Reikan Photography Blog

The Blog is moving to Reikan Photography...

2010-09-06T10:43:00.001+01:00

Click here to go to the new home

So far, my blog has been hosted with Blogger (this site), but I've decided to move to a Wordpress blog. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being that by hosting the blog myself it allows me complete control over the look and feel (but also the responsibility for backups etc!).

Don't get me wrong, I've been very happy with Blogger - in fact, I've got quite cross with Wordpress recently as the formatting was causing me all sorts of trouble! But it does seem that Wordpress has a lot more options and capability, and I'd like to get some experience in both using a different engine and hosting it myself.

So, you can continue to follow my exploits at http://www.reikanphotography.co.uk/blog. That is, as long as I haven't broken anything :) All the posts I've done to date will be there (the import utility is great).

Ireland 2010 Days 4 & 5 - Clare and the Cliff of Moher

2010-09-02T15:15:00.001+01:00

The next part of photos and journal from our family trip to Ireland, this bit is mainly about our visit to County Clare and the Cliffs of Moher. It started as part of a bigger post, but I kept adding more information about the places we visited, so I've left it as just these 2 days...

Sunset at Beal, County Kerry, Ireland

Day 4 - Swimming

After all the travelling over the last few days, the kids were desperate to go to a local (ish) swimming complex with rapids, wave machine, a slide etc, so we spent the day back in Tralee going to The Aquadome. It was good fun, and great to see my daughter's excitement when they switched the wave machine on (she's never seen one before!).

In the evening, I went out for an hour or so to try and capture the sunset from Beal. I parked opposite the entrance to the wind farm, ducked under an electric fence and walked down a path past the fields of cows (these ones). It was fine until near the bottom when one of the cows got grumpy with me, reared up and charged at me! All I had between me was a tiny electric fence, and I was just praying that they were scared of it enough to not come over. I turned away and carried on walking and they seemed to calm down, but I was a bit nervous about having to go back past them! Down on the edge of the (small) cliff, I managed to get a couple of sunset shots - the one at the start of this page and the one below:

Sunset over the Shannon, County Kerry, Ireland

Day 5 - Clare and the Cliffs of Moher

Today was going to be a day of travelling to Clare, specifically with the Cliff of Moher in mind as a destination. The map below shows the rough location of the house at A and the Cliffs of Moher at B.

View Larger Map

First off we went to Tarbert where there's a ferry across the Shannon to Kilimer. On both sides of the river are power stations almost opposite each other. On the Clare side is Moneypoint, which is Irelands largest power station and only coal fired one, capable of producing in excess of 900MW. It was started in 1979 and took 8 years to complete. The chimneys are 218m tall and are the largest free-standing structures in the country:

Moneypoint Power Station - Ireland's largest power station

Looking back the other way, Tarbert power station was built in 1969 and is oil fired with a maximum output of a little over 600MW. The power station chimneys, while smaller than Moneypoint, are still among the tallest in Ireland, standing 151 metres tall:

Tarbert Oil Power Station

We drove for a while, and stopped at Kilkee as the clouds were starting to part. It wasn't a long stop, but we parked near to the massive bay area, and as always seems to be the case in Ireland the tide was out and there were rock pools to explore!

Searching at Kilkee

Kilkee Crab

Kilkee

From here, we continued the drive up through Clare to Liscannor and the Cliffs of Moher. The cliffs, at their peak, rise 214m out of the Atlantic and are an amazing sight:

The Cliffs of Moher

Unfortunately, the weather had started to close in and it wasn't the best for taking beautifully lit shots of the area, but you can get a sense of scale from the next few:

The Cliffs

The image below is a crop from the one above - it's the point just right of the centre where the cliff starts to descend. I do love my 5D mark 2 - being able to get a crop showing the people at that distance and with a17mm lens is amazing!

Crop from the above picture

I also had the 7D with me with the 70-200 f4L IS, and I took a few shots of the same place. Here, you can see a couple having their photo taken, and they are on the edge of what is probably a 500-600ft drop with no safety rail at all!

Smile!

I need to point out here that the arrangement at the visitor centre was that a large area of the cliff edge had large slate slabs as walls and you would have had to make quite an effort to put yourself in danger. However, to each end of these, there were fences and warnings which most people were completely ignoring. I quite liked the idea - it means that you can make the decision to go somewhere dangerous but beautiful, but the risk is all yours. You just wouldn't get that in England - the state has to hold your hand so there would be a 24ft high fence and armed guard at each end :( Anyway, I didn't go over as it didn't seem appropriate with the children watching and a push chair! But plenty of people did:

Ignoring the Warning - you had to dodge a fence to walk this path

As I was armed with all sorts of photographic paraphernalia (two bodies, 3 lenses, filters, tripod, timer etc), I decided to set up shop for half an hour by a piece of the wall and do some long exposures with the 10-stop ND filter (with the 5D mark 2 and 17-40L). This one is of the highest point of the cliffs - 214m above the ocean. On top is O'Briens Tower, built by Sir Cornelius O'Brien in order to impress female visitors!

The Cliffs and O'Briens Tower

And here's another view looking South towards Hags Head:

The Cliffs, South towards Hag Head

When we left the cliffs, we headed North to Knocknagroagh and down a scenic route past Gregan's East - there are a set of hairpin bends called "The Screwdriver" which were originally meant for horses and can be quite interesting in the car! I set up in the viewpoint and took this panorama (like all the pictures on the blog, you can click for a larger view):

The Screwdriver - Hairpin bends at Gregan's East, County Clare

The landscape there is stunning - known as the Burren, this area consists of carboniferous limestone slabs and has an amazing look about it - almost like a moonscape:

Part of The Burren

We drove back down through Clare, stopping at a few interesting points along the way, and finally got back down to Kilimer to wait for the Ferry. As we had a bit of time, I again got the tripod out, this time with the 7D. Before going on this trip, I had purchased an adapter ring to step up the 67mm front thread on my 70-200 f4L IS to 77mm, so I could use both the 10 stop ND filter and the Lee filter holder. The first shot below is from the 5D mark 2 with 17-40L and 10 stop filter:

View to Tarbert and County Kerry from Kilimer, County Clare

And this one is from the 7D with 70-200 f4L and 10 stop filter - I reduced the clarity and increased the contrast to bring out the ruins of the pier. I was a pity that I couldn't get to a position which would have separated the pier from the horizon, and I really like the contrast on the wood in this shot, but I think it gets a bit lost in the background:

Old Pier, Kilimer, County Clare

The last shot of the day was the sun breaking through the cloud and shining on what look like dock cranes on a jutting piece of land in County Clare:

Sun on Cranes in County Clare

Other Parts

This post is part of a series about our holiday to Ireland:

Ireland 2010 Days 1-3 - Travelling, Ballybunion and the Dingle Peninsula

Sunrise at Hengistbury Head (...and a bit of afternoon too)

2010-08-31T20:52:00.001+01:00

It's been a while since I dragged myself out of bed stupidly early to go out with a camera and tripod and photograph something, but it's such a beautiful time of day and it's getting slightly more sensibly timed so I decided to this morning. Sunrise was at 0615, so I set my alarm for 0500 and got going very quickly (without even a cup of coffee!), driving from home to Hengistbury Head.

Hengistbury Head Beach Huts

Hengistbury Head is a sandstone headland that juts into the English Channel on the most easterly part of the borough of Bournemouth in Dorset, England. It has history which spans through the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, and is an interesting and distinct landmass, great for photography! You can find out more about it here (Wikipedia) and here (Hengistbury Head website).

In order to be successful in a sunrise shoot, its best to have everything prepared. I had gone to the location the day before in the afternoon to have a look around at parking, best places to shoot from etc, and checked the sunrise time (I've mentioned this brilliant tool before: http://photoephemeris.com/). I had my bag packed with cleaned filters, lenses, charged batteries, empty memory cards, and left the tripod already in the boot of the car. For landscape work, I use the 5D mark 2 and today I took the 17-40L and the 24-70L just in case there were any longer focal length shots to capture.

I arrived in the car park around 0545 - 30 minutes before sunrise. I had walking boots, a thin jacket and a fairly thick coat and gloves - I put them all on as it felt fairly cold and it was as well I did as even though it's August, it still would have been very uncomfortable without. It's worth leaving stuff like that in the car - I've got a rain coat, gloves, wellies (in case I decide to wade into a river or the sea) which stay in there all year round.

I had decided to walk to the beach and then along the front of the headland by the sea. In hindsight, I probably should have gone over the headland as you couldn't see much of the lightening part of the sky until nearly at the end of the beach area. Although it doesn't look far, trying to rush through about half a mile of soft sand and pebbles with a fairly heavy tripod and camera bag is quite exhausting!

Once I got to the end of the headland, it was about 5 minutes before sunrise and I took some shots from various points on the sand and groynes, some direct exposures starting with the 0.3ND grad (1 stop), and some bracketed shots for a play around with HDR. This first shot below was a few minutes before the sun broke the horizon, and is a 3 exposure HDR:

Just Before Sunrise (HDR)

It was beautiful watching the sun actually rise. First, you see a tiny speck of bright orange peeking over the horizon, and within about a minute it's mostly up. The sky and reflections are so dynamic at this point a shot can appear and disappear in seconds, so you have to both move quickly and remember what to do for next time (if there is a next time!).

Into the Water at Hengistbury Head

Once the sun rose, I swapped to the 0.6 ND grad, and quickly found that it wasn't enough for anything with the sun in. Going a bit over the top, I stuck the 0.9 grad on the front of the holder, making a total of 5 stops at the top of the frame!

Groyne at Sunrise

Moments after Sunrise

The shot below was shortly after sunrise - I wanted to capture the green of the algae on the rocks contrasting against the orange and blue of the sky.

Standing Tall

I took some more shots around the beach as the sun continued to rise. The shot of the beach huts below was carefully composed to block out the boats, tables, bits of car and rubbish just the other side of the dune!

Beach Huts at Sunrise

And I noticed this wind break on the beach just as I was leaving. Again, it's quite a deliberate composition to miss out a bin to the right and an ugly post of some kind to the left. I took 3 exposures of this and again processed as HDR. While it has potential, I'm a little disappointed by the bright orange highlight on the left side of the break. Maybe a polarising filter would have helped? I'm not sure I could have got a decent shot from a location that didn't capture the bright reflection without getting something unwanted in the picture...

Morning Light on a Windbreak (HDR)

By this time, I'd finished down on the beach and started heading back. I went up the steps to walk over the headland this time, partly to see whether it was worth coming back this way next time, and also for a different set of views on the way back. The top of the headland is either one large or a set of smaller nature reserves, and there is some beautifully colourful heather covering the ground. The shot below shows the heather, and one of the groynes I'd walked past earlier in the distance down at sea level:

Hengistbury Heather

There is also a disused coastguard station on top of the headland - it's all boarded up and obviously not used, but the antenna's are still on the mast, and the building is not too shabby. I thought this must have been shot a million times, so I went for something a little more abstract, which also gets the moon in the shot (not very clear, but it's just to the right of the mast, almost in the centre of the shot):

The Old Lifeguard Station - Hengistbury Head

And a final shot from the morning - the view down towards Bournemouth and Sandbanks. The sun was rising behind the shot and to the right, so the near part of sand is in the shadow of the headland. The sun is starting to catch the beach further down towards Boscombe and Bournemouth:

Bournemouth Sunrise from Hengistbury Head

The Day Before

I had the idea of visiting Hengistbury Head for a sunrise shoot a few days ago, and on Bank Holiday Monday we were looking for somewhere to go in the afternoon for a few hours out to amuse the kids so we headed out there. It was a nice opportunity to see what was about for the next day, but it led to a few photo opportunities as well.

I found some long grasses, some of which were covered in ladybirds, so focussing on one of these I captured the headland in the background out of focus:

Ladybird and Hengistbury Head

This is my son with a single line micro kite of a Sopwith Camel! It wasn't really windy enough for a small kite like this but we did manage to get it to fly for a few seconds at a time and I managed to catch this one shot of him flying it:

Flying the Sopwith Camel

And finally, the kids were playing down by the water when the waves started getting really big periodically. I think it was constructive interference caused by the tide coming in and the gradient of the beach, but every couple of minutes the water level would drop drastically near the beach and the next wave would rise into a wall. This dog was really enjoying barking at the sea then running away when the waves came in, and I managed to catch one of the larger wall-like waves (it was much better a few minutes before but I wasn't near enough to get a decent shot):

Dog vs The Sea

So, a good morning shoot I think. Nothing spectacular, but it was almost a reckee to determine where to go for the next opportunity. I think a little more cloud in the sky, or maybe some sea mist would liven things up to make a more interesting set of images, but I enjoyed the morning nonetheless. Now, I'm off to bed as I've been up since 5am!!

Ireland 2010 Days 1-3 - Travelling, Ballybunion and the Dingle Peninsula

2010-08-27T18:53:00.001+01:00

This next set of posts on the blog are going to be a dump of my favourite pictures from our holiday to both sides of Ireland in August 2010. We went for a week in Ballybunion (County Kerry) and then a week in Enniscorthy (County Wexford). This is a kind-of photo journal of the holiday, so lots of various pictures and some waffling too :)

Harry - Excited before we left, he wrote "Holiday Ireland - Yahoo!" on his hand!

Day 1 - Friday/Saturday - Travelling

So, to start with - the trip over. We left on Friday evening at about 2000, to catch a ferry at 0245 in Fishguard. Armed with Red Bull, we managed to get as far as the Severn Bridge without a hitch! Then the matrix signs informed us the M4 was closed for 4 junctions, we totally fluked a route around and then I sleepily drove on to Fishguard. The ferry left on time, and we tried to sleep on seats which I am sure are designed to stop you sleeping on them. The shot below shows my somewhat sleepy son and daughter at about 0600, just before getting to Ireland (and those nasty seats!):

Barely awake on the Ferry

Once off the ferry, it was a short drive to County Kerry. Or rather it wasn't - it was 235km, took us 10 hours after leaving the ferry (with several stops including an hours sleep for me in the car). We stopped in Limerick to have some late lunch:

Smiling in Limerick - nearly there!

After leaving Limerick, we stopped in Tarbert, called the guy we were renting the house from and arranged to meet in Asdee to pick up the keys. All was fine, and he showed us to the house:

View behind the house - I like wind turbines!

The picture above is NOT the house - it's the view from one side. It was a stunning location - nearest neighbours were a good 500 metres away, we were surrounded by fields (one of which had cows in), and on just enough of a hill to have a view down to the Shannon and over to County Claire:

View from the front garden

I took a panoramic shot of the view including the house on the last day, so that'll be in a later blog post (I'll put a link here if I remember). The house was lovely - a converted school building with an extension added. Several of the walls were stone inside (all stone outside), with wooden floors and lots of bright wood around the lounge area. Oz was very pleased with it all (and the thought of finally getting something to eat I think!):

Lovely Jubbly!

On the first evening, just before getting an early night (I'd had about 2-3 hours of bad sleep in a about 34 hours, and driven 400 odd miles), we went for a walk. We didn't get far, but we did meet a friendly local dog who came all the way back to the house with us - a regular visitor I think as he knew exactly where he was going:

Dog. We called it Zac for a while, until we found the real Zac.

