This is another image from our weekend with the family in Lynmouth, North Devon. We arrived first, on a rather grey, late February afternoon. The light was going, but we just had time for a very quick walk down from our rented cottage into Lynmouth. This first image from a Lynmouth series is looking up the River Lyn from the road bridge. Since the light was going and the colour image was a bit ‘flat’, I thought it would be good to try another B&W image. It was another chance to play with the newly acquired NIK collection. This time I picked a B&W preset from the HDR Efex Pro 2 tool and applied it to a single exposure. Apart from the ‘halo’ between the sky and the treeline, I was quite pleased with the result after I had made some fine adjustments. I should have taken time to remove the halo, but time is in short supply at the moment.
Our cottage was a couple of ‘zig zags’ up the road on the left hand side of the picture. We needed to do ‘3 point turns’ to get around the corners.
I hope to continue posting images from Lynmouth, but maybe not as a continuous series.
About a month ago, we were lucky enough to spend a weekend with our eldest son and family, at a cottage in Lynmouth, North Devon. On the way there, we took a scenic route along the coast of North Somerset and I snapped this groyne at Blue Anchor Bay.
Initial thoughts on the image were not promising, but today I was looking for something to try out Silver Efex Pro 2, now that Google have kindly made it a free download. I stumbled on this one, and found the program pretty user friendly. I chose one of the presets which gave this ‘grainy’ look, boosted the contrast a little more and arrived at this.
I think it is much more pleasing to my eye that the original colour image.
Groyne at Blue Anchor Bay Groyne at Blue Anchor Bay
Maybe it is an overly simple shot, being no more than a row of old wooden posts, leading off to the water, and eventually to the coast of Wales in the distance. There are a few Gulls on the shoreline, and the grainy processing has done them no favours, but I still quite like the final result.
There would have been many alternative ways to present this shot that would have proved more attractive to some eyes, perhaps on a different day to my eyes, but this is today’s effort.
I’ve been away for a very long time. Many of my images have been held on Flickr, but I am reviewing whether I can continue to afford my subscription. I have, therefore, been investigating alternatives. I’ve republished this post using one of those alternatives. Being away from WordPress for so long hasn’t helped and nor has being poorly for a bit.
It’s been a long time since my last post, a very long time at nearly a full year (now much more). It seems to have been difficult to find the time. To be fair, we have been quite busy, with other priorities and this state will continue for a while. I have, however, always enjoyed blogging and intend to carry on. I can only hope that some of my blogging friends are still out there, and spot my attempt at a restart.
I’m not going to spend too long on this post, otherwise I may not get going again.
This is just a few of the shots that I took along the south bank of the Thames when Dee and I visited our youngest son back in January. I won’t, on this occasion, write about the images. I’m just trying to remember how to produce a blog post, and WordPress have changed things a bit!
Under Tower Bridge
Standing
Multi-Tasking
Walking the Dog
Sharp Building
The way to St Paul’s
Across the River
Across the River (B&W)
Home Sweet Home
Pilgrim Father
London Skyline
Bridging the Thames
Lines & Grids
This was just for practice. I will blog again soon.
I didn’t really have any intentions to photograph the recent Solar Eclipse, and as it turned out, this was just as well. Our home town was fairly densely covered with cloud and mist throughout the period when the eclipse should have been visible. There were, however, a few opportunities to glimpse this event through very brief gaps in the cloud and mist and here are a couple of shots, just to prove it.
I’d already decided that I needed a 10 stop ND on the camera for safety, and I didn’t really want to use my E-M1, just in case the sun was bright and might damage the sensor. For this reason, my first shot was with only a 12-60 mm lens, which ND filter fitted. Much too heavy a crop was required, but it was only a minute or two before the maximum eclipse here so I thought it worth keeping.
After that, the fog settled in until about 10-15 minutes before the eclipse was completely over. There was then a very brief opportunity, by which time I had fitted a longer lens and held the ND filter in front of it.
Not good photos, but at least they remind me that I did see the solar eclipse.
Frankly, ‘street photography’ terrifies me. That’s why I haven’t posted much which could be considered of this genre. Last night was the judging of the 4th of this seasons Camera Club competitions, and the topic for ‘prints’ was ‘street photography. Oh happiness, or perhaps more accurately, oh hell!
