Looking at – and seeing – the world
June 20, 2017 10 Comments
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Starlings are flustered and scattered as a Carrion Crow flies in amongst them; Tadham Moor, on the Somerset Levels; 1 Nov 2013.
There is another image from these moments here.
Technique: D800 with 80-400 Nikkor lens at 400mm; 1600 ISO; Silver Efex Pro’s High Structure Harsh preset.
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June 18, 2017 8 Comments
I’ve just put out a post urging readers of my blog to take advantage of Google’s free offer of the Google Nik Collection digital photography plug-ins. I waxed especially lyrical about the Silver Efex Pro 2 program for creating black and white images, and said that very many images produced by the program can be found on this blog. Well, here is one – I hope you enjoy it. (And there are others in recent posts here, here and here).
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Inquisitive as ever, out on Tealham Moor, on the Somerset Levels; 29 Aug 2013.
My ongoing warm feelings for cows. The main subject is making a dive for my shiny lens – I fired and jumped back just before his wet muzzle engulfed it. The expression of the next animal right is interesting – distinctly doubtful and censorious. Maybe he read my thoughts about gravy and roast potatoes …
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: D700 with 12-24 Sigma lens at 18mm; 800 ISO; Silver Efex Pro 2’s Fine Art Process preset.
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June 9, 2017 6 Comments
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Carrion Crow perched in a fallen tree; Tadham Moor, south of Wedmore, on the Somerset Levels; 31 Mar 2014.
Early in the day, I pulled bleary eyed into the Magic Carpark, stumbled out of the car – and saw this crow. Praying that it wouldn’t move, and all fingers and thumbs, I readied the camera, turned and – it was still there! In fact it stayed there for sometime.
The tree is a casualty of the recent severe flooding. It was probably not standing vertically before, but then its roots had been able to find sufficient purchase in the soil. But, saturate that soil with floodwater for many weeks and turn it into something like blancmange or wet rice pudding, and the roots were simply not up to the task of keeping the great bulk of trunk and branches above them upright.
I went for a pure silhouette, with the sky completely burnt out, for simplicity – a Minimalist approach. To me, the few branches entering the frame at upper right serve to balance the composition. The adding of a blue tone takes the scene further away from reality.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: D800 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 300mm; 800 ISO; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Classic Portrait preset, and adding a Cyanotype tone.
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June 7, 2017 12 Comments
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Misty morning on Tadham Moor, on the Somerset Levels; 10 Apr 2014.
A typical Levels scene. The water-filled ditch forms the boundary of the grassy field on the left of the shot. Immediately left of the prominent tree, a little bridge across the ditch allows access to the field. The actual field gate is barely visible, at the left end of the two short lengths of fencing left of the tree. These short lengths of fencing prevent animals in the field from edging around the sides of the gate, and so gaining their freedom via the bridge.
A single track, tarmac road, Totney Drove, is just out of sight on the right of the shot, at the top of the low bank immediately right of the tree.
I was first attracted by the tree’s reflection, but I also like the thin mistiness, both back behind the tree, and above the water in the ditch. And the cloud above the tree helps the composition, being far preferable to having featureless sky there.
Technique: D700 with 70-300 Nikkor at 70mm; 200 ISO; Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Full Dynamic Harsh preset.
UPDATE: I will never stop loving this image, its as simple as that.
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April 8, 2017 4 Comments
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Close in with a male Mute Swan. The large black knob above the base of the bill shows this to be an adult male, a cob.
Most of the bird was bathed in bright sunlight, and spot metering overexposed the highlights below its head. Some very vague traces of its body are still visible, at upper right and lower left. These would be easy to remove, but they’re left in to provide (a very little!) context.
The first of these bird still life images, with context, is here: 1
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto that larger image to enlarge it again.
Technique: X-T2 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 215mm (equiv); 1600 ISO; Lightroom, using Fuji’s Classic Chrome colour profile; Herriots Bridge, Chew Valley Lake, Somerset; 3 Apr 2017.
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April 7, 2017 11 Comments
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The first flushes of sunrise on 16th Dec 2016 – just before the shortest day of the year. I was heading towards the village of Mark, and looking eastwards across Binham Moor.
Composition: a noisy, grainy, blurry image – no more than an impression of what it was like being there. And what was it like being there? Well, it was ******* cold and, despite 1/250th and image stabilisation, I was lying across the outside of the car, hoping to high heaven that, shivering as I was, I could still hold the camera steady. Did I have a tripod with me? Yes. Could I be bothered to use it? Nope – but then that’s always the case! This image is very much a series of horizontal layers, one on top of the other, the darkness of the ground moving up, in a series of discreet steps, into the first welcome tints of the day.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto this enlarged image to enlarge it yet again.
Technique: D800 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 300mm; 25,600 ISO; 1/250th, wide open at f5.6; Lightroom.
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April 5, 2017 6 Comments
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Self-portrait with road chippings and dead leaves, along Swanshard Lane, north of Polsham, on the Somerset Levels; 24 Jul 2012.
Along Swanshard Lane, approaching Fenny Castle House, there is a large layby regularly used by the local council’s road maintenance department for the storage of bulk quantities of chippings and other road materials. As I passed by yesterday the sun was slanting over the great mounds of debris, interesting shadows and textures were all around and the whole affair looked good for something wideangle.
