week 42: Macro!

Its been quite a while since my last post, and counting this one, I'm now exactly 10 weeks behind (or maybe 9 if I can find something else nice before the weekend) This project started out as being a year long thing, but I'm actually quite enjoying this and will probably continue ... as I may have mentioned before :-) But it will be a when I have a nice photo to post, which will hopefully still be a roughly weekly or fortnightly occurance.

I have been struggling to find something to inspire me for a while now (as if you didn't guess that by now), but my wonderful husband gave me macro extension tubes for Christmas and so I've been playing with those. If you don't know what macro extension tubes are, they are essentially just empty tubes that are placed between the camera and the lens to increase the distances between the lens and the focus point, which in turn reduces the distance to the focus point in front of the lens. In other words, it allows me to focus on closer stuff and therefore take photos of much smaller objects.

This photo is of the stamen of a geranium flower. I didn't even realize they had such intricate stamen until I started looking for something to take a macro photo of! Yes there are some water droplets too - another thing I've been playing with, but to be honest of all the photos I've taken this one had the best focus. I have learned that even at a reasonably small aperture of f22 (the smallest my lens will go), the depth of field is no more than a millimeter or two. My dioptre is set for my right eye, but even so the focus seems just a tiny bit off, so that will take further work too. But it is a nice exciting thing to be playing with and I expect to be taking more macro photos in the next couple of days.

For interest here is the same geranium flower from the top - its not a pretty flower, but it is winter and it was all that was available.

week 41: Jurassic?

We've been having some fantastic mist, well that is to say great if you're a photographer, not so great if you're waiting for your plane to leave as I've heard there was some flights grounded due to heavy fog. But since I didn't have a flight booked anywhere I managed to get out early enough one morning to actually get some photos with mist in. If I gotten up earlier that would probably have been even better, but I like sleeping in, especially when its cold.

This photo was taken in the Epping Forest close by my house. I was really taken in by the brown ferns, somehow I've never noticed them before and many not really have now except for the fact that I wanted to plant some ferns and discovered not all ferns are evergreen. I'm sure to most of you this is all obvious, but it came as quite a shock to me.

Anyway, I quite like how in this photo its actually the dead plants that add colour. The combination of the dead trees in the back, the ivy on the front tree, the large ferns and the slight mist made me think of Jurrasic Park - hence the title.

I had to replace the sky as it was completely blownout, but honestly the sky did look very much like that on the day I took the photo. This photo was taken at ISO 800, and it appears way too grainy to me at any level larger than what is displayed here.I tried some noise-reduction, but to make it as smooth as I would like removed so much detail that a subsequent sharpen could not replace that I ended up having to scale back quite a bit on that.

I'm hoping its not too dark on everyone else's monitor. I've recently printed my first photos and they're all a little darker than what it looks like on my monitor (and less saturated) I'm still trying to work out if that's because I should have converted to a different colourspace myself before printing or if it means my monitor is not calibrated correctly.

week 40: Time for something abstract

I did not take a single photo this past week, ok maybe that's not entirely true, but I haven't taken a single photo I'd be willing to put on the blog. So I looked through my old photos, I seem to go through splurges when I take lots of photos I like, but then feel I can't use them all because of the one-a-week rule. I guess I'll have to change my rules again, besides it was about time I put on an abstract one again.

This one was taken in Cape Town from the Chapman's Peak viewing point and is a sunset photo, but not just another sunset (at least I hope not!) I love the flowing clouds, the soft palette  and the general relaxed feel of this one. I'm sure some of it has to do with the memories of when it was taken - it was a lovely evening.

I think this one would have worked quite well with the silhouette of a sail boat or something on the water, but then offcourse it would not be an abstract, so I will leave it as it is and go out looking for something to shoot for next week.

week 39: View in the city

I love going outdoors and taking pictures of nature, but I am and always will be a city girl. And since I don't much like taking pictures of people that means quite often I'm finding my memory card full of images of buildings. Fortunately I'm fond of architecture so that's quite all right. And I really love how, in London, you have the the old and the new side by side.

This photo is a bit more of a graphical type thing - I was struck by the curve leading to the glass building. Now I've tried to do something like this many times before, but the light was never quite right to show it all off and then on my way home on evening, everything was the way I wanted. I still want to find a way of taking a nice photo of the yellow building by itself, but in this shot I think it works because the colour draws your eye into the photo and the glass building itself then draws the eye up, or something like that. I thought about cloning the lamp post out, but in the end I decided to leave it as it is very much part of what the city looks like in that bit.

week 38: Swan lake

Ok, maybe another misleading title as this is not a photo of ballet dancers.... This photo was taken on the same walk as the Early morning by the pond post. I did not adjust the colour at all - it really was a sort of
pinky-orangy colour as the mist evaporated in the early sun.

I went to the Columbia road flower market this morning in the hopes of some nice photos to use as I don't really like any of the stuff I took earlier in the week that much. The flower market was a bit of a disappointment only about 20-25 stalls and most of them sold exactly the same stuff - either cut flowers (which were very beautiful - tulips in October!) or winter plants which seems to be variations of cyclamen, winter pansies and some berried bushes. Hence the photo taken last weekend.

