
UPDATE: now, nine years later, the Cottage Cafe has long since closed down – what a loss! 😦
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July 10, 2020 Leave a comment
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There are earlier images in this Parked Car series here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 . Each will open in a separate window.
Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 320 ISO; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid profile; south Bristol; 12 Feb 2019.
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July 9, 2020 6 Comments
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Looking at this, the solid black border (an area in shadow) on the right and the dark plants of the hedge along the bottom of the frame form a prominent black “V” which is pointing down, out the frame, towards lower right, out of our view.
Given this, it is then a case of deciding whether those shadows of a plant are conforming by diving down into that “V” and so exiting our view too. Or whether, being ardent non-conformists, they are experiencing a lightbulb moment and flying back out towards a utopia of their own.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: TG-5 at 100mm (equiv); 320 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the B&W Green Filter profile; south Bristol; 20 Apr 2020.
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June 28, 2020 14 Comments
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Swans grazing on pastureland; Westhay Moor, south of Wedmore; 2 April 2015.
Some see swans purely as waterbirds, and on or beside water is where they’re usually encountered, reaching down into the water’s depths with their long necks to feed on aquatic vegetation. But they are often seen out on the fields of the Somerset Levels, quite at home grazing on short grass.
These are Mute Swans, the UK’s common and often tame, resident bird. But in the winter they may be joined here by a few Bewick’s and Whooper Swans that have come south to avoid the Arctic’s bitter freeze.
And the pylon? Well, 15 miles or so west of here, and in stark contrast to the Levels’ rural reaches, there is the Hinkley Point atomic power station, which sends lines of such gaunt metal towers snaking out across the surrounding countryside. The two reactors there are ageing now, but a third is proposed and construction is underway.
And – hot question! – am I in favour of nuclear power and especially, in this instance, so close to my favourite haunts? Well, the jury’s out on nuclear, I guess, my only certainty being that we need to get power from somewhere – news stories talk of our electricity supplies being only just sufficient to cover winter demands.
Click onto the image to see a larger version in a separate window – highly recommended.
Technique: D700 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 300mm; 2,000 ISO; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Dramatic preset.
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June 26, 2020 4 Comments
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Walking in the lockdown, and photographing the long shadows thrown across a main road by the rising sun. A shadow photographer – in both senses of the phrase – caught up in a world of stark diagonals.
There are three types of lines here. Those running from lower right towards upper left are the shadows of roadside trees and utility poles. The strong black and white lines running up from the lower middle of the frame towards the top right corner are the road’s pale kerb and gutter and, between the two, the black shadow of the kerb on the gutter. And finally there are the road markings, a thin, dashed white line along the middle of the road at upper left, and other dashed lines, at a bus stop, towards upper right.
Click onto the “early morning” tag (below) to see more images from the early hours of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.
Technique: TG-5 at 65mm (equiv); 800 ISO; spot metering; Lightroom, starting at the Camera Vivid profile; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Antique Plate 1 preset; south Bristol; 22 June 2020.
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June 21, 2020 13 Comments
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Aquatic tortoise at the Hippo Pools, Nairobi National Park, Kenya; Oct 1979.
This colour slide has been converted to monochrome because this is a graphic image, its all about structure, and this is best shown in mono.
There are three compositional ingredients. First and most prominent are the sunlit trunks of the fallen tree, which make a bold texture right across the image. Then there is oval area of sunlit water. Finally, there is the tortoise, which is at a compositional strong point on the conjunction of the picture’s thirds and also within the halo of the milky, sunlit water.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window – recommended.
Technique: OM-1 with 75-150 Zuiko lens at 150mm; Agfa CT18 colour slide film, rated at 64 ISO; converted to mono with Silver Efex Pro.
THE ARCHIVE KENYA SERIES
I’m re-posting photographs that I took in Kenya over 30 years ago. You can find more context here . Click onto the “Archive Kenya” tag (below) to see more of these film images from Kenya.
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