Day 2 - Sunday - Relaxing

We had a lazy day on Sunday - went to the local shop to stock up and then went to the beach. It was a lovely beach, and the great thing in Ireland is that you can just drive down on to a lot of the beaches. The tide was a long way out, and we found lots of what we assumed were Jelly Fish - feel free to correct me if that's wrong, but they were lumps of jelly on the sand (see the pics below)

Harry and his shell with eyes

The view back towards the house - with the wind turbines

We assumed these were Jelly Fish - there were loads of them on the sand at low tide

Oz was having fun on the beach as usual

Splashing in the water

And there was plenty of space to play - no-one else about really!

Back at the house, the kids had a muck around on the land:

Running About

Oz's first roly-poly

By the Big Red Door

Day 3 - Monday - The Dingle Peninsula

The Dingle Peninsula is one of Ireland's treasures - a mountainous land mass projecting into the Atlantic. We were about an hour or so from the edge of this, so on Monday we drove down to spend the day taking in the sights. The journey involved driving to Tralee (which has a nice working windmill on the water), and then onto the peninsula. We stopped near Cloghane to stretch legs and take in the first views:

Searching the Shells, Near Cloghane

The Brandons from Near Cloghane

Crossing the Dingle Peninsula from North to South involves going over the Brandon Mountains, and we chose the relatively narrow road that led through the Connor Pass, giving spectacular views both to the North and South sides:

View North from the Connor Pass

View South from the Connor Pass

Then on to Dingle town itself and to the South-West tip of the peninsula, where you could look back along the South side:

Near Kilvickadownig

From here, you could see the two Skellig Islands in the distance - they are famous for their Puffin and Gannet population, and an early Christian monastery which is a UNESCO World Heritage site:

The Skellig Islands

Further on round Slea Head we stopped at various points to admire the view (and take some pictures) - this one below is of a beautiful looking secluded beach in the distance, and I've attached the Google Map control to show where it is:

Slea Head Beach

The beach above is actually the one on the map below:

View Larger Map

From here, we headed back across the Peninsula, towards Ventry over a Sat Nav directed route through some very windy single track roads. Always fun to follow the Sat Nav :)

Near to Ventry

And we finally got to our final destination on the peninsula - Inch Beach. This is an amazing stretch of beach which juts out into the water. The tide was out, and the kids got into their wet suits and grabbed body boards for a mess around that was massively more impressive than most of the areas in the UK.

Inch Beach

And what's more, you can park (for free) on the sand near the water!

Parking on Inch Beach

I went out for a drive in the evening to investigate the area a bit more thoroughly for photos. While I didn't really take any significant landscape shots, I did get a shot of some friendly looking cows, which it turns out were not so friendly as I'll explain later on...

Scary Cows (more to follow)

Other Parts

This post is part of a series about our holiday to Ireland:

Ireland 2010 Days 4 & 5 - Clare and the Cliff of Moher

Hampshire and Dorset Fields (and a Bridge!)

2010-08-26T20:27:00.001+01:00

It was ridiculously hot on this particular day (at least for the UK) - a little over 30 degrees at lunch time when I decided to drive out to Beech Hill and take some shots in the fields around that area. There were lots of wheat fields, and the sky was nice - blue with enough clouds to give some interest:

Hampshire Field

All these shots were taken with my standard landscape setup - 5D mark 2 and 17-40L with Lee holder and Hi-Tech ND grad filters (0.3, 0.6 and 0.9), a remote release and mirror lockup.

Wheat

Just catching the sun in this shot (deliberately) gives another point of interest, although it does show the flare issues you can get from using square filters. Lenses are typically designed to minimise flare with clever designs and multi-coated optics (both internal and external), but a plastic ND-grad filter has none of this (not even a single anti-reflective coating), so flare can become an issue. Any dirt or marks on the filter can light up when exposed directly to the sun like this.

Midday Sun over the Fields

I liked this next shot as the wheat at the bottom looks like a load of sparklers burning away - the fine detail is just on the verge of being overexposed and looks almost white in the sun.

Golden Stars

I was in an observant mood today, and on the way home I noticed a field of maize on the side of the A31, near Avon Heath Country Park. I pulled in down the entrance road, clambered over a fence (armed with tripod etc) and carefully walked around the paths finding a nice shot. The sky was starting to cloud over, but I managed to get this shot (I think this was with a 0.9ND grad (3 stop), which has led to quite a dark sky):

Maize

I was really fired up for photography, so after getting home, having some food and putting the kids to bed I went out again down a few roads in Wimborne that were new to me (found while doing my 100 mile cycle ride a few weeks back). The few people along the road must have thought I was a bit mad - I drove along for a bit then I'd spy something out the corner of my eye which looked promising, reverse back up the road, stuff the car in a hedge somewhere and go and inspect! Most of the time the view I saw initially was ruined by something like a pylon, nasty looking fence or some metallic farm building which just wasn't going to work in the shot.

Carry on along the road, I turned down to Sturminster Marshall, and stopped by Whitemill bridge. This bridge dates back to the twelfth century - at least the foundations have been carbon dated to this age, although the bridge structure is probably sixteenth century and "somewhat hacked around by the Victorians" (see here for further information).

It was just starting to rain, so I quickly headed down the water's edge and set the tripod up with an ND grad on the 5D mark 2 and took some shots shielding the filter from the spitting rain. Luckily the rain didn't turn into anything significant, and I managed to get a few long exposure shots (after I had waiting for the man standing on the bridge and starting at me to leave!)

Whitemill Bridge over the Stour (in the rain!)

After taking shots of the bridge, I started heading back home through Shapwick and onwards towards Badbury rings. Again, another field caught my eye and the sun was just about to set, so I pulled into a layby and got my kit out (so to speak!). Through an unlocked gate, I was presented with a huge wheat field on a hill, and through the hedge a field partially crops (maize?) and partially wheat:

Crops

The sky was starting to get darker now - although the sun hadn't quite set the cloud was heavier near the horizon so there were long periods where there was no direct sunlight. The exposure time was going up, leading to the motion effects on the wheat from the wind:

Whispy Fields

I crossed the road after sunset to a larger field with more mature wheat. The wheat was firmer and the wind wasn't really strong enough to move it around so even on long exposures it was crisp and sharp:

Dorset Wheat

As is now standard, I took some portrait shots too (maximises your chance of being able to use the image in a publication):

More Wheat

This one has the lead in lines of the lack of crops where the tractor drove:

Tractor Tracks

All in all a good day of photography. It pays to be open minded and have your kit with you all the time - with 10 or 20 minutes spare time on a journey, you can stop and spend a little time capturing an interesting view - there's a lot of hidden gems all over the place!

Milton Abbas, Hilton and Bulbarrow

2010-08-24T11:24:00.000+01:00

I may have already mentioned this (ahem), but I did a 100 mile cycle ride for "charidy" in early July which involved cycling through lots of Dorset (you can read about it here if you've really got nothing better to do). While doing it, I saw some absolutely beautiful areas, a lot of which I'd never visited before despite living less than about 20 miles from most of the places. So, I decided to drive back out to some parts of the route one evening and get some shots.

Dorset Field Sunset

I started by heading out to Milton Abbas as I remembered stopping near to the Abbey/School (I'm not entirely sure which one it is, or if it's both - update: turns out it is a school: Click Here) and the sight was beautiful. It was one heck of a school if that was the whole grounds, and I'm fairly sure it would break all but the largest of banks to send your kids there!

Milton Abbey

The abbey is set just outside the village of Milton Abbas and is surrounded by fields and trees. To the right of my location, another field and tree-covered hill extends outwards:

Milton Abbas Field

The road from Milton Abbas past the school goes to the village (hamlet?) of Hilton, and this is one of the roads that I cycled on for the ride. The shot below was very close to the point where I parked my car, and shows the road with high hedgerows on either side.

The Road to Hilton

Across the road, there was an entrance to a wheat field on a fairly big hill. It was quite hard work lugging the camera, tripod and camera bag up the hill considering it was only 2 days after the 100 mile bike ride, but the view was worth it. It was a fairly typical sight from that area - lots of trees, fields and crops growing, all bathed in beautiful pre-sunset light.

Field between Milton Abbas and Hilton

From Hilton, I drove up Bulbarrow Hill which was the biggest hill on the bike ride and seemed to go on for miles. The particular point that I stopped with the camrea was a little uninspiring, but I capture this shot just after sunset.

View from the top of Bulbarrow Hill

Technically, all shots were with the 5D mark 2, 17-40L and HiTech 0.6 ND grad filter, on a manfrotto 055XProB tripod with ball head and remote release.

Sunset at Tarrant Keyneston

2010-08-02T08:04:00.000+01:00

On this particular evening, I wanted to try and capture something in or around Wimborne. The sky wasn't looking too promising - there was a lot of cloud near the horizon which tends to mean that as the sun gets close to setting it is obscured and the lighting goes very dull and uninteresting. But I have learnt a few things over the years, and knowing that (a) conditions change, (b) I love being outside with the camera, and (c) if you don't try you won't get anything got me out!

Tarrant Keyneston Sunset I

I drove through Wimborne the long way around, but I really wasn't seeing anything that grabbed me. I wasn't looking for anything in particular (and that might have been part of the problem), but was hoping something would just jump out at me. In the end, I gave up in Wimborne and headed out of town, past Kingston Lacy and along the famous tree-lined road past Badbury Rings. The lighting wasn't very good along here - too much cloud to get any direct shadows across the road, and just a general dullness which wasn't going to lead to a decent picture, but once I got out from the end of the trees the sky had seemed to come alive with clouds and gained some real interest.

Tarrant Keyneston Sunset II

I pulled over into a the entry road to a couple of fields, parked up and got out with my tripod, camera, cable release and filters. As the sun was getting closer to the horizon, the detail in the sky started picking up even more. I walked into the field and carefully manoeuvred around the edge to a position which captured the colour of a distant field without getting the road next to me in the shot, and took some shots.

The shots I've selected here were the best from the evening. All were taken with the 17-40L and 0.6ND grad to keep detail in both the foreground and the sky. I made a deliberate choice to shoot in both portrait and landscape as I'm starting to focus work to be flexible for publication, and the requirement can be dependant on the use (e.g. a double page spread will probably want a landscape, while a front cover is typically portrait). It seems sensible that if you are faced with a scene that may be of use, you should try and capture it in both formats.

This last shot is slightly different in that I zoomed the lens. I generally take landscape shots towards the wide end of the 17-40L, but have recently been thinking about using longer telephoto zooms to take landscape shots, particularly for isolating certain areas of a landscape. As I only had the 17-40L with me, this shot was taken at 40mm and just brings out some more of the detail in the middle ground. It's made me think, and on recent landscape shoots I've been taking my 120-400OS with me too (I've chosen this over the 70-200 f4L IS as the 120-400OS has a 77mm thread so I can use my single Lee adapter ring on this lens to allow use of ND grads).

Tarrant Keyneston Sunset III

I haven't yet had a chance to shoot any landscapes with the 120-400OS - the weather seems to have turned recently and my life has got incredibly busy too, so I've had less chance for photography. I'm hoping this coming week will see a change to that, though!

Sandbanks Bay and Poole Park

2010-07-30T07:41:00.002+01:00

The weather has been fantastic recently in the UK for landscape photography. The sky is generally a cheerful blue with a few wispy clouds to give some interest, and the sunsets are fairly colourful. I've been getting out a fair bit recently in the evenings - sunset is around 21:15 so to be out with the camera at least an hour either side of that give an opportunity to capture a wide range of lighting conditions in the shots.

Holes Bay Boat

The shot above probably deserves separate discussion as it's actually at Holes Bay and not either of the places I mentioned in the title, and it's also an HDR shot. I don't do many HDR pictures, but I've seen some great examples of natural looking images recently which just present a great range of light and contrast. I noticed this boat in the bay as I drove past a few days before taking it, and this was actually the focus of the evening when I came out to get the shot. It involved a 10 minutes walk from the nearest point to park the car, then clambering over rocks and walking precariously on crusty mud which could give way at any moment, but I managed to select this viewpoint and get about 9 different exposures. This image is actually composed of 5 exposures, and I deliberately went for the effect of enhancing the foreground while still having sky detail, rather than anything too extreme.

Sandbanks

Sandbanks is a spit of land extending into Poole harbour (see here) , with sea either side. The area regularly features in the top 5 most expensive places to live in the world, and with sea views on both sides, and a glorious golden sandy beach it's not difficult to see the appeal!

Boats at Sandbanks

As you drive along towards the end of the visible "spit" of Sandbanks, there are flats and houses on the left side obscuring most of the views of the beach, but on the right it opens out to the big bay with Brownsea Island dominant. The tide varies quite a lot here - from being completely in against the wall that runs around the bay, to being so far out you can walk a fair distance on the mud. On this evening, the tide was mostly in, and the shot above shows the boats in the bay as the sun hovers above the horizon in the distance. On the left is a structure jutting into the sea which I believe is the back of a restaurant.

5 Minute Sunset at Sandbanks

One of my intentions on this evening was to get some shots with my 10 stop ND filter. The image above was a 5 minute exposure, starting with the sun above the horizon and finishing a little after it had gone down. Notice how smooth the sea is - over 5 minutes, there is no chance of any particular waves standing out so it melts into velvet.

Pale

The shot above is an attempt at something a little more abstract. The sun had gone down at this point, and I wanted to capture the buildings and hills on the horizon as a very thin strip of interest in a generally monotone picture. I'm not sure it really works as I feel like there's too much detail in the foreground water (the exposure should have been longer - this was without any filter and around 20 seconds), but it's always good to experiment with these ideas, analayse what you think would make it better and get out and try again.

Poole Park

On the drive home, I took the "scenic" route and went through Poole Park. This is a park I visit quite a lot with the children during the day, but it's not often you get to see these sort of places after the sun has set. I was quite impressed with how much effort had gone into some areas to make them look nice at night. The shot below is of the Mezza Luna restaurant from the edge of the lake. The narrow aperture creates the star effect on the lights of the restaurant, and the longer exposure captures the reflections of the pinpoints of light in the water.

Mezza Luna - Poole Park

Another enjoyable evening out with the camera. I'm trying to make the most of the weather and late summer evening sunsets at the moment - it won't be long before it's getting dark much earlier (then I can get out for lots of night shots!).

An Evening in Hamworthy

2010-07-27T07:54:00.000+01:00

This is another journal style post about an evening out a few weeks ago to take sunset landscape shots. The original intention was to go to the beach somewhere between Sandbanks and Bournemouth as I wanted some sea, sand and beach hut shots, but a quick play with The Photographers Ephemeris (a brilliant and free tool: http://stephentrainor.com/tools) showed that the sun would be setting behind the cliffs and I think the beach would just be in the shadow long before sunset. So when I went out with a friend on this evening, we headed towards Hamworthy to see what we could find.

Sundown at Hamworthy

We parked up near Rockley Park and wandered down to the beach. It was a lovely evening, but unfortunately once we got to the beach I just wasn't inspired by what I saw. The sun was low in the sky but still bright and not really in the right position, and as I only had a wide angle lens (17-40L) I needed to find fairly big areas which were interesting and uncluttered. The tide was out, and the sand looked a bit muddy and dirty - probably just a play on the light from the low sun but it didn't look like it would make a shot I'd be happy with.