I also got a shot of some gulls a little earlier than this one. Here in England for the first time I saw swans and gulls on the same body of water and it seems quite a common thing. But I'm glad the swan was by itself here as gulls just don't imply the same tranquillity to me.

Only 14 weeks to go, though I am quite enjoying this so I may very well just keep putting photos on the blog after the 52 weeks are done.

week 37: Early haloween

Yes I know its not been a week since the last one, but I figured I've missed out on enough weeks that I can "make one up" while I've got a photo I want to share.

This was my entry for a photo-manipulation weekly "contest" on flickr. Its the first time I've entered, though not the first one I've started doing, but I managed to complete this entry before time run out (I made it by about 4 hours!) Still I was very pleasantly surprised to be awarded the winner of the week which means I got to choose the starting photo for the next week's contest.

I had a lot of fun with it. Just for comparison sake, here's the original photo I started from

 So as you can see I had to make several changes, but I used much less photos than I did in the previous photo manipulation that I put on my blog. Just the pumpkin, the moon and a brush for the bats. For those of you who don't know programs like photoshop or gimp, a brush is an image that you can use over and over - it comes from the round brushes you get in all such programs to start with, think of ms paint's pencil tool where you could choose how thick a line you draw. Esentially all you're doing is drawing one dot after another and so brushes specially modified images that you can drag around, or as I did if you click only once you get a single instance of the image. Offcourse you can use any colour with your brush, but I figured black would be best for bats.

So sure its too early for haloween, but I think the making of this picture will replace this year's pumpkin carving attempt.

week 36: Early morning at the pond

I originally intended to go on a "Fungi foray" today, which was held by the Epping Forest Visitor Centre, but when I phoned on Monday to book I was told its full up. So not to be outdone I decided to read up about mushrooms and do it myself. Got up at 5am to make sure I catch the early light (sun rise was just after 6, but I still had to get there) and set off. I forgot that sunrise at 6:12 means it won't get light till after that. Hmm, I also forgot that if you're going to walk in the Epping Forest (which is filled with Holly!) you need to wear jeans not some other thin pants (not to mention that it is cold early in the morning and jeans would no doubt have been warmer)

You may have noticed that this week's picture is not a mushroom, in fact I don't think there's any sort of fungus in this photo. The thing is, I've discovered that I'm not really that good at finding fungi at all, in fact the only one I found was after I've given up the search and I literally stumbled over it (well over the rock close to it) while looking for something else.

Meanwhile the sun did rise and it was a beautiful morning, and seeing as I was right by the pond, I found this beautiful scene. 7 Different exposures and some fiddling with Photomatrix and here we are. Still not quite as spectacular as what I saw, but my tree/forest type photos is getting better I think.

As for my mushrooms, well I did take a photo of the one I found, but it wasn't a really exciting mushroom so it'll probably get relegated to my taken-but-ignored photos.

week 35 : Lost in the garden

I fully admit that the real art in this picture is the making of a ceramic garden snail that cute.  My mom has a lovely collection of garden critters - this one, seen from the front is actually quite a happy smiley fellow, but I really liked how in the wild strawberry patch, from this angle, he suddenly starts looking scared and lost. I think its the darkness of the shadows, and the eyes off course :-) Don't worry he's safely (and happily) back in his usual spot by now.

Not a hugely exciting post this week and not a lot to say about the photo either, but I have found a building with amazing magenta light which I have taken test photos of and will try for a proper shoot tomorrow after work, so hopefully next week will be a bit better.

week 34: Story of Adoption

This week is a bit photo intensive, but it is a blog about photography after all, so I think its ok :-)

This set has been a work in progress for 2-3 months. That's quite a long time to work on only 5 photos, I hear you say, and its true, but I have learned a lot from it, not the least of which is, getting the right props for your photo is not always as easy as you might think.

The original idea came to me when I was going through a stage where I just wasn't inspire to take photos and none of the sites that has great photos which usually inspire me had any effect on me. This was quite worrying as I've bought a new dslr only a couple of months before. But I came across a flickr group which focuses on story telling through photography, specifically they want stories told in 5 frames and so the challenge began.

I had a ton of soft toys in my house and some of them will probably find their way into my photography at some point, but these 5 puppies were just what was prescribed, now all I needed to do is think of a story that contains 5 puppies. That wasn't all that hard to do either because I am a supporter of animal charities in general (and I would recommend that anyone looking for a new pet adopt from one of the shelters rather than buying from a pet store - its better for the animal and in the long run works out cheaper for you too)

Oh, by now I hope you've worked out what the story is here.... I think the title should give it away, but if not, its all about a puppy (I call all dogs puppies and all cats kittens)  who gets hit by a car, gets rescued and taken to a shelter and then finally gets adopted into a new loving home.

Ok, photo wise I have tried to do as little editing to these as possible.

