Saturday 14 November 2015

Revisiting an image

A friend who looks at this blog from time to time commented on this image that I posted last month:


and wondered if it would work well in monochrome, especially a high-contrast black and white image.

This version, immediately below, is what emerges from an 'auto' conversion of the image above into b/w:


And what follow below are various other ways of extracting a monochrome image. In each case below I went back to the unedited original colour image (before it was processed into the photo at the top of this post) and used that original to convert to monochrome.










Sunday 8 November 2015

Brief interval from rain

Yesterday started off with heavy rain which continued until mid-afternoon. Then, briefly, before darkness fell, there were a couple of hours when the rain stopped, the clouds parted and bright, low sunshine bathed everything. After several days of unremitting dark grey cloud, my greatest needs were for exercise and some daylight in my eyes - so I only took the little Sony with me as I went out for a walk, leaving my new wide-angle lens at home, and the photos I took were just spontaneous and opportunistic.









Thursday 29 October 2015

Wide angle experiments (3) - in the woods

This turned out to be a challenging outing: bright autumn sun through the tree canopy and deep shadows cast beneath. I was hand-holding, not using a tripod, so I couldn't use bracketing to deal with the high contrast. Also, the overall light level under the trees was very low, so I ended up with very high ISO, wide aperture, then under-exposing . . . all in order to get a fast-enough shutter speed not to have visible camera shake. And, of course, the processing was then difficult! 

So, here are the few that, in the end, I think 'work' well-enough.





Saturday 24 October 2015

Wide-angle experiments

Not long ago I bought (second-hand) a wide-angle lens for my Lumix G5. After it arrived, the weather was poor so I've only just been able to try it out. Last week I had a day when I wanted to go to Compton Verney to see their current exhibition, and I thought that the grounds and parkland there would enable me to have a bit of a play around with the new lens.

I had no 'intention' (that key photographer's word!) other than playing with the lens to get a 'feel' for it. Here are a few of the images I made - none of them all that brilliant, but giving me some idea of what's possible, and some sense of subjects that would be particularly enhanced by using this lens. 

With the clocks about to go back, winter approaching, and lowering, wet weather forecast, it may be some time before I have the opportunity to take this further.








Saturday 10 October 2015

Grand Union Canal, Hatton Locks (2)

Shapes, patterns and reflections:








Grand Union Canal, Hatton Locks (1)

Canal views on a bright autumn afternoon, with the light slowly fading towards tea time.










Tuesday 6 October 2015

Early morning spider

 . . . that's on my scale of 'early', by the way, which is by no means 'crack of dawn'!



Blog Archive