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.