The first one was probably the most challenging, I bought a toy car from the local pound store, but getting the setup done just the way I wanted took quite a bit of planning. And though the "headlights" (and the numberplate) are edited in, the actual lighting on the puppy and the ground was done in camera with the help of my very patient mom-in-law and a torch.

The second one,which was actually the one I did first, was another one which required quite a lot of retakes and adjustments to get it to look the way I wanted. The window was cut out of a cereal box, but then getting it to stand where I wanted without any supports showing in the photos was my first difficulty. Next I had to get the light at exactly the right place to get the length of "moonlight" to shine in without shining over the to of said cardboard box. I would have liked the window itself not to be quite so on the edge of the photo, but I do like how the negative space focuses the eye on our lonely puppy.

My husband suggested the newspapers for the third and fourth one as being cuttings from a real newspaper, but only selecting the bits with the smallest print so it looks more believe-able, which I think worked quite well. The food bowls was made from the tops of Berrocca tubes (the "food" is the stuff in the top that's supposed to absorb moisture).

The fourth photo is the reason this set took so long, not because it was that difficult, but because I could not find a doll's hand anywhere that I liked and eventually had to wait until I went to visit my folks again to get my Sindy doll from when I was little. Flying all the way from London to South Africa for a prop may seem a bit of overkill, but I promise that was not the only (or indeed the main) reason for my visit.

And the final photo was taken with the use of sosatie (skewer) sticks which I used to put the "ball" in place and have the puppy in the background look like he was landing from a jump. The sticks off course was edited out, but nothing was edited in. I'm a little in two minds about whether the ball is too bright, but since it was that bright when I took the actual photo I decided to leave it as it is.

Whee - very long post this time, next week should be back to only one photo though. I'd love to hear if you thought the set worked and the story came through.

week 33: Moon and clouds

Usually when I fly these days its to South Africa, an 11 hour flight and I like to sit on the isle so I can get up. But this holiday I also flew a 2 hour domestic flight and I got the window seat. While I have several badly composed photos which include large parts of the aeroplane window, by the time we flew back, I got the hang of it. And I was fortunate enough to fly on a day when the moon was visible during the day and there was actually some clouds.

I adjusted the contrast and colours of the photo and dodged the moon until it was bright enough and then performed the all important crop to get the proportions right.

Speaking of moons - I was also fortunate enough to see and photograph a red moon while I was there (this one was at night)


A red moon like this is likely to be caused by large amounts of dust in the air which scatters the shorter wavelengths- for more information have a look at http://www.universetoday.com/19969/red-moon/ - their photo is much better - probably taken through a telescope or at least a much better telescopic lens. My photo has not been colour adjusted or contrast changed at all. It means its a bit dimmer than I remember, but it is 100% authentic.

Week 32: Panorama

So, I'm back from my holiday and though I have many many photos to work through, I wanted to get my panorama done first. Last time I spoke about taking photos that's different from what they human eye would see and though a panorama is probably closer to what you would see if you were up at the viewing point where this was taken from, I still think it qualifies. Unfortunately I can't make this image much larger in the blog because it won't fit, but I'm sure you get the idea :-)

Chapman's peak is a mountain on the southern coast of South Africa. Its got a pass all around it on the sea side, which means its got some of the most incredible views of that part of the country, especially as the sun sets over the sea. The main viewing point a little way off the road itself is great for taking photos, but also just to sit and enjoy the beautiful light show. Off to the side is the town and bay of Houtbaai of which these photos was taken.

I used a program called Hugin for the stitching. It worked quite nicely once I figured out how to turn its auto exposure compensation off. The leftmost part is exposure fused to ensure some detail of the sea, mountains as well as the sky shows, but that means the exif data on exposure is incorrect.

I'll try and put another post on sometime this week, before the nice relaxed feeling of having had a holiday completely wears off.

Week 31: Otter

I have had a sudden realisation about my photography earlier today. I realised, considering most of the images I find inspiring, and the fact that a lot of my "reasonably good" photos don't appeal all that much to me. I don't actually like images that look exactly like what I would have seen if I was there. And the more I think about it the more I realise that is true not just for photography, but for the way of all visual art I enjoy. That is why, most of the time I would prefer a slightly surreal art piece over a say a perfect visual copy of a landscape. The kind of photography that appeals to me has enough of reality in that it seems real, but isn't quite.

Right now for my photos that means making use of things like shallow depth of field, long exposures and post processing. Take for example this week's photo, by all right's its not a great photo of the otter - the animal is not fully in the frame and there's lots of "irrelevant" bits, yet it is one of my favourites of my zoo trip and I think the reason is exactly because of the background, the otter is obviously the main subject, but there is now way while I was standing there looking at him that I would have seen the background going slightly blurry and the bokeh. That doesn't mean I'm going to disregard all the "rules of photography" or not learn as much as I can about it, but keeping this in mind will allow me to add my vision to the image, to create art rather than a recording.