It was a nice walk though, and we headed a fairly long way back round to the car. We then drove down to a pier, still in Hamworthy, and this looked much more promising. I went for a bit of a wander around, taking some shots of the pier from beach level, but I got much happier when up on the pier itself. The first shot on this page (at the top) was towards the sunset from about half way down the pier - the black bar across the top is one of the wooden railings which I deliberately left in the image.

Resting Boats at Hamworthy

A few technical details: all of these images were taken with my 5D mark 2, 17-40L with a Lee filter holder and ND grad filters (I think all of these shots were with a single 0.6ND grad), and my Manfrotto 055XProB tripod with ball head. My standard focussing method is to pick an aperture that is wide enough but where diffraction doesn't start to affect the image too much (typically around f/14-f/16), then switch in to Manual Focus and use Live View to focus the image. Starting with the hyperfocal technique, I'll zoom to 10x in LiveView around 1/3 of the way into the image and manually focus at this point. I can then quickly verify by moving the viewpoint to the horizon and the close foreground, both while using the DoF preview button to check the focus.

Tranquility

All shots are taken with Mirror Lockup and with a remote release also. I fairly quickly decided to go for a more interesting viewpoint and dropped the camera down low on the tripod. The 055XProB has the capability to rotate the central column through 90 degrees, so with the legs splayed wide open you can have the camera a few inches above the ground (or even close if you don't mind the shot being taken upside down).

Boats

The light on this particular evening was wonderful - beautiful pastel colours in the sky, and the view was serene with the Purbecks in the background and resting boats in the middle ground. As the light was starting to fade, the exposure time was going up, leading to the smoothing of the sea and the reflections of the shapes of the boats.

Hamworthy Pier Fisherman

I'm not particularly up with fishing, but it seems that people start coming out when it begins to get dark. The man in this picture came along and set up on the end of one of the arms of the pier. This exposure was a number of seconds, but he stayed still enough for there not to be any significant blurring.

It's all over!

This arm was on the end of the pier, and according to my friend Colin who I was out shooting with on this evening, it may well have been part of an old mechanism for rotating and lowering boats into the water. I just think it looks like a noose - not a particularly cheerful thing, but an interesting focal point to the picture!

Moon over Hamworthy

After about an hour or so enjoying the setting sun on the pier, we headed back to the car. The sun had disappeared over the hills, so I took this shot down towards the water - on the tripod, and this one was an exposure of about 30 seconds.

Sunset Daffodils

Finally, I noticed this bunch of daffodils. I've taken a lot of daffodil shots, but never one where you needed a 30 second exposure to get enough light in! This was the final shot of the evening before heading back home for a bit of processing and uploading.

All in all, a great evening. Putting some effort into getting out on a summers evening to take photographs was rewarded with a peaceful evening enjoying the water lapping against the pier, the boats and canoes gently navigating around the water and the sun drifting down below the hills. What more could you want? :)

Shots from Goodwood

2010-07-24T13:08:00.001+01:00

Thanks to Lotus, I got some free tickets to the first Moving Motor Show at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on July 1st this year. I've never been to Goodwood FoS before, and although the Moving Motor Show day was geared towards manufacturers exhibiting products and using the track for test drives, it was a great day with so much to see.

Going to something like Goodwood, you know the general setup is that there will be a lot of cars on static display and some going around the track. I wanted to try and get something a bit different from the show, so I didn't really bother with any track shots but went more for detail on the static displays. Kit wise, I went armed with my 5D mk 2 and 70-200 f4L IS and 17-40L.

Audi R8 (Deliberate grain added)

After the drive to Goodwood and the tractor (trailer) ride from the car park into the show itself, we headed for the Motor Show tent which housed moderate stands from a lot of manufacturers with some displays. This was where people who had pre-booked could take a car out for a drive around the track. You'll notice in the picture above and below (which were taken in the main "Moving Motor Show" area) that there is a road running down the centre of the area. It was quite an interesting idea - the internal road gave way to a sort-of temporary metal road that ran from this tented area onto the actual track, and there was a constant queue of cars both going out and coming back.

Lotus Evora, just coming back after a test-drive around the track

You can see in the image above that each manufacturer had a partitioned section, and it was in these area's that some static displays were on show, for example this beautiful E-Type Jag:

E-Type Jag Detail

E-Type Jag

Unfortunately, there was a bit of an accident - the paper's reported someone blacking out in a souped up Civic Type-R - which ended up with and crashing into 4 people, this particular E-Type and out the window opposite.

On the Lotus stand, there was an absolutely immaculate Esprit S1. I have a great fondness for Lotus (the majority of my shots are of Lotus cars, and I own an Turbo Esprit HC), and this was a gorgeous example of the first Esprit.

Esprit S1

Esprit S1 - the boot

The Esprit

Outside, there were lots more cars (suprisingly!) I noticed this Exige on the grass - it had an interesting matt finish paint and actually looked rather good. (Shot notes: I added a soft grad (in Lightroom) to bring back some detail in the sky)

Matt Black Exige

In the main area, there were fantastic showrooms erected in the days before the show started. The Audi room was effectively a 3 storey building with a raised area out the front - absolutely amazing how these things are transported and built in hours!

Round at the Lotus show area, there were some lovely cars:

Roger Becker Special Edition Elise SC (Supercharged)

Lotus Elise Detail

Lotus Type 52

Exige Detail, with Elise in the background

This following car is very interesing - it's the Evora 414E Hybrid (Concept). The car itself is an Evora, but with the engine removed and replaced with 2 200bhp electric motors and a set of batteries. There is also a 1.3L monoblock petrol engine which can also run off ethanol which can charge the batteries.

Lotus Evora 414E Hybrid

The range on batteries is around 40 miles, but with the petrol engine the range is increased to over 200 miles, with an efficiency of around 50 miles per gallon. And those electric motors can propel the car to 60mph in around 4 seconds! It's only a concept at the moment - the car in the photograph has all the bits inside (you can see them through the back window above), but it doesn't move under it's own steam yet.

Another vaguely interesting car was the Mercedes SLS. I'm not a great fan of Mercedes cars, but this one looked quite unique. It has fairly retro front styling, and gull-wing doors, and a price tag of around £160k.

Mercedes SLS AMG

I changed to the 70-200 lens at this point, and across the track from all the show areas was the house. Each year there is a piece of art outside - this year the art represented 100 years of Alfa Romeo:

100 years of Alfa Romeo

And lining the track were flags from all the manufacturers - here's the Lotus one:

Trackside Lotus Flag

In the Cartier Style et Luxe area, there are some excellent examples of cars from back in the day (that sounds so old!). With my focus on Lotus today, I was pretty excited to see the Etna there. I'd read about this car, but never actually seen it. It 's the V8 concept from 1984 who's engine I believe was going to make it into the Esprit, but Lotus ended up in severe financial difficulties and troubles with Colin Chapman's death a year or two before. The project got canned, and it wasn't until around 1995 that Lotus finally managed to get a V8 into the Esprit.

Lotus Etna

You can't see it properly in this picture, but the ETNA letters on the back of the car look like they are just pieces of insulating tape stuck onto the car! Pure Lotus :)

Lotus Etna - Rear

There were some fascinating shaped cars in the Cartier Style et Luxe area too, so I caught a shot of a few of these. The car below is the Alfa Carabo, designed b y Marcello Gandini at Bertone. It's very, very flat and reminds me of a hot-wheels car!

Alfa Carabo

Then there's the Alfa Navajo. This looks like the sort of car a puppet from Thunderbirds would be driving! It's got bold body styling all over...

Alfa Navajo - Thunderbirds are go!

... and I have no idea what Marecllo Gandini was thinking when he designed the back:

Alfa Navajo - Is this the most insane back end to a car ever?

I picked a few other detail shots out from the day. The front of a Morgan has a unique and classic shape, and in this colour in the sunlight it becomes a nice almost monochromatic array of shapes:

And finally in the American car section in the middle of the green were some massive engined chrome covered lumps with the suspension of a sofa (you can tell I like these things!), so rather than taking a picture of the cars I got a detail shot across the front and windscreen of one:

All in all a great day - beautiful weather, loads of cars both new and old, and a brilliant opportunity for photography. I can highly recommend a visit one year if you've never been and are at all interested in cars.

Back to Landscapes

2010-07-20T20:27:00.001+01:00

Although I've had an interest in photography for more than 10 years, it didn't really get serious until I bought my first DSLR in early 2007. Since then, I've tried many different types of photography and over the last few months have spent quite a bit of time shooting people and trying to get a feel for using shallow DoF in images. Recently, though, with the beautiful weather in the UK and late sunset times, I've been out with tripod, graduated ND filters and remote release - back to what is probably my favourite type of photography.

I fit my photography around a day job and family, so the times I have to take shots are often limited. Keeping a positive attitude is important, and you often need to "break the rules" and try and become inventive in how you take shots (for example, midday is not generally considered a good time for photographs of any kind).

I want to do a kind-of journal for the landscape excursions I do over the summer, so I'll start with two - Hartley Wintney (where I work) and Corfe Mullen (near where I live).

Hartley Wintney

So, over a lunch time I nipped out towards Winchfield and this field caught my eye. I stuck the car at an almost 45 degree angle (from horizontal!) on a steep verge, got my tripod and bag out and crossed to the field. One thing I've started to learn is that if there's a great photo opportunity, you can't let things like a sensible place to park or a gate get in your way - as long as you're respectful and no-one starts shouting and waving a shotgun around I figure you can probably get on with it!

This was one of the first shots I took. The field was fresh wheat, and in the middle was a patch of poppies - you can just see them in the shot below. I have to admit to slightly altering this image by taking a pylon out that was on the horizon near the centre, but other than that, it's only had a bit of colour and contrast adjustment. The shot was taken with a 0.6ND grad to keep detail in the sky - I really wouldn't be without my ND grads now. I tend to use them in all landscape shots where there's a clear horizon and they've transformed the balance between ground and sky. Often I think I go a bit towards the extreme side - ending up with a sort of HDR look - but the joy of photography is the ability to experiment. Some things work well, some things don't, and on top of that the things you like one month may not appeal the next month.

Wheat field with Poppies

I was on a fairly dull path next to the field, and I wondered what it would look like from an insect view-point, so I stretched the legs of the tripod out (I've got a Manfrotto 055XProB tripod with a ball head - the tripod allows you to completely splay the legs out and rotate the centre column through 90 degrees to take low level shots). This image has had quite a lot of tonal adjustment - recovery to bring the detail back in the sky (again, I used the 0.6 ND grad, but the sun was hot and bright and nothing could keep the detail there without going to HDR), and some fill light to light the green crop. While I like the viewpoint of the image, I do find the blown out sun a bit distracting, but there's not really anything I could do about it. In hindsight, a viewpoint which captures the sky without a direct shot of the sun is probably the way to go next time.

Insects-eye View - Wheat Field

As I mentioned, there's a patch of poppies in the middle of the field. As I was planning on going, I thought I had to get to them to see if the shot would work. I spent a good couple of minutes navigating my way along the tractor tracks so as not to damage any of the growing crop, and when I got about as close as I could I fired off a few shots. A bit of tonal adjustment brings out the red of the poppies and green of the wheat against the sky.

Poppies and Wheat

Corfe Mullen

This evening was dull, but I'd made the decision to get out and take some photographs. I'm writing this some time after this particular evening, and it's something I've done a few times now. Without getting all deep and meaningful, it's beautiful being outside and taking the time to look at nature, landscapes, trees, growing crops, grass, the sky... even if you don't take any pictures, it's a lovely experience.

But this evening, I packed my "landscape" kit (5D2, 17-40L, ND grads, remote release, tripod), along with a raincoat and a sense of wasting my time and set out. When I got to the place I wanted to take the shots (about 1 mile from where I live!), I got out and unpacked. Luckily, as is often the case, a little gap appeared in the cloud around horizon level and the sunlight burst through to illuminate the bottom of the huge cloud layer that had been threatening to empty all over me.

Sunset at Corfe Mullen Heath

Again, these shots were taken with an ND grad filter (I generally start with the 0.6 and fiddle if things don't seem to be working, but generally the 2 stops offered by this filter covers most situations). The shot below had a bit of acid applied I think - I've called it "Cocktail" as a friend pointed out that he used to drink something approximately this colour when at university! It's a bit extreme in hindsight, but as I said above, it's nice to try these things - without doing that, how can you know what you're really happy with and what defines your own style?

Cocktail!

So to the last shot - long grass, heathland and the sun sitting just above the horizon. The 17-40L at 17mm on a full frame camera gives a beautifully wide view, and if you keep the horizon moderately central you can hide most of the distortion you get from going this wide. I've got into the habit of taking both landscape and portrait shots of most of the places that I visit - if you are planning on offering images for sale (especially to publications) then the choice of both formats increases the chance of them being useful.

Corfe Mullen Sunset

All in all, great fun to be out with nature and try and capture some of that beauty that surrounds us all the time, but most of the time, most of the people never notice...

Coffe Arithmetic

2010-06-09T11:00:00.000+01:00

A bit of maths with coffee:

Mmmmmm!

Couldn't resist that - just about to go and make one now...

Lasers

2010-05-25T20:48:00.000+01:00

I have always had a keen interest in lasers - to be honest with light in general, but the purity and brilliance of laser light holds something special. My uncle (who is no longer with us) spent years working with lasers for all sorts of reasons - everything from a few milliwatt (Helium Neon) up to 2W Argon Ion lasers which on one occasion led to him accidentally cutting his tie in half! - and I spent a lot of time learning from him.

I've owned quite a few lasers - I was gifted a 2mW HeNe laser first off, and I've had quite a few standard laser pointers (all red diode lasers). But in the last few days I've finally got hold of a couple of diode lasers that are a bit different from the norm - a 20mW green, and a 205mW red one.

I ought to say, I may have got a bit carried away with the technical explanation about lasers having re-read the post. If you're not interested in that, then skip to the pretty pictures below :-)

Both of the lasers that I have recently acquired are diode lasers, but the green one is a more complex diode pumped solid state (DPSS) laser. To try and explain: diode lasers create their laser light through the recombination of electrons and holes in a semiconductor material who's recombination causes the emission of photons. If this makes no sense to you, then I apologise for the various bits of technical gibberish throughout this! Anyway, the recombination of electron-hole pairs causes a photon to be emitted (spontaneous emission), and this photon can in turn cause other electron-hole pairs to recombine and release a very similar photon (same direction and phase - stimulated emission). It is this cascading stimulated emissions - contained within an optical cavity - which produces "lasing".

The red laser I have is probably an AlGaInP (Aluminium Gallium Indium Phoshphide) laser which has a single emission frequency of around 660nm:

The diode inside is very small - contained within the aluminium housing at the end of the PCB below (you can just see a hint of the copper casing that the laser is encased in - this is all for heat dissipation):

The PCB consists of a protection diode and a driver IC which generates the appropriate voltage and current to power the laser from the batteries despite their changing (discharging) voltage.

This laser has an output power of 205mW which puts it into class 3B. This is the point where I get all serious...

The lasers I have owned up to now have been less than 5mW total output power. They are class 1 or class 2 devices, both of which are certainly incapable of burning anything. With some effort or serious abuse, they would be capable of burning the retina in your (or someone else's) eye, which is the primary cause for concern from most lasers.