Here my shadow falls on a mound of chippings rising up in front of me, some minor heaps produce an interesting line of shadows which my shadow intersects, and there are some richly coloured dead leaves around too. The slopes of the mound were not vertical, but they appear so in the photo – to me they appear to be rising up almost vertically in front of me and I like this effect.
This is a prime candidate for conversion to mono, but I think the bright colours of the dead leaves add something living and organic. I tried converting the shot to mono and then restoring the leaves’ colour, but the image looks better in straight colour.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: D700 with 16-35 Nikkor lens at 16mm; 320 ISO; manipulated with Capture NX2.
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April 4, 2017 8 Comments
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The day starts: star-rise, Our Star rising, Tadham Moor.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window, and click onto the larger image to enlarge it yet again.
Technique: X-T2 with 55-200 Fujinon lens at 305mm (equiv); 800 ISO; Lightroom; 27 Jan 2017.
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April 2, 2017 10 Comments
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Early morning on the Tealham-Tadham Moors, on the Somerset Levels south of Wedmore; 28 Aug 2013.
Rhyne (rhymes with seen) is the Somerset term for water-filled ditches that help drain the land and often, as here, act as field boundaries. This rhyne’s surface is covered in floating waterweed and, in the foreground, are the tall, pointed leaves of wild iris, which love these waterside locations.
The two prominent trees are in the fact the ends of two rows of such trees that line the undulating, single track, tarmac road just visible lower right of them. The two, pale sheets of corrugated iron set up against the rhyne’s bank on the right of the picture are held there by stout wooden stakes, in an attempt to prevent the road collapsing down into the mud and water.
The point here being that there is no solid rock supporting this landscape. Below this countryside are over 60 feet of sodden clays and peat – “rocks” easily demolished by your shovel if not by your bare hands – such that everything is soft, yielding and unstable. Stand beside this road as a tractor goes by and you are suddenly rising and falling as if on some rural trampoline, which can be quite shocking for those unused to it.
Click onto the image to open a larger version in a separate window.
Technique: D700 with Sigma 12-24 zoom lens at 12mm; 400 ISO; conversion to mono and split toning with Silver Efex Pro 2, starting at the Pinhole preset.
UPDATE: still a very favourite photo of mine, one that – in my eyes at least – will certainly stand the test of time. No, it by no means depicts reality, but it is about a small, out of the way area of countryside that has a permanent place deep within me and, visually, it forcefully turns me on. Technicalities? Well, this image owes much to Silver Efex Pro 2 processing software, it would probably not have ended up looking like this without SEP2. Reading about the photographic world, it emerges that SEP2 is very, very widely used by those with a love for black and white imagery. And the other thing to mention here is my (now ancient) Sigma 12-24 zoom, which has facilitated this angle of view which is far wider than the human eye can achieve. I call this lens ancient and, in digital terms it is – I first started using it with film cameras, shooting colour transparencies that I presented in slideshows – which maybe dates me a bit! But since those far off days, Sigma has put this lens through two major updates, which have apparently improved image quality considerably. The only downside to that is the cost of the latest update, £1600, which is significantly more than the cost of my recently acquired Fujifilm supercamera, the X-T2! So I think I’ll just be sticking with my ancient 12-24 and, if it doesn’t give me “perfect” image quality, well, that’s just how it is – I’m not really into that degree of perfection, I don’t peer manically at pixels on screen, I’m more interested in the content of images, be it graphic or, sometimes, narrative.
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February 22, 2017 11 Comments
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Looking east along Tealham Moor Drove, the faintly seen track at lower left, as sunrise colours start high in the sky above the Somerset Levels.
Technique: it was dark! The human eye is a wonderful camera, able to see in low light levels, but it was clear that most things here were still heavily engulfed by the gloom. And when I raised the camera to my eye – WOW! – even allowing the brightening sky to influence the reading, 25,600 ISO still only gave me 1/140th, wide open at f4.8 . So, working handheld as always, image stabilisation helped, as did the fact that this camera is mirrorless, so that it has no mirror slap – there is more on mirror slap here. Many photographers prefer not to use their lenses wide open due to reduced sharpness and definition, but I always go for it – if the light conditions demand it (and also if I’m looking for as narrow as possible a depth of focus). The bottom line being that its far, far better to be left with an image that is blurred and/or grainy, than to be left with no image at all. This is a part of the great and ongoing debate about the respective importance of the technical quality of images on the one hand – sharpness, definition, colour rendition, white balance, etc. – and image content and atmosphere on the other. I’m 101% with the importance of content and atmosphere. Compositionally, the faint lines of the track and the much brighter, water-filled ditch lead the eye towards that single tall tree – and I’ve used this same composition, in this same place, before.
There are other images from this bitterly cold morning here (with context), here, here, here, here and here. Each will open in a separate window.
Click onto this post’s image to open a larger version in a separate window, and then click onto this larger version once more.
Technique: X-T2 with 55-200 Fujifilm lens at 305mm (equiv); 25,600 ISO; Lightroom; 27 Jan 2017.
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