I'm hoping this new way of looking at my photography will lead to more growth in my photos going forward. But for the two weeks I'm away so I'll post again when I get back

week 30: European wolf

We had another bank holiday this Monday past (which I'm really grateful for). I spent it going to the zoo to take photos. I always said that I didn't want to go take photos at the zoo until I had a DSLR, but then after I got mine I still didn't go because I discovered to my disgust that the London Zoo didn't have the animals I wanted to photograph. Ok, so maybe I was expecting too much - it is a zoo in the middle of the biggest city in the UK. And I've probably been spoiled being brought up in South Africa where there are lots of large zoo's and safari parks etc. Anyway, point is one of the animals I really wanted a photo of was a grey wolf. So I had to wait until I could spend 3 hours travelling to the right zoo and another 3 back.

The photo is not hugely exciting as these things go. I accept that. I have come to learn that animal photography even in a relatively enclosed space like a zoo requires huge amounts of patience. Maybe if I spent the entire day watching only the wolves I would have gotten that photo I wanted of one of them emerging from the den (the dark hole at the top right of the picture) I however was impatient and had at least 4 other animals to see still, so after an hour I left. My 70-300 mm lens, even at max didn't enlarge quite as much as I thought, but with photo's like these I can't complain. Now I just have to work on my composition (and my timing!)

week 29: Another graveyard

Not far from my office is an old cemetery. It was used at one point to bury people who were independent of the Church of England. It apparently has lots of famous people in, none of whom I've ever heard (with the exception of William Blake). And as far as we can tell it has never been consecrated. Once it was full (120 000 people got buried in the 4 hectares here!) it was then turned into a public garden. These days its a lovely place to go for a lunchtime stroll. There are beautiful trees and even some benches to sit on and you can often find city workers having lunch or mobile conversations there and it is also a popular place for runners. The graves are all fenced off so the public can not actually walk between them. But if you go there at non-peak-time, its actually a very peaceful place.

I don't know who this gravestone belonged to, but it seemed to command a space to itself and on a day like that (overcast and rainy) the coloured leaves just really stand out. I spent a lot of time trying to do things to this photo and eventually discarded them all except for a slight white balance change. I'm hoping that's a sign that I'm finally getting the hang of my new camera, but I guess only time will tell.

week 28: Moth

I found this little guy on my back door window the other evening. Sometimes you see something and the light is just right. So where normally I would not look at any of the various moths that come into my house twice, on this fine evening with the back lighting, it just turned out nice. I'm also loving how my new camera (yes I will probably call my canon "my new camera" for at least a year) can bring the depth of field down so much that I can only tell what the background is because I know what it was :-)

I was toying with the idea of adding a texture to this or creating an artificial frame, but at the end of the day I think I like it just cropped a little like this.

Week 27: Photo manipulation

When I started this blog, the intention was to only post photos, but as I have been learning and growing I found myself more interested in what is called photo manipulation. That is not to say that I won't be taking photos and enjoying them just for themselves any more, just that my horizon's have broadened and when I feel the desire to create an image that I cannot setup in the real world for whatever reason I now have other options.

This one has a bit of history behind it. I've been doing a couple of photo manipulation tutorials. One of them had you create a beautiful background with arches through which you could see storm clouds and then in the foreground was a woman with her hands raised to the sky. Now I like the background, but the woman did very little for me so I decided to find a substitute. The same tutorial alter on had a small urn with water flowing out of it, which inspired me to play with filling the floor level with water just to see, but then that triggered the question, why would the building be filled with water? And the answer is off course the broom with its bucket. 

For those of you who don't understand this at all, have a look at Disney's 'The Magician's Apprentice'. Its a lovely little story about an apprentice who had to do all the chores, including carrying buckets of water to fill up a tub. The magician was not around and the apprentice thought it was unfair that he had to do this if they could just use magic, so he took the magician's hat and want and magicked a broom to carry the buckets. Unfortunately once the broom started, the apprentice could not make it stop and it kept carrying buckets of water and pouring them out into the tub. The tub could off course only take so much and eventually the whole building was flooded. Various things happened, but in the end the magician came back and fixed it all and the apprentice was back to carrying buckets of water himself. Very cute and worth watching!

Back to my photo, I created this broom with its bucket, but I just could not make it work with the arched background of my tutorial. But it was too much fun to just relegate to a corner of my hard drive, and so I went out looking for a background to suit it.

I mostly used photos by other people who have provided those images as free to use stock photos or under the Creative Commons licence and so everything you here has been derived from the photo's (and links) below.

* Broom by 1024greenstreet

* Bucket by Katie Cordrey

* Stairs - PirateLotus-Stock (on deviant art) <a href="http://piratelotus-stock.deviantart.com/art/Stairs-stock-139642387" rel="nofollow">piratelotus-stock.deviantart.com/art/Stairs-stock-139642387</a>

* Texture for red carpet by tassie.sim

* Winged Lion - my own photo
* Wood grain texture - my own photo

* Fire and water brushes - Obsidian Dawn (on deviant art)  <a href="http://redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Flames-Fire-Photoshop-Brushes-17721488?q=boost:popular+fire+brushes&qo=0" rel="nofollow">redheadstock.deviantart.com/art/Flames-Fire-Photoshop-Bru...</a> and <a href="http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&global=1&q=water+brushes#/dm8agx" rel="nofollow">browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&global=1&...</a>

I hope this has made at least one person smile.

week 26: Abstract building reflections

Week 26 - half way there, but this week I'm cheating (oh and yes I'm a bit late too). I have taken photos, just not many and none that I'm ready to display yet. But I am finding myself drawn to photo manipulation, so this week I did several tutorials. I ended up with a few half-finished pieces, but all of them are missing something. Some of them will require me to go out and shoot what I'm missing others may just require more thought first. And I will hopefully be able to put one of them on here. Anyway to get back to this week's photo and why its cheating; its old, in fact a whole year old, but I'm going through all my old photos.