These two latest lasers are both powerful enough to do serious damage to the retina without much effort. At 20-30mW (and potentially more in the infra-red part of the spectrum - explained later), the green laser could cause damage with a very short direct flash into the eye. The red laser, at 205mW, could do serious damage even through reflected light. I cannot stress enough that these are not toys. They may be quite interesting and exciting, but without proper safety precautions they can partially blind you without you even realising until it's too late.

OK, safety talk over (but please take note and don't just go and buy some without some serious research!)

The green laser (below) is considerable more interesting from a technical point of view - it's what's known as a DPSS (diode pumped solid state) laser. The sort of direct band-gap semiconductors available tend to emit photons towards the red and infra-red end of the spectrum, rather than green or blue light. It turns out the most efficient way to generate green light is through a 3 stage process involving shifting the frequency of light through the use of two different crystals, starting with an infra-red laser.

So, an infra-red diode laser at 808nm (Gallium Aluminium Arsenide) generated the source light which "pumps" a crystal of Neodymium doped Yttrium Vanadate (Nd:YVO4). This crystal is excited to emit photos further into the infra-red part of the spectrum at 1064nm. This sounds completely counter-intuitive (we're trying to get green, after all - why go further away from green), but actually this bit is really clever: you use a crystal of Potassium Titanyl Phosphase (KTP) which doubles the frequency of the light from 1064nm to 532nm - which is green! So there you go, nice and easy really!

The extended size of the DPSS laser hides it's high power infra-red source (the conversion process is fairly inefficient), and Nd:YVO4 and KTP crystals behind the collimating lens:

Laser light is both monochromatic (a single frequency - think about how it's generated) and coherent (all the wave are in phase), so it doesn't diverge much - the shot below is of the red laser point while on - you can safely look at it from any angle except directly down into the beam:

Now, with all the semiconductor explanation out of the way, here's a few pretty pictures...

This one was outside, a long exposure with the camera on a table, slowly moving the laser back and forth across the sky. I'm intrigued by the visible "stopping" point of the beam - I don't quite understand why it appears to go a certain distance then stop dead rather than fading into the distance:

Now, the red laser is 205mW, and has a screw-thread collimating lens on the end. This means you can focus it to a point, and 205mW on a point which has a tiny area means there is a lot of energy on that point, and you can really heat that point up. Below is the result of focussing the beam on a piece of wood (well, the garden furniture, but don't tell the wife!)

The other thing that I had read a fair amount about is using the laser the light a match. A safety match is dark in colour, and will absorb a lot of the energy from the laser light, so I set up my 7D with the 100mm macro lens focussed on a match head (at 1:1) and started lighting matches. The shot below shows how visible the beam is in a dark room (note that at 1:1 the 100mm macro lens had a DoF of significantly less than 1mm and the beam is a bit out of this DoF):

This shot shows the match at the point just before it lights:

And the flame is just starting to erupt from the edge of the match here:

Now the match is on it's way to igniting across it's surface:

This shot shows the spent match illuminated with the green laser - it's more for art than any other purpose:

And finally a couple of long exposure shots writing on the Leylandii that make our back fence with both the green and red lasers:

I have a lot more ideas to try, and I can think of all sorts of interesting experiments to perform with these lasers - reflections, combinations, speckled interference patterns, interferometry photos, and apparently popping balloon's is fun! Hopefully I'll get some interesting shots to post over the next few months.

I think I should just once again re-iterate how these are not toys, and you really should research the safety issues relating to them if you're thinking they look like fun. At the very least, spend quite a few quid on some safety glasses meant for the frequency of laser that you are using.

7D Macro - Summary after several shoots

2010-05-20T20:55:00.000+01:00

I've spent several hours out now taking macro shots with the Canon 100mm f2.8 (non-L) lens on my 7D, and I wanted to showcase my favourite images and give a bit of technical detail about how I've taken them.

(Note that, like with all my post images, if you click on any image you will be able to see a larger version)

A bit of introduction. For those who don't know, the 7D is an APS-C camera (meaning the sensor diagonal is 1/1.6 times that of a full frame sensor, reducing the area to about 40% that of the full frame sensor), and has a pixel count of 18 million pixels. A macro lens is (officially) a lens which is capable of at least 1:1 magnification - that is the image on the sensor is the same size (or bigger) than the object in real life.

A fly in a flower, covered in specs of pollen.

The lens is a fixed focal length (100mm) lens, so the only change you can make is to change the focal point. This also changes the magnification, with 1:1 being at the closest focus point (which is about 30cm from the focal plane - i.e. the sensor of the camera). Assuming the camera is focussed to 1:1, an object of 22.5mm in length (i.e. less tha, 1 inch across) will span the complete width of the sensor - that is 5184 pixels! So, you can see, with this kind of sensor resolution and 1:1 magnification, you can get magnificent detail - an object of 22.5mm x 15mm will be captured with 18 million pixels.

A hoverfly, next to some gorse.

Up until owning the 7D, I used to use a Canon 40D for macro shots. This is 10MP but still produced some beautiful detailed shots. There is, however, one significant difference in the way the images were captured between the two camera. On the 40D, I used to switch the lens to manual focus, and rock slight back and forth while looking through the viewfinder. With the appropriate autofocus point set, there would be a confirmation beep and flash when I rocked through the right point and I would take the shot. This technique works well, and I used it in preference to using AI Servo AF on the 40D as I tended to get more success.

An ant, climbing to the end of a leaf.

The 7D, with certain Canon branded macro lenses and when switched to AI Servo AF, enters a new macro specific mode where the AF sensor samples at 3 times it's normal rate, thus more rapidly responding to any slight movement of either me or the thing I'm trying to photograph. I was somewhat sceptical about this when I read about it, but having tried it I was so impressed with the number of keepers I got I tend to use AI Servo AF as my standard capture method now. The only time I switch to manual focus is when I really want something taken at 1:1 magnification.

Hoverfly on a leaf

One other technique comment is that I generally use a flash for taking macro shots. Depth of field at 1:1 magnification is tiny - at f2.8 the DoF is 0.6mm, and moving up to f11 it only extends to 2.6mm (figures according to dofmaster). Most shots are taken in manual mode with a shutter speed of 1/125s and around f11 - this requires either super bright sunlight, or a flash to illuminate the images. I'm generally content with the flash on the body of the camera, and I always use a diffuser (Stofen type) to make the light somewhat less directional out of the flash. I have an off-shoe flash cable which I sometimes used, but I find that while taking landscape orientation shots, the source of the flash mimics the sun and ends up with a fairly natural looking images. I'd like to try a ring flash at some point to see how much difference it really makes.

Fly on a stinging nettle.

Now I'll talk a little about some of the images I've picked out. The one above is a fly on a stinging nettle - see the big spikes on the leaf (well, they're very small really!) particularly the one just in front of the fly - you can see what causes a stinging nettle to sting now!

Patterned leaf

This leaf caught my attention due to the pattern on it. It seems like everything to the near side of the white line is dried and dead, and to the other side it's not too bad. It would be interesting to know what cause this - maybe some caterpillar?

Climbing up the leaf

I've no idea what this is (I'm learning about different bugs but I'm not really there yet), but I like the way it's climbing up the leaves, and the gentle bokeh in the background frames the creature nicely.

These next few were inspired by some shots taken by @robfryphoto. I went out into my garden and took detail shots of dandelions, and some random shots down in the grass at various aperture values. All were without flash, and so generally wider aperture (although it was a gloriously sunny day).

Sparkles

Seeds

I particularly like this abstract shot of a single blade of grass - taken completely at random down in the grass, I think the bokeh and green tones of the image work really well:

Blade

Back to the heathland, and I managed to spot this ant wandering around a leaf. After a while of shooting macro, you know there's always something interesting nearby, so I now have a tendancy to wait until the creatures get into an orientation that will lead to a nice picture rather than just shooting when I first see it. There's always a tendancy to get a picture before the thing disappears (either flies off or runs away!), but you get to learn the behaviour of lots of insects and most don't really mind you being about as long as you're not moving too fast or bothering them too much. I waited specifically for this ant to come towards me to get this shot of it's face:

Ant

A similar story again with this ladybird - it was the second one I saw as the first one flew off when I got close (I moved in a bit too quickly). I'm amazed at how ugly and scary these things are close up - imagine being shrunk and them coming face to face with this!

Ugly Bug

And as for this beetle - it's got a face only a mother could love! I like this shot as it shows it doing something - it's chomped a section of the leaf out behind it's mouth. The light also catches the minuscule hairs on the back and lead to a myriad of colours:

Chomp

This one isn't really a macro, but it was taken with a macro lens. Wide open, I shot the top of this pine cone, then desaturated the image to give it a wintery feel. Again, this was taken on a blazingly sunny day!

Winter?

Another abstract shot - this was taken using LiveView to focus on the tip of the leaf. I didn't saturate the colours quite as much in this shot as it has a kind-of calmer feel than the earlier blade of grass shot.

Serenity

The next few shots were from my third day of going out for macro shots, so I was really starting to look for something different than just static documentary shots of insects. Here, I waited until the bug was half covered by the leaf and took the shot to make it look like it's rising up out of the leaf:

I'm coming to get you!

A few seconds later, it had explored up to the top of the leaf of the nettle, and met this other insect. There was a momentary exchange (caught here), and the smaller insect dived off under the leaf to run away:

En Guarde!

Another ladybird shot, with lots of face detail. Notice that the right hand eye (as you look at it) appears dented - I guess it has been in some kind of fight:

Dented Ladybird

Later on in the day, I stopped at a field full of oil-seed rape. I had intended to use the field as part of a landscape picture, but I had the macro lens already on the 7D, so I had a quick look around to see what I could shoot before changing lenses. I was amazed at how many small flies and beetles were covering the plants and flowers! The image below shows a couple of mating beetles - these things were absolutely tiny - the yellow flower is a single flower on the top of the oil seed rape plant, so these insect can't have been much bigger than 1-2mm:

Mating beetles

Beetle on oil-seed rape.

And my most recent shoot - I decided to go close to some water to see if I could capture a different set of creatures. I am petrified of wasps, so was quite pleased to capture the shot below. It's not actually a wasp - it's a Sawfly - but I didn't know that at the time!

Sawfly. Scary.

It appears to be quite difficult to find spiders at the times when I tend to be out - I think they are mainly out and about in early mornings or evenings. This one was on a leaf, and is considerably smaller than it looks:

Not a Tarantula

I've seen (and taken) a lot of dandelion pictures recently, and noticed these fairly perfect specimens out near the water. I wanted to try and capture something a bit different, so I moved around several and found this one with a small patch of tiny blue flowers at the base. I kept them in the out of focus area, and cropped part of the dandelion away as well as adding a quite strong vignette:

Mellow

Finally, this was the last shot I took yesterday. I have no idea what it is, but it looks like a properly armed and scary thing out of Doctor Who! Nature has an amazing way of produce a huge variety of creatures at all scales from cells to whales, and it's been an absolute pleasure to capture some of the ones towards the smaller end of that scale:

Another ugly bug!

And one final image: While I was writing this blog post, my 6 year old son's first tooth fell out! Here it is, on a 5p piece:

Macro shots - Insects with the 7D

2010-05-14T21:05:00.001+01:00

I went for a wander at lunch time today with my 7D, Canon 100mm f2.8 macro and 430EX. Most of the shots were taken with the flash mounted on the camera, but a few were with the 7D acting as flash master and the 430EX in slave mode, hand held in various positions. I'm pretty pleased with the results - I don't have a lot of time tonight so I'll just put a dump of the pictures (all were Manual mode, 1/125s, various apertures, but most at f/11, with some down as low as f/2.8):

I've never managed to get a decent picture of an ant before:

The 7D allows so much cropping with 18MP:

These flowers were absolutely tiny - you can get an idea of the scale from the size of the hairs under the petals. I would guess no more than 3 or 4mm across:

I like the pattern on this leaf - no idea what caused it:

A new shoot in spring

52 Weeks - Week 6: "Flowers"

2010-05-09T20:33:00.000+01:00

This week has been all about photographing flowers, and to try and avoid another post with the excuse that I was too busy, I have made a bit of an effort here! Unfortunately, it's been more in the taking and processing of images than the pruning, so there may be a bit of an overdose, but hey, at least it's better than the last couple of weeks.

I generally take at least one camera pretty much everywhere, and I've been really enjoying my Sigma 50mm f1.4 on the 5Dmk2 recently, so when we went to a garden centre, I took a few shots there:

This is a bit of a cheat as I've already done a post about the bluebell woods at Pamphill, but they were taken in the "Flowers" week, so I think I'm sort-of allowed to repost them here:

My mother absolutely loves gardening and flower arranging, and she had made an absolutely beautiful arrangement of flowers which I took a shot of (again, this was with the 50 f1.4 at f1.4 - probably should have had the DoF a bit wider...)

But I wanted to make an effort with this topic. My daughter picked the theme for this week, along with the comment that it gave me a chance to "buy Mummy some flowers", so off I went to the local flower shop and selected a slightly off mixture of hopefully photogenic flowers. My advertising bit - I've got a shot of the label below, as if you're about in Corfe Mullen then Just Add Flower's is a wonderful shop to go to - very friendly and flower's everywhere (which is what you want!). Here's the bunch as I bought them:

I'm not great with flower names - the lady in the shop (I didn't catch her name) did tell me what they were all called, but I think I'm going to have to revisit this post with some details. So below are a bunch of shots of the flowers. These are mostly taken with a 7D and Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens, but also with 5Dmk2 and Sigma 50mm f1.4.

This one was against black card, but the flash lit it as grey. I quite like the contrast between the flower and the background (saturation reduced quite a bit on the flower):

This is a silhouette against the window:

I started using a couple of coloured plastic sheets as backgrounds here - I think they add interest to the shot overall rather than having a plain black background:

This was backlit with the flash:

I think this one is my favourite - I love the colour contrast between the flower and the red background:

This was the macro lens at f2.8 - the DoF must be 1-2 mm:

And a classic rose:

This was one of the few taken with the 50mm f1.4 - the ultra-shallow DoF shows as the focal point is just the top of the rose:

And finally, the place they all came from:

Technically, as I said above, most of the shots were taken with the 7D and 100mm f2.8 macro. I used the master flash functionality of the 7D and a 430EX in slave mode - hand held in various positions - to light the flowers. Generally, the position that worked best was to have the flash head on to the "face" of the flower to minimise shadows, but I also used a combination of just the off-camera flash and both the off-camera and on-camera (pop-up) flash also to try and minimise distracting shadows.

All in all, it was a lot of fun to spend an hour or so taking these shots!

Latte and Espresso

2010-05-08T13:18:00.000+01:00

Time for a couple of coffee drinks! My wife loves a nice Latte, and I like Espresso. I had the camera handy and took a few shots of preparing the drinks:

First, you have to get everything out. The coffee machine is already set up in the kitchen, a couple of Espresso cups and the coffee holder are all ready to go:

Pop some coffee in the holder, tamp it down (compress it with a special tool):

Put the holder on the machine, and switch the pump on. If you've put the right amount of correctly ground coffee in and tamped it properly, then you get a beautiful espresso in about 25 seconds.