I didn’t have much expectation of success, particularly because I hadn’t been able to take any street photos especially for the competition. This had left me rummaging around in my archives for some images to use, and there wasn’t much there. I had some, which I really classed as ‘travel’, so I dismissed them, only to find that an image which I would have put in that category earned a place in the results. Live and learn! It was a great image anyway. In the end, I entered a couple of images which I had taken at the Bemondsey Street Festival, a while back, one of which has been seen on this blog. I wasn’t hopeful.
The one which I had published in a previous post, in colour, I printed in black and white for this competition, thinking that it might give more of a ‘street’ feel. The judge said that he wished that I had printed it in colour. Live and learn! To be fair, the image was a little lacking in street ambience, and I did prefer it in colour myself.
The second image that I entered, was of a girl singer, performing in the street. I’d always liked the image, but it did have a few too many distractions in it. I have a very limited Photoshop ability and was unable to get rid of the distractions properly in the time that I gave myself. Always last minute when producing for a competition! In the end, I cropped it heavily (not appropriate for ‘street photography’), and entered it anyway. There were some particularly bright distractions in the background that I hadn’t noticed until I had printed it. They fell just in front of the singer’s face and did spoil the picture, having similar tones to her face. The image would never have made it in this competition because of the tight crop, and failed as I suspected that it would.
It spite of what I have just said, the judge for this competition was excellent, and made some very valid points about all of the images entered. I certainly learned from the experience. After all these words, here is just one image for this post. It is a further rework of the Street Singer, and I still quite like it. I have now managed to tone down the distractions a bit.
I haven’t posted anything for a month, and I have also struggled to find time to visit the blogs that I follow, so the first thing that I must do is apologise to all my blogging friends. To be honest, I suspect that the next few months will also find me with little time, so any posts will be even more sporadic than usual. Keeping up with the ‘reader’ may also be a challenge. I did however get the chance to go out with the camera for a few hours this week, and largely because I thought the weather would be better in that direction, we popped down to Corfe Castle for a ‘breath of fresh air’. As it happened, the weather may have been better at home, but at least the weather stayed dry, but cold. We hadn’t been around the castle for many years, so we took a quick look, but being ‘half term’, it was pretty crowded with kids, swarming all over it, so not much in the way of photos. It was cold up in the castle, so next stop was a warming cuppa, after which we did a lap of the village, ending up at the Railway Station. We had never visited this before, and were pleasantly surprised to find that there was one train running on the Swanage Railway because it was ‘half term’. We had a wander around, chatting to the Station staff, and waited for the 15:20 from Swanage to come through. Here are a few photos, best viewed by clicking on the first one and displaying a slide show.
Thanks for taking a look. I hope you will come back again when I post some more of my photos.
Sculpture by the Lakes is a landscaped park in Dorset, owned by Simon Gudgeon, who is a well known British contemporary sculptor. This park provides a showcase for his work.
Last Saturday I was able to spend the afternoon there with Dee, and our friends Susanne and Ed. I did, of course, try to take a few photographs. The weather was cold and dry, but I still found it quite difficult to produce the quality of photograph that I wanted. I’m going to put it down to the cold freezing my poor old brain. Still, it was a useful opportunity to, hopefully, learn from my mistakes.
I haven’t been able to find time to post, or visit blogs recently. I’ve got a little time available today so I thought that I would post a few photos from that afternoon, even though I wish they were better. Any artistic value in these images should, of course, be attributed to Simon Gudgeon and his wife, Monique, who is responsible for the gardens in which the Sculptures are set.
Here is a ‘gallery’, best viewed as a slide show, by clicking on the first image and then using the carousel. I hope that these images may inspire you to visit Sculpture by the Lakes.
A visit to the Sculpture by the Lakes site will provide details of this excellent Sculpture Park as well as some images which are much better than mine. I’m looking forward to revisiting the park soon, to try to improve on these shots.
This one continues from Monochrome Moments – 4, it also having been taken in the dunes of Fuerteventura. This was a snapshot taken because of the potential appeal of the intersecting diagonals of the sand ripples and stick. Monochrome conversion was again made with Topaz, and I also chose to retain a ‘warm’ look to the image because it seemed in keeping with the scene. I did consider a more ‘stark’ B&W conversion, but didn’t like any of my results as much.
This is another of those rather minimalist images which, when you look back, you wonder whether it was really worth taking. Having played with it a bit, I think it probably was, just.
Update!
I wasn’t really happy with this image so I took some advice from Adrian Lewis. I’ve increased the contrast a bit (quite a bit), and the result is below. I could probably go still further but think this may be enough. I didn’t do this before because I am always a little nervous of ‘overprocessing’.
Dave's Photo Musings 