Nothing much technically about the photo - it was still captured with my Panasonic Lumix (like the first 3.5 months of this blog was) and I didn't need to do much in pp except lighten the shadows a bit.

Oh and I have a new photographic hero - Jean-Francois Rauzier. If you've got a couple of minutes looking and playing with his hyper-photos is absolutely amazing.

week 25: Warwick castle

After 6.5 years in the country I have finally managed to get myself to Warwick castle. Initially I booked tickets for last winter to go with my sister - they have some fun tours and stuff. But our winter visit got completely snowed out. We spent 7 hours stuck on a highway in the snow 3 days earlier and wasn't willing to try that again - if only I knew  back then it was so close to the rail station, but then again with trains in this country and snow... hmm probably better we didn't go back then. Anyway, back to last weekend's visit. It was lovely day, if a little hot. My Mom in law went with me and we  made the mistake of going up to the battlements. Ok, so they warn you its one-way and that it can be tiring. What they don't say is that the bloody stairwells are twisty and barely big enough to walk in - quite problematic for claustrophobic people, but we survived with nothing worse than severely tight muscles from clinging to every hand hold. We enjoyed the audio tours quite a lot and seen several other bits and pieces, including birds of prey of which despite me setting my camera to continuous shooting I got no decent photos of.

This photo was one of the earlier ones I took and the only one with reflections of the actual castle on the river Avon. Towards the back of the river you can see the old mill house. The castle fell into serious disrepair before being refurnished and turned into a tourist attraction, but most of the repairs are almost invisible and this is well worth a visit if you come to England and have a day or so to spare.

week 24: London at dusk

Hmm, I missed another one last week. To be honest I was (and still am) working on another photography project to tell a simple story using only images, but I've only done photos 2 and 3 and I really would like to do number 1 before I start posting them here, maybe next week if I've managed to do some more by then. Or maybe I'll do them all at once. Meanwhile I suspect this will become a project of taking and posting 52 pictures in about 13 or 14 months at the rate I'm going at the moment, but never mind.

This photo was taken on the way to the Docklands and Greenwich Festival where my Mom-in-law and I went to see Les Girafes, which was very cute. We had to changeover from one DLR line to another and fortunately had to cross the bridge over the tracks, otherwise I never would have seen this one. The windows are a touch dirty, but I still like the imagery and the colours. And then I discovered it would also fit in nicely in the DPS assignment for the week (vertical lines)

week 23: Cat in washing bin

I made it almost half way through before I have a picture of my cat. It's quite a bit further than I originally thought I'd get, but I'm quite happy to have this one here. She is now (if the home we adopted her from was correct), about 7.5 years old, but still very active and playful like a kitten at times. Here she was "exploring" the inside of our pop-up wash bin after I removed all the clothes for washing.

I really haven't done any editing on this photo apart from convert it to jpeg and the very slightest bit of sharpening and curves - my fastest edit for this project yet in under a minute :-) Maybe I'll get around to my designed photo next week, maybe not, we'll see how it goes.

Week 22: staircase

I'm trying a couple of different things here. This is my first real black&white, ie the first one I've desaturated completely. Its also the first on I've not cared too much about the grain, in fact I specifically didn't remove any noise at all. I would never do that in a colour photo, but it suites the mood I'm trying to create with this photo.

I took it last Saturday at the Sommerset House in London. I was a little disappointed with the visit, I guess I expected more judging from their website, but one or two of the spiral staircase photos came out nicely and I did get to see Ai Weiwei's Zodiac Heads so it wasn't a complete waste.

I've also come to realise that I am currently a reactive photographer, I take the photos that are there, but I can't say at the point where I press the button I actually "make" the photo as that would imply (to me at least) that I preplanned what it should look like. I imagine that is much easier to do when you work with models and you can direct the photo, but also with a still life and I haven't done any of those for ages, so I think for next week I'll see if I can come up with an interesting idea for a still life of some kind.

week 21: forray into street photography

Well technically this photo was also taken at the Chelsea flower show, but I've been spending so much time in post process on it that I think it counts. I'm finding that I'm quite interested in digital art, not just straight photography, but I must admit trying to clone out 4 people, an umbrella and a wineglass that could be seen through the arches took more time than I'd like. But even so I like the dreamy effect - I just wish Flickr would stop trying to sharpen my photos (the bit that looks like noise through the arches) It is also one of the very few photos I've ever taken of a person, in fact I think its the only photo I've ever taken with the express purpose of capturing a person (not including private snapshots of family and friends)

week 19&20: Chelsea flower show

This week past was the Chelsea Flower Show here in London and I finally managed to remember early enough this year to get a ticket. Quite a spectacle, but with the amount of people attending I suspect I saw more of the gardens properly on the BBC TV shows. Still I'm glad I went. I got some more ideas for my garden and even a couple of nice photos. Strange though that when I was narrowing down the photos I liked the top 5 did not contain any gardens/plants except some scenery backdrops. But then again the ornamental stalls held much more interest for me than most of the plant stalls and with the amount of people there I have no good shots of any special gardens.