Fresh ground coffee, properly prepared in the machine will come out with a lovely "crema" - this is the creamy, oily frothy layer on the top of the coffee:

Now, for the latte you need milk. Frothing milk is quite a precise operation - you need to get it between about 60 and 70 degree C. Too cold and you end up with a luke-warm coffee, too hot and you scald the milk and it doesn't taste as nice. That's why I use a thermometer:

About 1/5th of a jug of milk froths up to completely fill the jug if you get it right:

To make a Latte, you pour the milk into a glass, using a spoon to hold back most of the froth. Leave a little bit of room, then pour the espresso into the milk and add a dollop of froth to the top:

For a cappucino, you pour about 50/50 froth and hot milk (using a spoon while pouring to divide) onto the coffee (so you put the coffee in first).

And there you go! Photographically, all pictures were taken with 5Dmk2 (all at ISO 800), Sigma 50 f1.4 all at f1.4. I'm absolutley loving the Sigma 50 f1.4 on the 5Dmk2 - an absolutley brilliant combination.

Pamphill Bluebells

2010-05-07T08:11:00.000+01:00

Pamphill has a "secret" woods which springs up with thousands of bluebells in April/May time. I went along a couple of weeks ago and only a few were flowering, so I had hoped to get back last week during some lovely weather. As usual, things got in the way, but I did manage to get out and take a few shots under a fairly overcast sky. All shots are taken with 5Dmk2, 17-40, Hi-Tech 0.6ND grad, tripod, mirror lockup and remote shutter.

52 Weeks - Week 5: "Chocolate"

2010-05-05T09:06:00.000+01:00

My Wife has been setting my weekly photo topics generally, and she's just figured out that it might be in her interest to suggest things she likes - like Chocolate! Unfortunately, for the 3rd week in a row I've not really had the time that I would have liked to spend on the photos, so here's a few picked out for the theme of Chocolate:

(5Dmk2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4m 1/500s at ISO 400)

I had my camera in the shop and caught a few shots of the kids choosing what to get as a treat - Harry took a while to decide and wandered back and forth inspecting pretty much everything!

(5Dmk2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4m 1/100s at ISO 100)

And at the garden centre, we got some chocolate ice-cream milkshake which was actually very nice!

(5Dmk2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4m 1/250s at ISO 100)

I will really try and take some specific shots for next week's theme, which is Flowers (that one was set by my daughter, but my wife's quite excited about the possibility of getting some flowers, even if the motivation is wrong!)

52 Weeks - Week 4: "Morning"

2010-05-04T20:26:00.000+01:00

Once again, I was desperately busy this week and capturing shots for my topic wasn't really much of an option. I've picked a few out from the week that work for Morning:

(Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 f4L IS at 111mm, f4, ISO 160)

The shot above was in a field off Julian's Road in Wimborne which I often go to - it's fairly accessible and it was full of sheep and new born lambs on this morning. I wanted to get the sun in, and played with it just out of frame giving a morning flare to the shot.

This picture is a bit of a cheat - it's from the set that I did on the Goose egg that I was given. It's even more of a cheat as I took it in the evening! But I thought it's about representation of "morning" rather than necessarily morning itself, and I think this at least has that:

(Canon 5Dmk2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f2, ISO 400)

Finally, this was another shot taken in the Julian's Road field - I've shot this tree before, but I decided to play with the processing here. The exposure has been raised to just under blown highlights, and I took the black level up to raise the contrast of the overall image. Doing this generally makes it far too saturated, so the saturation is reduced a bit to compensate:

(Canon 7D, Canon 70-200 f4L IS at 125mm, f4, ISO 125)

52 Weeks - Week 3: "Happiness"

2010-05-03T18:25:00.000+01:00

This weeks challenge was Happiness. Unfortunately, I had a somewhat mad week and didn't really have much of a chance to focus on the topic, so I've picked out a few shots from the week that sort-of represent happiness.

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, 1/800s at f8, ISO 100)

The first shot was a couple of Buzzards flying over my house - it's quite heavily cropped from a 400mm lens as they were a fair distance away. They seemed to be playing around - I'm not sure if they're a mating pair, but they were ducking and diving and kept looking like they were going to crash into each other, and then they'd just glide around together before starting again.

(5Dmk2, 24-70L at 70mm, 1/320s at f2.8, ISO 100)

This one is my daughter out in Pamphill, near Wimborne. We had gone to see if the bluebells had all come out in the woods there - we were about a week early, so the kids were mucking around and having a great time! Sophie found this tree trunk to sit on and wanted a picture taken (which is fairly rare as they're all pretty fed up with the camera).

(5Dmk2, Canon 24-70L at 48mm, 1/160s at f5, ISO 100)

And out of the woods, Ozzie (my son) was walking around (he's just starting to get the hang of it) and cracking up every time he staggered and fell over!

This is a macro shot of the heart of a Dandelion - they might be weeds, but they are colourful and quite beautiful close up. With the great bright yellow petals, I thought this was quite a "happy" picture :-)

(7D, Canon 100mm Macro, 1/125s at f8, ISO 100)

And a bee doing what bee's do best - buzzing around in a bush trying to find something useful. I figured he might be happy...?

(7D, Canon 100mm Macro, 1/125s at f8, ISO 200)

Finally, a capture of bath time with two messy kids - lots of splashing, giggling, general mucking around and lots and lots of smiles!

(5Dmk2, Canon 24-70L at 57mm, 1/60s at f2.8, ISO 1600)

Birds and Squirrels with the 7D and 120-400OS

2010-04-22T21:20:00.000+01:00

Yesterday and today I went a wandering with the 7D and the 120-400OS. I won't use this lens below f8 as it's too soft, so for an effective focal length of over 600mm (on the cropped sensor of the 7D) you need good light to use it. Recently, we've been having some decent weather, so I've been trying it out properly...

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/640s, ISO 400, distance:6.52m)

This is pretty much a dump of the pictures from yesterday and today - click any image to see it a bit bigger (although not full size). I'll put some comments throughout and at the bottom...

These first images were taken at the Basingstoke Canal near Winchfield. Lighting was OK, but it was quite cloudy so the conditions were variable throughout the time I was there. I've put the metadata information underneath the images, and included the lens focus distance information - this is an approximate distance to the focal point, so you get some idea of how far away the birds and squirrels were:

This squirrel was the other side of the canal up quite a high tree:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, 1/400s, f8, ISO 250, distance:13.5m)

This one is a Long Tailed Tit

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, 1/400s, f8, ISO 800, distance:13.5m)

The following two images are taken very close together - they show the bird just taking off from the branch:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/400s, ISO 400, distance:16.7m)

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/400s, ISO 320, distance:16.7m)

This is a Great Tit, hiding in the bushes (so high ISO):

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/500s, ISO 3200, distance:9.72m)

And a Chaffinch sitting on a branch in reasonable sunlight:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/400s, ISO 160, distance:9.72m)

Another Chaffinch from the back:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/640s, ISO 640, distance:6.52m)

And a Goldfinch, over 28 metres away at the top of a very tall tree!

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/400s, ISO 100, distance:28.2m)

The rest of the shots are from today - this one from Poole Park. I set the camera up in Manual mode, f8, 1/800s and auto ISO to take the shots at the park:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/800s, ISO 400, distance:16.7m)

And now from Upton Country Park - another Chaffinch:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/500s, ISO 200, distance:4.72m)

A Robin - another high ISO shot:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/640s, ISO 2500, distance: 2.36m)

This little chap was sat on a bench nibbling seed and corn that had been put down for the birds and squirrels...

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/500s, ISO 400, distance: 6.52m)

When I got a bit close, he jumped off and ran into the trees, but not too far from the food. He sat up in a real "Mission Impossible" stance!

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/500s, ISO 400, distance:8.39m)

The focus is a bit off, but you don't often see birds as fast as Great Tits in the air (at least I don't!), so I've included this one for interest:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/640s, ISO 400, distance: 8.39m)

And here he/she is not flying:

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/500s, ISO 400, distance: 8.39m)

Another Chaffinch

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 400mm, f8, 1/640s, ISO 640, distance: 8.39m)

And a massive squirrel butt on a tiny post - very good at balancing!

(7D, Sigma 120-400OS at 323mm, f8, 1/500s, ISO 800, distance: 5.8m)

Comments:

For smaller birds, it's best to try and use shutter speeds over about 1/500s irrespective of the lens length - they are so twitchy that you'll inevitably get blur on anything slower.
The 7D is great at focussing, and the 120-400OS is a pretty good lens at f8.
All my shots from today except for the last one included here are at 400mm... I'm contemplating replacing the 120-400OS with a 400mm prime, and the evidence so far suggests that I wouldn't miss any shots...
You definitely need good light for shots like these, but the high ISO performance of the 7D is respectible enough, especially when combined with the noise reduction capabilities of Lightroom 3 (even as a Beta 2 which is what I used for these pictures).
Noise is less of an issue if you can fill the frame, as long as the image is scaled down - the noise will be averaged as you scale down, which reduces it's effect.
The RSPB website is a superb resource for identifying birds - the search facility is fantastic.

My First Goose Egg!

2010-04-20T21:04:00.000+01:00

I was given half a dozen chicken eggs and a goose egg today. The goose egg is a pretty impressive thing - it must be 3 times the size of a normal chicken egg! I thought it would make a good subject for a bit of food photography:

(5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f2, 1/250s, ISO 100)

As you can see from the pictures, the goose egg is a massive great thing.

(5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f2, 1/80s, ISO 100)

Frying seemed like the obvious thing to see how big it really was, so...

Comparison to a normal egg and the frying pan (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/125s, ISO 400)

The shell is very tough - the sort of hits you give a normal egg with a knife to crack it just bounce of this beast. Eventually, after quite some battering and dropping bits of shell into the pan I managed to crack it and pull it apart to drop the egg in the pan. As you can see, it takes up most of this moderate sized omelette pan:

(5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/60s, ISO 400)

I'm not sure if the picture below demonstrates, but the shell is pretty thick. Note that the piece of bread is from a "small" loaf (i.e. the slices are smaller than normal) - this is a big egg but not that big!

(5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f2, 1/30s, ISO 400)

Finally after a good 6 or 7 minutes frying, I put the egg on the bread, sprinkled with a little cracked black pepper and dill, and off we go:

(5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f2, 1/15s, ISO 400)

(5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/25s, ISO 400)

Technically, these shots were all taken with the 5D mark 2 and Sigma 50mm f1.4, most of them in natural light. The lighting for the latter few shots on the plate was quite low, and the lens performed really well to allow me to get these shots at ISO 400. I am suitably impressed with both the egg and the lens performance.

Volcanic Sunset? - Timelapse

2010-04-16T08:02:00.000+01:00

So, the big eruption under the glacier in the Eyjafjallajoekull region of Iceland (yes, I did copy-and-paste that jumble of letters!) is still pumping plumes of ash miles high, which due to the prevailing winds is drifted over old 'Blighty and grounding all the planes. Those boffin sorts predicted "an apocalyptic sunset", so I'm guessing that everyone with a camera went out trying to capture something representative...

I was a bit gutted, as it's just totally impractical for me to get out on a Thursday evening during sunset time due to various commitments, so I thought I'd take a different approach and set the tripod and camera up in the upstairs bathroom (suspiciously poking out of the Velux window!) and capture a timelapse.

Setup was the 5D, ISO 100, f14, manual focus with a HiTech 0.9ND grad on to get some detail in the shadows. I left it on aperture priority and evaluative metering mode, and by the end the exposures were running around 30s.

And here it is. And no, it wasn't apocalyptic. It wasn't even very good. But the clouds and the colour in the sky at least make it slightly interesting...

Sunset Timelapse - 15 Apr 2010 from Rich Meston on Vimeo.

Apparently, the volcano is still belching out it's ash and could cause air-traffic disruption for days to weeks. Hopefully we might be compensated with one or two really great sunsets, and maybe at a time when I can get out to capture them :-)

52 Weeks - Week 2: "Rainbow"

2010-04-13T20:24:00.000+01:00

My second week of the "Photo a Week" year was themed "Rainbow". I'd had a very busy week, and wheras I normally take pictures every day, I had about 4 days this week without picking up a camera. I had a couple of ideas for the theme in my head, but it took until Sunday evening (the last day) to actually get the shots. Here's one of them:

(7D, 24-70L at 32mm, f2.8, 1/125s, ISO100)

I'd seen a shot of a piece of ribbon with floating scissors behind, and loved the idea, so I thought I'd recreate it with a bit of rainbow ribbon cable and a pair of old wire cutters.

I had a couple of ideas - either the white light tent with white cotton to suspend everything, or I had some new black paper roll which I thought might work well as a background with some black cotton to suspend the items from... something. I looked around all over the place to try and find some kind of frame to mount the cotton on that would be adjustable to allow some setup, but I couldn't see anything, so I opted to start with the light tent.

I used a needle and white cotton, both ends poked through different places in the top of the light tent and looped around the ribbon cable to suspend it approximately in the centre of the tent. I then did the same trick with the wire cutters. The positioning was fairly approximate, and I had some extra thread to cut off, but I thought I'd take a few test shots and see how things looked first.

I put the light tent on a white duvet, and put my 430EX on it's little stand facing one side of the tent, as is shown in the picture below:

Once great thing about the 7D is it's ability to be master controller for a slave flash, so after a bit of fiddling around I settled on manual flash around 1/4 power, firing the 430EX from the camera (but not using the camera flash for any lighting) - this seemed to work best with some contrast and detail to the wire and cutters, and enough light to blow out the background.

Inside the tent, the wire and cutters were hanging down using the cotton. In the end, I left the long piece of cotton hanging from one end of the pliers which I had intended to cut off (you can just see it in the picture below). This served as a great control line - pulling it outside the tent meant I could control where the cutters were in relation to the wire, and pull them up tight to look like they were just about to cut!

And here's another one of the final shots. They are pretty much straight from the camera. I did a tiny bit of adjustment in Lightroom, and cloned a reflection out of the rear part of the ribbon where it caught the flash. I also brightened a few bits of the background just to remove any traces of the tent. I didn't bother cloning out the cotton as you can hardly notice it - it's the tiny white line tight to the Micromatch connector (the near red connector).

(7D, 24-70L at 40mm, f2.8, 1/125s, ISO100)

In the end I ran out of time to try the black background, but I think this is an idea I'll be playing with a bit...

I did, however, capture a few other rainbow shots. My second idea was to use my polarising filter and some plastic. Plastic has the ability to polarise light, and the amount varies depending on the makeup of the plastic and how it is stressed.

The setup involves two cross polarised filters to cut out all the light. As I don't have a light table and big sheet of Polaroid, I used the next best thing - my monitor! I opened up a big white window on the screen of my LCD monitor, and with the polarising filter on the front of my camera, I turned it to block all the light from the screen. What you end up with is being able to see everything as normal (maybe a little darker than normal), but the screen is totally black.

Now for the best bit - if you stick some plastic between the two, you end up polarising the light from the screen in all sorts of different directions, and the result is a rainbow of colours (well, actually, that's not true, especially not from a computer monitor, but I won't get into details here):

(7D, 24-70L at 50mm, f5.6, 1/100s, ISO1600)

The above picture is an empty CD "cake" box which woul dhave contained 50 CDs or DVDs. And below is the bottom of a 1300ml plastic tub - the injection moulding point is visible to the right of the picture and you can see the coloured areas spreading out from this point.

