I'm Still Here

It's been over two months since my last post and I think it's about time I got back into it.  I've had an early bout of winter blues and there's little sign of getting past it yet even though we're only in mid autumn.  I feel my photography has seriously got stuck in a rut and although I've taken lots of pictures I'm not getting the urge to share them at the moment.  So this is taking a lot of effort, but I'm determined to push through before I lose the will to make pictures any more.

It's been quite mix of weather the last couple of weeks but last Saturday we had a bit of early sunshine.  So while my wife was having her hair done I wandered into Victoria Park in Holmfirth with my camera to look for inspiration.  The sun was quite low and sky was blue and I thought I might find some trees with their leaves a nice autumn yellow to make a great contrast to the sky.  It's a great combination of colours, yellow, green and blue.  But I just couldn't find a shot.

As I walked about I spotted some mushrooms growing at the bottom of an old tree stump so I went to have a closer look.  The tree stump was very dark with it being in its own shadow and the mushrooms were out in the sunshine and very bright.  I decided to make three exposures of each shot at different shutter speeds so I could merge them to makes tone mapped HDRs with details in the shadows.  I took quite a few shots at different angles and heights to make different compositions of the mushrooms and in the end I chose this ones as the best.  In the end I didn't merge the exposures because I decided I didn't want the detail in the shadow to detract from the detail in the mushrooms.  When I look at the picture now I feel I need to get rid of the grass in the background on the right because it's drawing my eye away from the main subject. Its too light so maybe I can darken and desaturate it, or perhaps clone in some more tree stump.

After the mushroom I started heading out of the park and there is a small public garden with a bench and some shrubs in the borders.  I spotted some very late blooming honeysuckle and went to have a look.  Although the weather has been mixed it has been quite mild for the time of year so there are a few late blooms around.  I quite like this picture but again I wonder if I should darken the background a bit more to emphasise the flower.  Maybe add a bit more of a vignette to darken the corners might work.

Next to the honeysuckle was an unknown (to me) bush with some furry leaves which had lots of water droplets from the overnight rain.  Some of the leaves were in the sunshine and I spent the rest of my time trying to get some interesting pictures of them.  This was my first attempt but it doesn't work too well with the angle of the shot and the busy background.  I need to seriously get rid of the contrast in the background by darkening and desaturating it all because the foreground subject is completely lost.

This next ones a bit better with having the wall in the background, but the bits of honeysuckle stem are a bit distracting.  I lowered the angle of the shot to try and look through the big water droplet and this works a bit I think.

Same leaf but from the side of the leaf this time and lower again.  Now I'm getting the shot right through the big water droplet and I quite like the effect of the light bending through it.  Maybe again I just need to get rid of the light circle near the top left because it's distracting but overall I pleased with this picture.

Same leaf again and back to the same direction as the first one but lower and closer. There is very little depth of field and I've used the exposure two stops below the metered exposure which is why it is so dark.  I chose this exposure because the background has almost completely gone and the only part of the picture in sharp focus is the big droplet.  I noticed a variety of colours in the little droplets so I boosted the overall saturation sky high and then desaturated the green so that the leaves look a fairly normal colour.  I love this picture, even the very light blurred spot in the foreground because it is on a bit of a diagonal line through the composition.  It looks even better full size on my computer screen with the weird shapes in the big water droplet and all the little coloured circles of bokeh from the little ones.

Thanks for looking at this post.  I really hope you like something here.  Writing this has been a bit of therapy for me and maybe I can get back into the swing again.  No promises but I'll try to get back to posting weekly.  Please give me some feedback in the comments if you have a bit more time to spare me.

A Few Recent Images

It's been too long since my last post. My problem is that enjoy making the images so much that I don't get around to putting them anywhere. Maybe now I've got some ink for my printer I'll finish some more images off ready for printing and publishing on the blog.

So I've spent more time taking shots to make High Dynamic Range images and I've been experimenting with all the different sliders in Photomatix to see what results I can produce. The results can be wildly different from images where it's not obvious they are HDR to those which are almost surreal. I've been saving some of the settings so I can try them out with different sets of shots and compare the results. I've found that different images are more suited to different settings and some really look quite poor at certain settings. I'll do another post later to illustrate some of the things I've discovered but in the meantime here are some recent images I like.

Here's a little bird which I've tried to identify on the RSPB Bird Identifier and I think it might be a Chiffchaff but then it could be anything.


Here's a Lapwing in flight.....



..... and then on the ground


Another little bird and Evey is giving it a good looking at. Again I don't know what this is but it obviously has very little fear. I don't think Evey knew what it was and so she was regarding it very closely before it flew off.


One of the wind turbines rising up from behind the trees. This was quite early morning and most of the turbines were stationery.


This is a place where I have taken a number of shots at different times of the year and with varying amounts of water in the reservoir. This day it was bright, the trees, plants and grass were very green, the water level was low so I thought I'd try a HDR.


Yet another bird, this time a little woodpecker. It could be a male Lesser Spotted but I think it's more likely to be a young Greater Spotted because I think it was calling for food to be brought. It was very noisy and I thought I saw a brief glimpse of a parent flying about.


Another HDR of a little waterfall with a tree branch wedged into the rocks.


I took a set of shots to create a HDR of this bridge but I decided I preferred this image which was the normal exposure shot adjusted in Aperture. I used the shaddow slider to bring up the detail of the stones inside the bridge and then just standard adjustments to the contrast and colour saturation. The HDR image was blurry because it was a bit windy so the grass and fern had movement in them between the three shots so the software couldn't make a sharp image like this one.