Not that much to say photo-wise. The top one with the wire horses I cloned out the pathway on the right and in the bottom one I had to merge two exposures to get the sky the right colour. I thought afterwards I probably should have used a fill-flash - I need to work on that aspect a little.

Week 18: Abstract

Right, its about time for a guess-what-this-is photo. I found this amazing metal sculpture not even 5 minutes walk from Liverpool Street station. Now taking a nice side on photo (see below) of the sculpture in my mind shows nothing of my creativity, but just reflects that of the original sculptor, so I was looking of an interesting way of showing the beauty of this. I love the curves and shapes used, the semi-spiral design makes it into everything and the blue gems are just wonderful. I also liked how the little bits of rust is starting to colour the legs and contrasting with the blue glass.So this photo is of the knight's knee and lower leg with the horse's harness in the back and a bit of the spear. Bet you didn't think of that when you first saw the photo :-) 

This sculpture was commissioned to commemorate the Cnihtengild, which was apparently a group of 13 Knights from the 10th century. They were granted the piece of land on which the sculpture now stands. I'm not going to give exact directions of the piece of land since it doesn't fully make sense to me, and I know the London landmarks, except to say that  piece of land extended  "south to the Thames as far as a Horseman riding into the river at low tide can throw a lance". That just brings home how different things were.  Oh and the knights had to each fight 3 duels to be given this land, one duel above ground, one under ground and one on sea.

Below is a small photo of what the statue in full looks like

week 17: Chapel at Lincoln's Inn

I've learnt a new word, or more accurately I suppose, I've learned a new meaning for a word I knew. Here in London, the word Inn don't just refer to a place which rents accommodation and sells food to travellers, but also used to refer to large houses of important persons whose business brings them to town. These Inns could  house the magnates and their retinue. These buildings were not always occupied and due to their proximity to the (legal) courts, they were often used as shared accommodation for legal students while not in use by its owner. As time went by some of these Inns became places of legal education and 4 of them became known as the Inns of Court. 

This photo is of the vaulted open crypt under the chapel at Lincoln's Inn. So much of London's beauty lies in the incredible architecture and attention to detail on the older buildings. This chapel for example is almost 600 years old.

This photo has been perspective adjusted to correct the skewed right angle - happening because it was take from a side angle to get the vaulted roof to show through. But the stairs still shows it side on and the faces look to the left. I'm going to have to spend some more time working out how to fix all of that next time. Otherwise not much done, oh and I've dodged the darker areas on the inside to show more of the details.

week 16: Early morning sun rays

I've been wanting to take a picture of sun rays for quite some time, but apart from the occasional rays showing through the clouds which would invariably only appear when I'm on a train with dirty windows, I haven't had the opportunity to do so.

Arriving in South Africa it was grey and rainy, not quite what I hoped for and the weather prediction wasn't too promising either, but I did want to go out walking in a nature reserve with my dad as I always do and we picked the day it seemed most likely to get some sunshine. Got up early that morning to find a beautiful day with no rain cloud in sight. And as we were about to get in the car to go, I saw the sun streaking through the trees. I knew I wanted to get the wooden well my dad built in the picture too and not knowing how much time I had I didn't bother with my tripod. It turns out I only had about a 10 minute window, so it was a good thing too. 

I tried again the following day and though the sun shone, the air conditions must have been different because the sun rays just didn't quite show up like the first day. That was a pity because this time my tripod was all set up and I would have been able to bring down my ISO significantly. I also think this may have worked better if I had bracketed the exposure (on a tripod) to avoid the white blown out areas. As it was I did have to play with getting some more detail in the darker areas (thankfully I do shoot RAW).  But I do like how the trees frame it making it look a lot more secluded than the actual large garden lawn which is really there and for once I actually remembered to put some foreground interest in too.

week 15: Akasha (Snake warning!)

I'm doing this post a little different from usual because I know some people are sensitive about certain kind of photos, and I would hate to scare off any of my precious readers :-) So I'm going to do the writing bit first, put in a huge warning and then the picture in the hopes that you will have to scroll down to see it.

The below information is likely to change as soon as I've spoken to my sister to confirm seeing at this is her snake.

Akasha is a constrictor, though she is still quite small. She is approximately 1.5 years old and her beautiful red/orange colouring is due to the fact that she is an albino (hence also the red eyes). She gets fed once a week and when she's warmed up a little she is very active, we suspect this is why she is not growing as quickly as her partner who is very lazy.