(7D, 24-70L at 52mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO400)

So, I didn't have much time to take the photos this week, but in a way that's been useful as it left me to think about ideas of what to take. I'm quite pleased with the wire shots - they're clean, well lit and ended up pretty much how I pre-visualised them The polariser pictures are interesting too and I might play again sometime.

Next week's subject is "Happiness"

52 Weeks - Week 1: "Rain"

2010-04-08T20:23:00.000+01:00

Recently, I've been watching several people doing their 365's - this is where you take at least 1 picture every day, usually with a theme. I really like the idea of doing something like that, but we're already a good 90 days into the year as I write this and I didn't really want to wait for next year. Anyway, on thinking about it, I decided I'd rather take a bit of time thinking about a theme and see what I could do over a few days, so I've decided to do 52 themes - one a week, ending on a Sunday. My wife is setting the themes, and this first week's topic is "rain".

Apparently, my wife's plan was that if I had a week to take photos of rain, then it would not rain at all. While that wasn't quite true, it did conspire to do nothing more than drizzle at inappropriate times during the week, so it did make things somewhat difficult for me!

The first shot (above) was from inside the car of the stationary windscreen wiper. It works better in B&W, but I'm not really sure it's a particularly great shot (7D, 24-70L at 70mm, 1/200s, f2.8, ISO400).

On one of the days, it started raining outside, so I grabbed the 7D and 24-70L and try to capture the Daffodils in the front garden in some rainy glory:

(7D, 24-70L at 70mm,1/250s, f2.8, ISO400)

I left the 24-70L on the 7D as both of these are the best weather sealed body and lens that I own. The 17-40 is weather sealed with a filter on the front, but the hood is so shallow (as it's a wide angle lens) that it would end up covered in rain drops in no time! The 24-70L at 70mm has the front element quite deep inside the hood, so most of my shots in the rain were with this setup.

This shot was one of a few where I stuck the camera and flash out the back door on the one occasion when it was properly raining to try and catch the drops. It took quite a few attempts to get something interesting, and here it is (I removed the colour then applied a duo-tone effect to brighten it up a little):

(7D, 24-70L at 24mm, 1/100s, f2.8, ISO400)

This is the lines of the wooden garden table in the rain. I was hoping to capture some rain drops hitting it, but once again the rain was a pathetic drizzle, so I opted for the lines and texture of the wet wood:

(7D, 24-70L at 70mm,1/250s at f5.6, ISO160)

I then took a few shots of rain drops on plastic - forming nice droplets and giving some texture to otherwise dull, flat material:

(7D, 24-70L at 34mm, 1/1000s at f2.8, ISO160)

(7D, 24-70L at 70mm, 1/500s at f2.8, ISO160)

On the Sunday that my theme finished, we went to a garden centre and bought an umbrella, so I got my daughter Sophie to muck around in the garden in the rain for a minute (literally - she's sick of the camera and I had to bribe her to get that minute!). Here are a couple of results:

(5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, ISO100)

(5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/125s, ISO100)

In conclusion - I had some grand ideas for how I could capture shot of rain, and had some great pre-visualised shots in my head. But both time and the weather conspired against me to produce the shots I really wanted (however, it did give me the inspiration to do the shots with the shower!).

What I will say is that it has been brilliant to have a focus, to think about what I want to get from shots, to plan in advance in my head what I want to capture, and to have a theme and date to work towards. I'm enjoying this at the moment, and looking forward to next weeks...

Next weeks theme is "Rainbow".

Inspiration? The Shower...

2010-04-01T21:37:00.000+01:00

Not what you think. I was wondering what could be done with a shower, a bath, a wireless slave flash and a camera. As it happens, you can make a very wet flash, but luckily that didn't happen until I'd nearly finished (and don't worry, no flashes were harmed in the making of this... well, post)...

(5D2, 24-70L at 24mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)

So, I guess the setup is fairly obvious for this. A shower, upturned in the bath, held in place with various childrens toys that I found around the bathroom. I took advantage of the 7D's master control of flashes here, and used my 430EX as a slave. Initially, this was put in the bath, but then I held it in my other hand and took shots with it in various places.

(5D2, 24-70L at 51mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)

Initially, I started with the on-camera and external flash firing, but eventually switched to just the external as it gave me a bit more control of the light, especially as the 24-70L with a lens hood it a pretty massive lump casting a great big shadow for a camera mounted flash.

(5D2, 24-70L at 70mm, f2.8, 1/30s, ISO100)

Above and below - I was playing with DuoTone in lightroom. All images are not natural colours - I converted to greyscale to remove dodgy colour casts from the lights outside the (dark) bathroom.

(5D2, 24-70L at 67mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)

I switched to manual focus, and moved the camera about and selected shots with the most interest:

(5D2, 24-70L at 24mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)

My new technique in Lightroom is to whack the exposure up and the Black level up too - this is the sort of results you get if you go to extremes...

(5D2, 24-70L at 24mm, f2.8, 1/100s, ISO100)

I'm not in a particularly sensible mood so I'm not going to extensively analyse my attempt to drown a flash, but the one technical thing I can say is that the 7D focussed perfectly (using the flash as an assist lamp) consistently every time. I realise that the flash as an assist lamp is quite a help, but subjectively I would say it's better than my 40D ever way.

Goodnight and thank you.

Hi-Tech ND Grad Filters (from Formatt)

2010-03-30T21:15:00.000+01:00

A while back I bought myself a Lee Filter kit which comprised of a filter holder with an expandable bellows hood. I also bought a single 0.6ND (2 stop) soft ND grad, and after a bit of faffing a 77mm wide-angle adapter ring. The cost for this lot: slightly under £200! Seriously - it's some injection moulded plastic, a bit of machined metal and some carefully crafted polymer without a colour cast. While I knew this was good stuff, I did believe it was a bit pricey. So, to get some more filters (a single 0.6ND grad doesn't cut it for all situations), I bought some HiTech filters from Formatt...

The choice you have for external plate type filters seems to be either Cokin (with the A, P and Z-Pro series), Lee, maybe Singh-Ray (not sure if they do square type filters), and HiTech. Cokin Z-Pro are big enough for UWA lenses on full frame cameras, but the Cokin filters do seem to have a magenta/purple colour cast (I've experienced this myself with some P-Series filters), although they are quite a bit cheaper than the others. Lee are known to be decent, but are pricey as I've shown above. From research on the internet, Hi-Tech filters appear to be neutral (i.e. no colour cast) and land about in the middle, with 3 ND grads (0.3, 0.6 and 0.9) costing £100. And they fit in a Lee filter holder.

I only got them in the post today, and it was rubbish weather out so despite my going for a walk to find a nice location to test them in, I didn't even bother getting the camera out as it would have been wet in 5 seconds. I will take some shots to show (hopefully) the neutrality and usefulness of the filters, but for now I've got a few shots of how they were delivered, what they look like and a shot of a comparison with the Lee filter I own.

The filters as delivered - they come in plastic enveloped with a card insert to protect from scratches:

This is one of the Hi-Tech filters in my Lee filter holder - it fits nicely. The filters are a little thinner than the Lee filters, and appear to be slightly less wide so the filter can twist by about 1-2 degrees in the holder. In real use, this make absolutely no difference whatsoever, though.

Here are all 3 filters: the 0.9 is in the holder, the 0.6 in front and the 0.3 at the front of the pack. They don't look hugely different unless you put them side by side.

The following two shots show the Lee 0.6 next to the Hi-Tech 0.6. The things to note is that the Hi-Tech filter is a litlte thinner, and also appears to be slightly more neutral than the Lee filter. This suprises me, as the Lee filters are sort-of the standard to go by, but compared to the Hi-Tech filter, they appear to be slightly browner. I am absolutely happy to admit that my eye's white balance is not to be trusted, so it may be a bit of an optical illusion, and again I suspect that it makes no difference at all in real use. Anyway, here's the filters next to each other in colour, showing the difference in height and the slight difference in colour tone:

And here's them tightly together to show the height difference - the Hi-Tech filter is nearest and a little thinner (this shot is in B&W to accenutate the filter height difference rather than the slightly distracting reflections):

I look forward to playing around with these filters - my Lee holder has 2 slots so I can stack them and try out various shots. I'll report back sometime in the next couple of weeks when I've had a chance to properly test them out...

5D2 Sensor Cleaning (Scaaaary!)

2010-03-23T20:20:00.001Z

I've had my 5D2 for 7 months now and while I don't just change lenses every 5 seconds, I don't hesitate to change if them if I need to - dust is a part of life with a DSLR and you just have to learn to deal with it. Even so, I took a quick test shot at f22 to see what the state of the sensor was, and was quite suprised at how much "stuff" was all over it, so I dug out a few tools and got to work...

I have to say that I've only cleaned the sensor of my other cameras a few times, so I'm not an expert. I did quite a lot of research before buying anything, and eventually settled for a SensorKlear pen, along with my rocket blower. When I first got the SensorKlear, I tried it out on my "most disposable" camera - the 400D, and then moved on to the 40D. Once you get over the initially scare of actually physically wiping something over the sensor, it's not so bad.

But with the 5D2, my guess is a replacement sensor unit is somewhere between £600 and £1000 (and I might be being optimistic there), so I was a little nervous...

Here's where I started (click on the image for a larger view)

Test shots should be taken at maximum aperture - I had the 24-70L on the camera at the time so this was f22. So, this starting point wasn't ideal with spots and blobs over the frame.

You need to choose the manual cleaning mode of the camera which opens the shutter and exposes the sensor for cleaning. At this point, you probably want to be in as dust free environment as possible, with relatively still air, and try to keep the camera pointing downwards to stop any contaminants dropping into the sensor chamber.

First step was the rocket blower. I ought to warn you that using this technique generally moves dust etc around the inside of the camera, and people are in two minds as to whether it's a good idea or not. For some reason, on all my cameras I end up with spots on the focus screen so that's just become a fact of life now and I don't really get bothered by it. Holding the camera inverted so any mobile dust/specks will drop out due to gravity, I gave the sensor a good blow.

Brilliant. More crud on the sensor. I gave it another hearty blast:

Ooops. I think that's a bit of rocket blower on the sensor now. Glad this isn't a flipping expensive full frame camera that I'm mucking around with!!!

At this point I decided to ignore my own rules above and lay the camera down on it's back in the sunlight so I could clearly see the sensor. Despite the look above, the black blob was actually a piece of something white on the sensor, but obviously very opaque. I did a targetted blast from the blower to move it, then tested again:

While better than before, this wasn't better than where I started, so I decided it was time to get out the SensorKlear pen (click here for details).

This is a pen device with two ends - one end had a fine bristle brush which is used for cleaning the lens mount and lens surfaces and does NOT touch the sensor! The other end is like an ultra fine carbon-based solid lubricating compound which you wipe over the sensor surface to remove dust and debris. The cap contains a pad which strips the top surface of the carbon tip from the pen allowing it to be used up to about 50 times.

I did a few strategic wipes from left to right across the sensor, working from top left to bottom right, and was left with this:

You'll have to click the image to see, but basically while it's a lot cleaner, you can see a strip of fluff and junk down the right side. So I did another wipe working down the right, and got here:

There are a lot of people who suggest that when checking the sensor for cleanliness, you load the test shot into photoshop and run auto-levels on it. If you do that with the cleanest sensor, you will frighten the life out of yourself! It's just not a realistic test, so I opted for plain images at f22. Here, I can see things that will interfere with landscape images (in which I generally stay below f16 for anyway), and I'm very happy with the look of the last frame above. It significantly clearer than when I started and should pose no problems at all for real-world shots.

Job done.

New Streetlights in Corfe Mullen

2010-03-20T20:50:00.000Z

This is a slightly nerdy post, but they've just put new streetlights up (or rather, replaced the old ones) around where I live. I went out in the rain tonight to take a few pics to capture the differences before they replace the lot and I completely forget what they used to be like!

This is a very quick post - just a couple of picture. The one above shows the difference between the old and new lights. The new one is in the distance - a much whiter light, while the older is nearer and is distinctly orange.

I haven't read the details anywhere - in fact the information on the specific changes in Corfe Mullen is very sparse with the "Lights On In Dorset" website from SEC just saying "Coming Soon" - but I believe that the new lights are higher pressure sodium vapour, giving a bit more blue light (thus balancing aout the orange), and giving a significantly higher light output efficiency than the older lights.

At first sight, it appears the lights are much brighter, but I think this is just becuase the light is more directed - much more downards as the image above and below show. It was raining tonight and the arc of light from the lamp can be clearly seen.

It remains to be seen whether they pollute the sky as much - it would be nice to think that the sky's will get clearer if these lights are installed all over the place. But my suspicion is that they are driven purely by trying to reduce energy use (which is not such a bad thing in itself...)

From a photographic point of view, these were all taken with the 5D2 and the 24-70L at either f2.8 or f4 (for the first image only), hand held at either ISO 3200 or ISO 6400 with a little bit of NR applied in Lightroom. Beautiful camera... :-)

Sigma 50mm f1.4 - First Shots

2010-03-18T20:38:00.001Z

My Sigma 50mm f1.4 turned up on Wednesday and I've spent a short time walking around trying to get some shots that get the best out of it. This lens - like all very wide aperture lenses - has it's limitations, but if you work within those you can have a lot of fun - I'm certainly enjoying it so far!

I'm really tired tonight, so I'm almost just going to put the pictures down which I like the most out of the shots I took today and yesterday. I will say a couple of things about the lens first though:

It's fairly big and heavy - nothing too major, but significantly bigger and heavier than the 50 f1.8 that I also own. Having said that, the build quality if miles better, and the filter size is 77mm which matches 3 of my other lenses too.
It suffers from CA at extreme wide apertures. Apparently, it's pretty well controlled in this lens compared to other similar lenses (including the £1300 Canon 50mm f1.2L), but it's something that you have to get a bit used to. It seems that having bright highlights around the edges of the sharp part of the image will create obvious purple and green fringing. Having said that, it's noticable at 100%, but I think in real terms and with real uses for this lens it's not actually going to be an issue.
It fringes massively when overexposed - e.g. exposing for tree branches with the sky blown out behind. Again, this is worse wide open, and again it's not a typical use case for this lens.
It seems quite soft at f1.4 (as per the reviews that I read). Having said that, portraits again I don't think it's a problem in real terms.

I need more time to fiddle: I think it needs some microadjustment to the focus and I've done some quick tests to determine a figure but I need to prove my results with something a bit more controlled. I've also got a bit to learn about the best use of that shallow DoF!

(Note: You can click any of the images to see a larger size version)

I'm in a "high contrast" mood tonight - quite a few of the images below have been processed to deliberately be bright and dark in the same pictures, with quite vibrant colours. It's not the lens, I'm just being creative :-)

Springing (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/800s, ISO100)

The focal point was wrong on the one below, but I've included it as it showed an interesting thing in nature - the spiky leaves of the flower have grown straight up through the oak leaf in 2 places and skewered it:

Spiked (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/1600s, ISO100)

I liked these 3 flowers out on their own in a row:

Three in a Row (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/2000s, ISO100)

Wooden Bridge (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/1250s, ISO100)

This is a post marking the edge of a path - I focussed on the top to show the DoF in action and the bokeh on the leaves at the back:

Post (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/500s, ISO100)

More daffodils - it's definitely spring out there! (although it's raining as I write this - it's definitely England too...):

Daffs (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/12500s, ISO100)

Spring has Sprung (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.8, 1/1250s, ISO100)

I've been to this derelict building a few times before. I'm not sure what it is - it seems like some kind of store house but it's got electricity and a telephone line going into it, despite being derelict:

Derelict (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.8, 1/60s, ISO100)

This one was focussed on the point of the broken glass. It's the first time I've seen a definite difference between the higher accuracy centre focus point and the outer points on the 5D2. There was no hope of getting decent focus with the outer points, but the centre point consistently caught what I was after:

Shattered (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/100s, ISO100)

And this was a deliberate self portrait against a piece of dirty, derelict broken glass:

Broken Portrait (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/100s, ISO100)

Ivy (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/500s, ISO100)

Finally, I can't let Holly get away with it - she's been my loyal subject for quite a few tests over the last week (all photographic, I hasten to add!). Here she is again, in f1.4 glory:

Holly Again (5D2, Sigma 50mm f1.4 at f1.4, 1/100s, ISO800)

In conclusion: careful use is required to avoid the limitations of super wide aperture primes like this (when wide open), but I'm enjoying this lens so far and looking forward to capturing some great shots with it :-)

Wimborne / New Forest Morning (and landscape shooting tips)

2010-03-17T07:59:00.000Z

A poem:

It was a cold and frosty morning,
and the sun was shining bright,
when I went a wandering and nearly caught frostbite!

Yes, it was very, very cold this morning: -3.5C when I got back into my car in Wimborne after wandeing around in a field with my 5D2, tripod etc. This post shows some results and has some comments about things I've learnt/am learning about shooting like this.

This first shot is from a field near Wimborne. Out of the car with the tripod, cable release, mirror lockup, manual focus with LiveView. When taking landscape shots it is typical to get some focus and some foreground interest - in this case I've used the branch in the foreground. The the luminance of the blue channel has been dropped a bit to make the sky a little more how I remember - in order to get some brightness on the foreground I had to overexpose the sky a bit as I didn't have my Lee ND grad filter with me on this day (daft mistake - I should always have this!)

Wimborne Morning (5D2, 17-40L at 17mm, 0.6s at f14, ISO100)

This following shot is a closer view of the bridge that you can see in the background of the shot above. It is the same as the first photo at the very top of this page, but processed in B&W. I did a certain amount of standard processing (cropping, clarity/contrast/fill light improvements) then created a virtual copy of the image and processed the colour and B&W images seperately. Again, I used a reduction in the blue channel luminance to bring out sky detail, but in the B&W I case I took it to more of an extreme. As the sky looks quite dark and the foreground quite light, it takes on the appearance of an HDR image (although this was from a single exposure, I suppose as an end-result the techniques I used would be similar to the processing done on a single RAW image in a program like Photomatix)

Morning Bridge (5D2, 17-40L at 17mm, 0.6s at f14, ISO100)

Moving on from Wimborne, I went through Ringwood, Moyles Court and on the Rockford. This is the first time I've investigated this area, and I was a little short on time. I parked in a small car park on the road, and quickly climed a fairly substantial hill (luckily I'm fairly fit - it's handy for these moments!). The sunlight was beautiful, and this climb reminded me of the massive change in view you can get from a modest ascent.

Of most interest was the mist on the rolling hills, but I had a couple of things against me for that image. Firstly, as I mentioned, I didn't have my ND grad with me so it becomes impossible to get a single appropriate exposure for both foreground and direct sun. Secondly, the 17-40L, whilst a great lens, does not cope with flare very well, and pointing directly at the sun results in a significant amount of flare artifacts and a drop in contrast across a lot of the image. Sometimes this can be used for good effect, but mostly I try to avoid having the sun in any shots with the 17-40L.

Here's a shot of the heather at Rockford Common - in the distance, you can see the morning sunlight on the hills, and the heather covers most of the top of the hills. There are lots of footpaths, and I will get back out there to investigate this area more thoroughly soon:

Rockford Heather (5D2, 17-40L at 17mm, 1/13s at f14, ISO100)

From Rockford, I travelled towards Stoney Cross to get on the A31. I passed a small car park on the right (I have no idea of the name as there was no sign), but the mist in the trees and the light on the ground caught my attention. Once again, I hopped out of the car with the camera already on the tripod and took a few shots. I was tempted and shot a few with sun in the frame (contrary to my own advice above), and ended up discarding almost all of them for exactly the reason I've said above! I wanted to capture the tree line and the mist, and this shot has some of this. To be honest, I feel there's too much foreground and I really needed a longer lens here (notice I was at the end of the 17-40L's range), but the contrast between the foreground, trees and sky made for an interesting layered image (there's a horse almost smack bang in the middle too - click on the image to see it):

New Forest Sunshine (5D2, 17-40L at 40mm, 1/25s at f14, ISO100)

I have a habit of noticing more shots as I'm about to pack away, and back at the car I saw these lovely horse shoe marks on the ground. I thought that would make a nice focus to the shot, so I composed with the marks in the foreground and the sun just peeking in from the left. Notice the flare on the image, but I actually quite like it here. From a processing point of view, I increased the contrast and adjusted the black point to make the foregound markings stand out more and make the tress more of a silhouette:

Horse-steps (5D2, 17-40L at 33mm, 1/40s at f14, ISO100)

Finally, this image is nothing to do with the early morning shot - I just liked it as a landscape shot! I was out on a fairly uninspired lunchtime trot with the camera, and found these teasels. I took some high level shots without an interesting background, and as I lowered my viewpoint I realised I could put the plant wherever I wanted against the sky. Using LiveView, I composed the shot with the teasel between the gap in the clouds. The original exposure made the plant a little dark, so I've lightened to bring out the detail. Although this isn't a brilliant shot, it's a technique that I want to play with over the next few weeks - I think there's lots of potential there! (Note that the apparent blockyness in the image is not due to the camera - although ISO800 was way higher than necessary for this shot, the 5D2 is very clean at this level. The artefacts are due to my output process from Lightroom which I need to review to get rid of these annoyances on my exported images).

In the Clouds (5D2, 17-40L at 40mm, 1/1250s at f8, ISO800)

Comments

I wanted to note a few things that I've learnt over time and remembered recently whilst doing these landscape shots, so here's some notes:

When it's cold, wrap up warm. Take more than you need, and put it all on. It's very annoying having to stop a shoot because your hands or feet are too cold. Think I've said this before on the blog, but it's important so I'm saying it again :-)
If you're planning on a bit of a drive while landscape shooting, leave the camera on the tripod when you put it back in the car. I put mine on the front seat, camera against the seat with the tripod pointing out towards the passenger door. I then wrap the seatbelt around the tripod legs and pull it tight. In that way, the whole lot isn't going anywhere, and the camera is protected by the seat. This makes it much easier to stop, get out and grab a shot properly rather than having to faff around with setting everything back up again.
I have a protective filter on my 17-40L. I don't normally use them as I don't like the idea of a degradation of image quality on an expensive lens, but the 17-40L is not weather-sealed if it doesn't have a filter on. Having said that, if the weather is nice, it's worth taking the filter off - any dirt etc on it will cause more flare as it catches that early morning or evening sunlight.
Manual focussing with LiveView is really useful. Use hyperfocal focussing (lots of info on the web about this) where necessary - basically, use a small aperture (I tend to go with f14 or f16 as much smaller and you soften the image due to diffraction), and focus about 1/3 way into the image. Using the DoF preview button and LiveView (magnified fully) will let you review the details before the shot.
ALWAYS check the shot after you've taken it at full magnification. There have been a number of times I've taken a shot that I've loved on the rear LCD, only to get home and start processing and find it's technically flawed beyond repair.
When driving around to a specific place, keep not of other areas you pass that might be worth a visit. As a phototographer, I always tend to have my eyes open for new places, but it's worth noting these down and making a point to get back and check them out.
Finally, don't try and get everything done in one morning. Pick a place you want to shoot sunrise or sunset, go there and stay there until the light has gone. Otherwise, you'll inevitably find that the perfect light occurs while you're driving between places! Also, this gets you out more to take more shots :-)

5 minutes with the 50

2010-03-09T20:31:00.000Z

I've read loads of posts/articles recently about people making very good use of both shallow DoF and 50mm (standard) lenses. I was sitting around this evening after a hard day at work, about to chill with the piano for 5 minutes, when I read an article on my phone about 80 inspirational shots with a 50, and I thought I'd have a quick go and see what I could do...

Holly (5D2, ISO800, 50mm f1.8 at f2.0, 1/50s)

So the first shot is of Holly, one of our 3 cats. She's such a poser! I used a fairly typical portrait technique of taking a shot from above, focussing on the eyes and throwing the rest of the body out of focus with shallow DoF (this was taken at f2.0). I tweaked the colours a little - reduced the sharpness a touch as it's not necessarily flattering for portraits to be too sharp, and desaturated a bit after a touch of white balance correction. I tried B&W, but wasn't happy with the results, so I left it with subtle colour.

Fly and Shoes (5D2, ISO800, 50mm f1.8 at f1.8, 1/50s)

If you like ale and have never tried Blandford Fly, I can wholeheartedly recommend it! Absolutely gorgeous beer, made with a little ginger. I had one bottle on the shelf and fancied it after the day at work today. I decided to make it a point in a shot, and my shoes were on the floor next to where I was, so I bought those in to get some detail in the old leather. The vignetting is deliberate (although all the 50's vignette fairly heavily when wide open).

Little and Large (5D2, ISO800, 50mm f1.8 at f1.8, 1/25s)

My youngest, Oz (short for Oscar) has just got his first pair of "real" shoes (as opposed to the very soft first shoes). And here they are! They are very sweet, and he looks so cute in them! I use my big oafish shoes to give a sense of perspective, focussed on the little train on the front of the nearest shoe and got this shot. The vignette, again, is added and deliberately squared off a bit from the standard oval.

Red (5D2, ISO800, 50mm f1.8 at f1.8, 1/50s)

Finally, I had bought my wife some roses from the supermarket on the way home from work. They're still in the packet here, and I put them against the table in the kitchen with the wooden slats of the chair in the background. I've left only red and green in the image to bring the focus completely to the roses.

This was a very quick play with the 50mm, and it's not helping my desperate want for a better quality 50mm lens. I've been eyeing up the Canon f1.4 and the Sigma f1.4, and today was reading about just how good the Canon 50mm f1.2L is (and at a touch over £1000, I wont be getting one of those yet!). But I'm pretty sure I'll get myself a Sigma f1.4 something soon - primarily as I think it's considerably sharper by f1.8 than the f1.8 that I have got, the bokeh is better, the AF is better, the construction is better. I think it could end up being my most used lens on the 5D2...

Broadstone War Memorial - A Photographic Study

2010-03-08T18:07:00.001Z

The war memorial in Broadstone has stood for 90 years, and when first erected it had stunning views over Poole Harbour. There has been an ongoing campaign by Broadstone's Residents Association to have the vegetation around the war memorial thinned to restore the view, so it's been a topic of a few news stories recently. Having seen it on a couple of occasions but never really studied it, I thought I'd take the opportunity to spend a short time taking some photos of the memorial and surrounding area as they currently stand, with a view to updating once the work is complete.

The memorial stands within a secluded section of bushes just on the edge of the recreation ground in Broadstone. It is easily accessable from the gates on Ridgeway.

War Memorial Base (5D2, 24-70L at 24mm, f2.8, 1/500s, ISO400)

The memorial is engraved with the names of Broadstone District residents who died during both the first and second World Wars.

War Memorial Base (5D2, 24-70L at 24mm, f8, 1/50s, ISO400)

It was built in 1920 by Gilbert William Bayes, and the memorial itself is named "Memory". Engravings of Officers adorn the sides:

Engraving Detail (5D2, 24-70L at 27mm, f8, 1/60s, ISO400)

Around the four edges, about 1/3 of the way up is engraved the following:

Lettering around the cicumference, reading "TO THE MEMORY OF THE OFFICERS AND MEN OF BROADSTONE DISTRICT WHO FELL IN THE WAR" (5D2, 24-70L at 58mm, f8, 1/60s-1/200s, ISO400)

Leading up to the memorial from the main path is a cobbled path. The memorial itself is placed in a circle of cobbled stones, which have two short paths leading away at 120 degrees, behind and to each side. The image below has had all the colour removed except red and magenta to highlight the poppies, and a little green to bring out the grass:

Looking to Memory (5D2, 17-40L at 17mm, f9, 1/60s, ISO400)

The above pictures are primarily documentary, and I wanted to try and get some more "artistic" shots. This shows the shorted paths leading away behind the memorial.

High View (5D2, 17-40L at 24mm, f7.1, 1/50s, ISO400)

And this is an angled view from behind, showing the tree area which will be pruned to reveal the view down towards Poole Harbour. I'm quite excited about just what it's going to look like when that area is clear, as it should be a stunning view.

Towards the Trees (5D2, 17-40L at 17mm, f7.1, 1/320s, ISO400)

Untitled (5D2, 17-40L at 24mm, f16, 1/50s, ISO400)

Dream (5D2, 17-40L at 17mm, f8, 1/200s, ISO400)

A low viewpoint shot of the poppies, showing the base part of the monument:

Poppies at Memory (5D2, 17-40L at 17mm, f4, 1/250s, ISO800)

The Names (5D2, 17-40L at 17mm, f4, 1/500s, ISO800)

And finally a shot looking back across from the main path towards the memorial:

Memory (5D2, 17-40L at 36mm, f4, 1/800s, ISO800)

The following link from the Bournemouth Echo shows further details of the work that is about to be carried out: Bournemouth Echo Link.

More Birds with the 7D - Spring is here!

2010-03-07T20:16:00.002Z

This isn't going to be a long post - I just wanted to shout about the 7D again! I'm really, really happy with this camera - the AF is the best I've used by a long shot (I'm comparing it to a 40D as the next best), and the IQ is great considering the density of the sensor - leading to very usable shots, e.g:

So, I'll keep this brief - a basic overview of how I was shooting, then a dump of some pics to show what I'm talking about.

The camera was in my (now standard) sunny-day bird-shooting mode:

Single point AF with expansion, generally set in the centre although I did move it around a bit
Started at ISO 400, but dropped to ISO200 once checking that most shots were 1/1000s - 1/1600s
AI Servo mode - continuous AF
High speed shooting (8fps)
All custom setting were as default
Lens was a Sigma 120-400OS with OS switched OFF

I filled up a 4GB card (about 140 shots) in about 4 minutes (oops!), and took home around 250 shots altogether. On reviewing, I dumped about 50 of them through technical imperfections and most of those were my fault (e.g. me completely missing the birds!), and then I get the hard task of picking out ones of interest in the remaining shots. With the 40D, I'd take maybe 200 shots of birds and generally end up dumping 150 of those, making the job easier as to pick which ones to keep.

So, I've narrowed it down to 15 or so pics which I've included below. I haven't shown shooting information as I've explained that above. Click on any image to see it larger (but not 100%) as usual:

I like the wings on this - not sure if the ruffling is the wind or control surfaces to aid flying?

I liked the detail on this one

Action!

Hi!

The focus is just great on the 7D

Lots of greys and action - I cropped to capture texture/shades more than anything specific

Check out the serrated beaks on these blighters - they draw blood if they nip apparently!