I was fortunate enough to arrive when they were about to be fed. With smaller mice, she does not need to constrict to kill her prey and can just swallow it whole, but she did have to use her body to restrict the movement of the mouse until she had it in her mouth. The mouse in this photo was still too young to have had its eyes open, making it easy prey.

Photography wise, this was taken outside on an overcast day, the snake was confined to a glass tank and if I'd thought it through I could have gotten some nice reflections off the walls, but with 2 snakes in the same tank and a curious cat walking around the outside, I just didn't quite manage. Its something to keep in mind next time I go visit them though.

WARNING: PICTURE OF SNAKE EATING A MOUSE

week 14: Butterflies

Yes, I missed another week. This time I didn't even have a processed photo I could put up later, so my project will now end one week later. On the up side I've finally got myself a DSLR and I'm absolutely loving it. There is no way I would have gotten this clarity and this shallow a depth of field on my previous camera. Off course it does take some getting used to, since I'm now using an optical view finder rather than a digital lcd screen, the only indication that my exposure is off is a small flickering number at the bottom which is quite easy not to notice.... I've had quite a number of almost black photos before I worked that one out. But they were all taken in my back garden so it was no problem.

Right, onto this week's photo; The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London has a spring/summer exhibition of live butterflies. Can you believe I've lived in London for 6 years and somehow I've never visited the NHM? Well, not counting their yearly ice-rink which I have been to. Its a beautiful building and they allow camera's inside! So I will be spending quite a bit of time over the next couple of month there. Not that the butterflies was actually in the building. They created a kind of a greenhouse setup on the lawn outside.

Butterflies, I have discovered must like a hot humid climate. My lens, does not. The first couple of shots I took were all awfully misty. But as my camera and I adjusted, we came to appreciate the wealth of butterflies they have in there. Most of the ones were very brightly coloured, black and red, bright blue, yellow with black stripes etc. Some of them never seem to sit down and others did not move for the entire time I looked at them. Despite various google searches I still don't know what the name or family of the butterfly in my picture is. I should have asked at the butterfly enclosure, but at that stage I didn't know which one of my 126 photos I would be using.

When I read up about photographing butterflies one of the recommendations that keeps coming up is to use a long focal length (preferably macro lens off course). And in the wild it makes sense, but in an enclosure like the one I was at it became quite difficult at times because the butterflies were all over and I just could not focus on the close ones.  The amount of people in there at one time was also quite staggering. And I have discovered that holding and taking photos with a 70-300mm zoom lens is really hard on the hands - no wonder people use tripods with that kind of lens!

I'm off to sunny (I hope!) South Africa from Wednesday onwards, so my next blog entry will most likely not be until after 29 April. Happy Easter holidays everyone!

Week 13: Nurofen

Wow, its week 13 already - 1/4 of my way through the project, and I'm now caught up again. Hopefully my broadband will stay stable (or maybe not, I might need another excuse for a week or two :-)

This lovely little liquid tablet is a pain killer - I accidentally bought these rather than the usual ones and then took one out at night and saw the electric light shining through it. Immediately I thought this would look nice in sunlight, but I had to wait until the sun was shining and I was at home at the same time. Then while I was busy playing with these I suddenly remembered that I have see-through coloured multi-sided dice. Unfortunately by the time I found them and brought them out there was only about 5 minutes of sunshine left before the clouds came over, and I didn't really like any of the shots I got. I might do one in summer proper, who knows.

week 12: Magnolia tree in spring

Springtime here in London has come and though we still have grey rainy days (do we ever not?) we also have some beautiful spring blossoms and sunshine. This lovely tree raining white blossoms everywhere is of the genus Magnolia. There is a huge amount of information about this species on wikipedia, most of which consist of more botanical naming and people involved in discovering various other such plants. I decided to forgo the pleasure of trying to reproduce any of that here :-)

As for the photo itself, it was taken just about at the "worst" time of day, right in the middle of the day with full sunlight. But I think it is justified in this case because all the building surrounding this little park cast shade on the tree most of the day and this photo just wouldn't have that spring feel to it if it was all shaded or alternatively if it was overcast.

That brings me back up to date, well mostly anyway though I will be posting my next one this weekend which is only another couple of days away.

week 11: Two umbrella's

Not having internet for 2-3 weeks put a serious stop to my blog, but I've got the photos to put up. So I won't be writing much on this one, more on the next post again.

week 10: St Ethelburga's wall

You may be forgiven for thinking I snuck off  to some Moroccan destination, looking at this photo. The truth however is even more interesting. This lovely location is right here in the heart of London, though I will admit the sky doesn't actually look like that; I replaced the drab building in the background with this sky, but it is a London sky taken last year in October, so its not cheating too much :-)

St Ethelburga's centre for reconciliation and peace is a London based charity situated in a small (rebuilt) church and its backyard. Though the charity is independent of the Church of England, the church bit of their property is still consecrated ground and christian services are held there. The backyard is less traditional (and also where this photo was taken). It consists of a lovely little space with raised beds and a water feature (on the other side of this wall) and to the left of the photo would be the yurt in which they hold several different kinds of events ranging from reconciliation talks to meditation sessions. Though they are Christian-led, they provide hospitality for people to resolve conflicts from across the world, including interfaith conflicts and hold that they want authentic dialogue between peoples of different faiths without either side trying to "convert" the other. Quite an different point of view from what one usually hears.