I can think of lots of rude captions for what that gull is shouting :-)

Another backside... I guess they just don't like the camera

This swan appeared to be nesting - kept picking up twigs

Speckly highlights from the sun on the water

More highlights...

Just BIF

Another BIF

This chap just sat there with his wings open - Drying? Showing off? Not sure...

And just before I got back to the car, I noticed some people on the walkway and thought the silhouette might be nice.

Birds with the 7D

2010-03-02T20:31:00.003Z

This is a quick summary of the 7D and Sigma 120-400OS at lunch time today, taking my 1 year old son for a walk around the local pond to feed the ducks (and seagulls, intimidating geese etc!)

Fundamentally, I was wandering around the small pond at Poole Park with a pack of muffins that were just out-of-date, my 7D and my son. I stopped at various posts around the pond to throw bits of bread and attract the birds and take a few shots. Oz (my son Oscar) was loving it until he fell asleep!

So, once again, this is not what the equipment is capable of in the best of circumstance, but more what the equipment is capable of with a bit of setting up before a shoot and then very little flexibility while shooting (have you ever tried throwing bread in one hand and shooting with a 400mm lens in the other?!!!).

I'd been doing some research about the 7D for BIF (Birds in Flight) shooting, and my initial setup was as follows:

ISO 400 fixed (I've been using auto ISO for a while as it's fairly good ont he 7D, but the choice of shutter speed is usually not good for BIF).
Aperture set to f8 - experience has shown that this lens is good at f8, not that good at f5.6 and I don't really want to use smaller apertures as it'll just reduce the shutter speed.
Av mode - obviously if the aperture is fixed at f8 I can only be in manual or aperture priority - I didn't want to think about changing the shutter speed while learning what's good and what's not with the 7D/120-400 combination, so I let the camera do the work.
Centre focus point with 4 assist points - the 7D has 5 (yes, 5) autofocus point modes, on top of the 3 drive modes, and a load of custom functions! This is a truly configurable camera as far as AF is concerned, but if I'm going to decide what's good and what's not, the best way is to pick something and run with it, then assess the successes and failures and try to modify things for next time.
AI servo mode (continuous auto-focus) - the birds are flying all over the place - no point in using one-shot AF.
Although this lens has Optical Stabillsation, I switched this off as I was looking for high shutter speed shots (> 1/640s ideally, but hopefully up towards 1/1000s).

And on with the shots. These first set are ones I actually like - they are a bit different to typical bird shos with gulls, ducks and geese, and have some action in:

And these further shots, while I'm not quite so excited about them, give a bit of a view of the capabilities of the camera/lens combo in the situation I described above:

With all these images, if you click on them you can see the original uploaded image, which is a scaled down version of the original (unless otherwise stated, I generally don't post 100% crops unless I'm trying to prove a point, but I also try to only post images that would view well at 100% crop).

Overall, I'm very pleased. My shooting conditions wern't perfect, and I plan on repeating this with an appropriate helper throwing the bread so I can concentrate more on the birds themselves. Considering the situation I was in (one handed shooting) I think I got some pretty good shots, and a few interesting ones that are a bit different from the normal flying gull shot I see quite regularly!

Length vs Quality - Canon 70-200 f4L IS vs Sigma 120-400OS

2010-03-02T20:00:00.002Z

A few months back I bought myself a Sigma 120-400OS lens - previously, my longest lens was the Canon 70-200 f4L IS, and having gone to a full-frame camera I realised that 200mm was not actually that long. I was offered an excellent price on the Sigma, which meant the Canon equivalents were coming on for 4 times the price, so in the interest of testing out, I opted for the Sigma.

The Canon 70-200 f4L IS lens is renowkned for being one of Canon's sharpest lenses. The Sigma 120-400OS is a decent lens, but with a book price of about 70% of the 70-200 f4L IS, it is not sold as being a superior quality lens. Since owning the Sigma lens I've often wondered if an upscaled image from the Canon would match the Sigma in quality - I'm talking about a super-sharp image at 200mm from the Canon lens doubled in size (or quadrupled in area), against what could be a softer image from the 400mm of the Sigma. So I decided to do a quick test.

I will mention that this point that it is a quick test - I'm an engineer by trade, and there are a lot of flaws with this test. But it answered the question that I was investigating first of all - that being "is there a clear winner among these two"?

The moon was out, and it struck me that you can't get a much better target for testing a lens (well, other than a lens target, but I didn't have one of those lying around, unlike the moon which happened to be out and about the night I did the test!). I stuck the 7D on a tripod (7D as if I was genuinely going to take a shot of the moon, that's what I'd use as the image would be spread across more pixles than with the 5D2), and took some shots with the 70-200 f4L IS, and then similar shots with the 120-400OS.

I'll be honest, I'm not sure I was really awake when I did the testing. Part way through the test I realised I'd taken the 70-200 shots in JPEG, so I switched to RAW for the 120-400OS pics, and on reviewing the metadata I found that I'd in-fact had the 70-200 at 169mm rather than 200mm (yeah, I know, don't ask!). Whilst this doesn't equate to any kind of valid test now, it does put the disadvantage firmly in the 70-200's side of the court, so with the added fact that it was going to have to be scaled 2.38 times to compete against the 400mm image, I definitely thought I was going to have to redo the test (and I will have to - I just didn't want the data I have so far to go to waste).

Anyway, enough waffling from me - here are some results:

The image above is 6 slices of the same portion of the moon, all scaled to the same size. They are taken with the 2 different lenses, at different apertures and different focal lengths (hence the scaling). You'll need to click on the image above to view the 100% image, but if you fancy a test, then have a look at them and decide (before reading below) which one you think is sharpest...

OK... here are the details. From left to right:

70-200, 169mm, f8
70-200, 169mm, f5.6
120-400, 214mm, f5.6
120-400, 214mm, f8
120-400, 400mm, f8
120-400, 400mm, f10

I should point out that this wasn't the clearest of nights - it wasn't thick with cloud, but there was a definite cloud layer, so these images should not be thought of as the best these lenses can produce. You can notice the effect of the cloud layer as a halo around the moon, more pronounced on some images than others.

From a processing point of view, I did what I could to each of these images to bring the best out in them. They have had levels adjustment, some contrast changes and sharpening as I saw fit - different for each image. Now I know that a lot of people will complain about this, but I'm quite frankly not interested in what the lens is capable of, or the camera is capable of, but what the combination of both of those and the processing software is capable of - after all that's what makes an image that you can print and sell.

Finally, I need to come clean about the focussing. I initially used live view contrast detection AF to focus as this takes out any risk of mirror-to-AF-sensor error (the error that you correct with microfocus adjustment), but I found that I could do a better job by manually focussing using magnified live view. However, I can't remember exactly which images I used which technique on - I know I focussed using one method or the other for sets of images and from that point didn't adjust the focus, but I can't absolutely guarantee that they were all focussed using the same method. This, in itself, is probably the biggest reason to rerun this test.

And, my conclusions of this somewhat dodgy test:

I think my personal best is the 120-400 at 400mm, f8. This pleases me because it means the 400mm is worth something, and also I tend to only use this lens at f8 as the reviews I read before I bought it suggested at f5.6 (max aperture) it was very soft.
The 70-200 f4L IS is a sharp lens - even scaled up nearly 2.5 times, it is moderately difficult to see the differences between the images. I will redo this at 200mm properly and make a better assessment.

I will re-run this test and spend more time doing it to get a more representative result, and hopefully it will be a clearer result, but who knows? The 70-200 f4L IS is a superb lens, and is considerable lighter than the 120-400OS and easier to handle, as well and possibly faster focussing, but it's also nice to see a cheaper, 3rd party lens produce quite usable results under the typical conditions of use.

And here are the images used to create the slice image above - they are all full-moon images, scaled to approximately the same pixel size. Click on each image to view at 100% pixel size:

70-200 f4L IS at 169mm, f8

70-200 f4L IS at 169mm, f5.6

120-400OS, 214mm, f5.6

120-400OS, 400mm, f8

120-400OS, 400mm, f10

Early Morning Shoot - Eye Bridge and Broadstone

2010-03-02T11:32:00.003Z

Dawn and dusk are widely regarded as the best times to shoot - when the sun is just below the horizon the sky is filled with colour, with beautiful detail in the clouds, and just above the horizon it casts long shadows and light everything with a golden light. Unless it's raining, which it usually is in Britain. So I thought I'd take advantage of the current nice weather we're having at the moment and get out in the freezing cold to take some pictures.

I went armed with my 5D2, 17-40 f4L lens, tripod, a remote release and my Lee filter holder with a 0.6 soft ND grad. I also took 2 coats, gloves and my new wellies which I bought a month or so back specifically for an occasion like this. The temperature when I left was -2C, brrrrr!

I left the house around 06:10, and the sky was lightening on the horizon, with bands of orange and red fading quickly to deep blue. From this point, the sky and lighting changes dramatically every few minutes for about 60-90 minutes as the sun rises up over the horizon. My original plan was to stop at a few places, eventually getting to Eye Bridge (an old favourite location of mine!), but seeing the state of the sky at the time I left I realised I'd probably only have a chance to do one location, so I headed straight for the bridge.

In the car park, I put the camera on the tripod, plugged in the cable release, put on my coats and gloves (it had dropped to -2.5C according to the car thermometer) and headed out to set up on the bridge. I've taken this shot many times before (inspired by a shot I saw from Mark Bauer), but I love the perspective and it always looks different depending on the lighting. Besides, the original bridge was torn down in October last year as it was getting quite unsafe, and this is a brand new bridge in the same style:

Eye Bridge (5D2, 17-40L at 20mm, 10 s at f14)

While still on the bridge, I turned the camera to point down the Stour towards Wimborne. There is a small wier about 50 metres from the bridge, and it's very peaceful standing up there hearing the water rushing. For this shot, I got out my ND grad filter - the brightness of the sky was already meaning that without the filter I was ending up with either blown out sky or very dark foreground. To make the best use of the dynamic range of the camera, you need to darken the sky a little with an ND grad filter. For this day, I really could have done with a 0.9ND grad (3 stops at the top and clear at the bottom), but I only had a 0.6 (2 stop) with me.

The Stour from Eye Bridge (5D2, 17-40L, Lee 0.6ND Grad, 3.2s, f14)

Across the bridge are fields leading out towards the main A31 (which you can't quite see thankfully, otherwise it would somewhat spoil the atmosphere of the shots!). At this time in the morning, with the temperature so low, the grass in the fields was covered in frost and had a beautiful white glow to it.

Towards Wimborne (5D2, 17-40L, Lee 0.6ND Grad, 2s, f14)

It's always nice to get some foreground interest in shots, so I set up in front of some tall grasses and took a few shots. This is quite a challenging shot as it's got a huge depth of field - everything from the grass near the lens to the distant horizon should be in focus. At this aperture (f14) and 17mm, everything from around 60cm to infinity should be in focus (see DoF Master for an online depth of field calculator and lots of information about DoF). I had to slightly adjust nature by removing one very close piece of grass, and I used my flash (off the camera in manual mode) to slightly illuminate the the grass at the front during the exposure otherwise it was a bit too dark:

Stour Field (5D2, 17-40L, Lee 0.6ND Grad, 1.3s, f14)

In one of the further fields, I noticed a flow of water from flooding that had turned to ice, and set my tripod up with some interesting frosty grass in the foreground of the shot. This was one point where I was really glad I had the wellies on - I could walk out into the water and set the tripod up without worrying about my shoes!

Ice (5D2, 17-40L, Lee 0.6ND Grad, 0.5s, f14)

Back on the bridge, I took another shot of the Stour as the sun was coming over the horizon. You have to make a decision with shots like this, even with the ND grad - do you want detail in the sun and dark foreground (fine for a silhouette shot), or blow the sun out and keep detail everywhere else. I tried to compromise here, and the recovery feature in Lightroom definitely aids in shots like this (much more so if you shoot RAW), allowing you to pull back some of the overexposure of the sun and bring some detail back.

Stour Sunrise (5D2, 17-40L, Lee 0.6ND Grad, 0.2s, f14)

With the sun coming up, and back towards the car park, I wanted to capture some of the reflections on the water. I put the tripod low down on the bank and took this shot:

Stour Bank (5D2, 17-40L, Lee 0.6ND Grad, 0.5s. f14)

And zooming in a little further to remove the bank let me capture the sunrise and the reflections in the water as the main focus of this shot:

Reflections (5D2, 17-40L, Lee 0.6ND Grad, 1/8s, f14)

Finally, just as I was packing up to get back in the car, I noticed this fence which could be used as a lead in to the sun - I picked the position so the lines of the fence would draw the eye into the sun in the middle of the picture. The puddle adds a bit of interest in the middle ground, but I would rather the foreground smaller puddle wasn't there, although it does serve to lead the eye in from the other side of the image.

Leading to the Sun (5D2, 17-40L, Lee 0.6ND Grad, 1/5s, f16)

On the drive back, I passed a beautiful sight on the road from Julian's Bridge in Wimborne to the A31 roundabout. Off to the right of the road was a field of sheep, gently lit by the just risen sun with gorgeous golden light, and all the fields and trees were covered in frost. However, along that road there isn't anywhere to stop easily, and the traffic was building up, so I decided to log that one for another morning!

I came back into Corfe Mullen, and had the idea of taking a few quick silhouette shots through the trees form the wooded area near Hill View. I didn't bother with the tripod as I more wanted to investigate the possibility of using this area later. As I got out of the car, the fairly new stone bench that has been placed in this area caught my attention. Again, with warm morning sunlight, this area looks very tranquil, and the bench provides as nice focus:

Roy's Seat (5D2, 17-40L, 1/25s, f8)

Going past the seat, I got into position low down in the trees to take a silhouette shot. After taking a couple of shots which I wasn't very happy with (the 17-40L doesn't handle direct sunlight very well - you end up with massive amounts of lens flare), a man walked past with his dog off the lead. I managed to grab a shot just as the dog walked in line with the sun, and capture the long shadow against the ground:

Woof (5D2, 17-40L, 1/15s, f10)

A couple more shots show the long shadows from the sun on the ground, cast by the trees:

Morning Light (5D2, 17-40L,1/15s, f13)

When taking shots with point light sources (e.g. the sun or streelights at night), if you close the aperture of the lens down (i.e. a larger f number), you create multi-point stars from those lights. The shot below was taken near to ground level using Live View to capture the sun just peeking over the top of the seat:

Sunrise (5D2, 17-40L,1/160s, f16)

Thoughts about morning shoots:

I seem to have got into the habit of writing a Jerry Springer style thought about the post, so I might as well carry on!...

Make sure you get up early enough. I was a bit late this morning - I think 20 more minutes would have given me more chance to stop on route and capture other pictures. Sunrise was at 0651, and I left home around 0610, so you probably should be thinking about getting to your shooting site around 1 hour before sunrise.
In winter, take more clothes than you need. Spare socks so you can put on a couple of pairs for wellies, jumpers, coats, etc - it's better to have too much than too little as getting cold can finish a session prematurely.
The range of light in a dawn scene can be huge - if you've got some ND grad filters then make sure you pack them. Again it's better to have something you don't use than to not have it and need it.
It is worth getting up - it might seem like a nightmare when the alarm goes off and you could be spending another hour in bed, but once you're awake, out and seeing the results it makes it worthwhile!