The photo as I said was processed to have the lovely blue sky in the background, which immediately lightens up the photo enormously (this was taken in the shade on a slightly overcast day) I wish I could have gotten the whole window into the composition too, but I was as far back as I could go, and changing the angle would have cut off the door, but I want to go back there and take this shot again with a wide angle lens when I have a camera that can do that.

Week 9: Pansies

Firstly I realised I mistakenly named my last weeks post week 9 - getting a bit ahead of myself there!

I have a pot of pansies in my front garden - the card called them halloween pansies, presumably because of the orange and purple bi-colour ones. But somehow I got a couple of lovely solid dark violet ones in there too. Pansies were developed from the viola species which are biennials, but have been selectively bred  to flower as soon as 9 weeks after the seeds are planted. They are winter hardy plants and survive frost and cold even during their flowering season which is why they are often used for colour in gardens during winter.

This photo is taken up close with the intention of using a shallow depth of field to separate out the single violet flower from the bi-colours in the back. It was taken by natural light on an overcast day (we have lots of them here in England :-) I tried using a reflector to give a bit of back lighting, but it didn't seem to work well and eventually I found that by turning the pot such that the direction of the light was from behind I was able to capture the "veins" and still have satisfactory lighting on the rest of the subject.

Week 9: LIFFE trader statue

I'm feeling singularly uninspired by my photos this week, mostly I guess because for once I had a very specific photo in mind and I just could quite get it. I'll keep working on that one, meanwhile I decided to just go with one of the other photos I took this week.

This sculpture is called "LIFFE Trader" and was placed in London in 1997. It depicts an investment banker with his mobile, presumably doing trades on the LIFFE exchange. Apart from the fact that mobiles have become much smaller, this could be a modern day trader, or anyone else working in London for that matter. Still, this is a lovely model for a photo shoot, sure he's a bit rigid and only knows one pose, but he's endlessly patient.

There's no special technique to this photo and apart from a little cropping no post processing either, next week I hope to have something a bit more challenging.

Week seven: Fungus

This is an example of a local shelf fungus. Having found it I started looking up when is th best time to find these, and surprise, surprise its autumn and winter, so I'm just catching the tail end of it, but fortunately autumn and winter will come again.

Shelf fungi , also called Bracket Fungi, consist of shelf bodies called conks and has no stem, but grows directly out of the wood. They are found on trees and tree stumps. Shelf fungi are actually quite hardy fungus as these things go and the coloured rings as shown above are in some species age rings just like one would find on trees. Unfortunately I couldn't find out for sure which on the thousands of different ones this one is, so I'm going to have to assume its true for this one too.

The photo was taken hand held with an fstop of 2.2 to get the shallow depth of field. My camera can't do full macro, though I could get better closeups than this, this one shows the context of the fungus better. I have adjusted the levels a bit to get better saturation and cropped it a little, but otherwise not much pp was done.

St Lawrence Jewry church

I've decided to do something a little different going forward, rather than random musings I will describe firstly how I took the shot (plus any major post processing) and then give a bit more information about the subject.

This is my first HDR for the year. It is comprised of 3 exposures at -1,0, +1EV and tonemapped in Photomatrix. All for the exposures were taken with a tripod, which I'm fortunate that I was allowed as many buildings in London don't allow tripods. Its a lovely airy church with huge windows all round. This was taken from just in front of the altar facing backwards. However I used auto-bracketing which resulted in my camera choosing f/2 as base aperture which results is not the sharpest my lens gets. Next time I'll try to remember to just manually take multiple exposures - on a tripod it doesn't really matter what my shutter speed is for a static shot like this.

This church is sited on the Guildhall grounds and is dedicated to St Lawrence. As most churches in the city it is still being used and has regular services, but also lunchtime music performances throughout the year. It was originally built in 1136, but burnt down in the great fire of 1666. Christopher Wren rebuilt this church only to have it destroyed apart from  some sections of wall and the tower in the blitz 1940. Once again it was rebuilt/restored to the state it is today. For more information visit  http://www.ourpasthistory.com/England/st-lawrence-jewry

This week I decided to go for something simple, and it just so happens that DPS (http://digital-photography-school.com/) has an assignment for Still Life Flowers. Nice to be able to do two things at once. I know its not hugely original, but it is the first one I've done like it,so all in all I'm happy with how its turned out.

Tower of London

So this week I tried to find a nice reflection photo - several presented them to me, but none worked out, so eventually I decided on this one which admittedly I took the week before and only edited the week after. So much for playing by the rules. This one is the first I actually composed with the moon in mind, and also the first one of the Tower of London from the north side of the river. Hope you like it too.