Roundabout

I wanted to enter a competition 'Movement' at my local camera club. I had taken a shot of a friend hanging off a roundabout the year before, and decided that I was going to reshoot - different person, same roundabout.

I took a couple of shots, here they are:

View larger sizes at flickr

Waves, Skies and Stones

I recently borrowed a Sigma 10-20mm wide angled lens for a week and decided to make the most of it by visiting a couple of my favourite places to see what I could take.

I went over to Gwithian Towans near Godrevy in Cornwall on my first outing and was blessed with the most beautiful sky. My first challenge was getting to grips with the lens, I wasn't used to things being so far away in the composition and I realised I had to step into the composition to get anything vaguely interesting. I was quite pleased with my results that day considering it was the first time I'd used it.

All of the photographs look a million times better larger, I promise.

The next time I took the lens out, I wasn't so lucky with the weather. Cold, damp and overcast, I wasn't sure if I was going to get anything at all! I headed up onto Bodmin Moor to another of my favourite places, Minions. Aside from the Cheesewring (which I didn't photograph that day as the light would have been terrible) there are a couple of stone circles called The Hurlers and numerous old abandoned Tin Mines.

I only took one strobe with me (I foolishly took one out to make room for the borrowed lens in addition to my other lenses - but since I only used the wide angle, I could have rearranged my camera bag if I'd have thought about it more) which presented some limitations due to the lack of natural light and me being a total novice in the world of off camera flash.

Still, I got the chance to have a go at balancing flash and natural light, so it's all part of the learning curve.

The Hurlers

Bodmin Moor : A Triptych

You can see Dartmoor in the background.

Visit my Flickr to see the large sizes and other photographs.

Swans, Grey Heron and Canada Goose

After a recent talk on natural history photographs at the local camera club, I felt inspired.
I headed off to Par Beach Pool (just behind Par Beach in Cornwall) to see what was there. I haven't got a telephoto lens, and there looked like there were some more interesting birds that were sadly out of my range.

Still I managed to get some half decent attempts with my Tamron zoom lens.

This is my favourite shot, a Mute Swan Cygnet. I loved the golden tones.

There were some adult mute swans too:

And a Canada Goose:

I managed to borrow a lovely telephoto lens, so I returned to the pool a couple of weeks later and had more luck I think...

(This looks much better large!)

A Wagtail:

I was also really excited about catching a Grey Heron - it was only there for the briefest of moments, so I didn't have much of a chance to zoom in or compose it more thoughtfully. It does look better in a larger format (click the photograph for a larger size)

My Flickr

2009 - Faces

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Portraits. Still so much to learn!

I bought a cheap strobist lighting kit at the end of the summer - experimenting using an umbrella and a couple of strobes resulted in these:

and a few without all the fancy *coughs* equipment

My Flickr

2009 - Summer - Daisies and Painted Ladies

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With a boom in the population of immigrant butterflies such as the Painted Lady, by the time summer came around, my macro lens was itching to get out.

I couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day!

(these really need to be seen larger - check out the butterfly tongue!)

Other Macro / foliage shots I took over the summer included:









My flickr

2009 - Spring, Still Life, Snails and Stalking

Click on photographs for larger versions

Digital Photography School Forums inspired me to experiment with photographic still life in the spring. Their weekly assignment topic was wisdom, which I found quite inspiring, as it can be interpreted so many different ways.

Another hobby of mine is genealogy - finding out where I came from and understanding what my ancestors experienced helps to put things into perspective. I decided to focus on this as a source of wisdom, the wisdom of knowing where you came from, to construct a still life to photograph as my entry into the competition.

The photographs are of my two great grandfathers (although you can't really see at this size - click photographs for larger versions).

It was also around this time that I discovered my mums table was ultra reflective, and she also owns some quirky looking bits and bobs, so I thought I would take a few shots of this antique clock, and I quite liked the resulting reflections.

"Reflections of Time"

I found this little fella in my garden, sliding along the now dead (I'm still upset. This was the down side of the snow/frost) red banana plant. My macro lens (a Tamron) was blurring the background beautifully, but it was all a mass of browns, and I wanted more contrast, so I propped some coloured card behind him.

Here's a stalking little cat on a hot tin roof!

My Flickr

2009 - Winter - Snow, Frost, Graffiti and Kittens.

Click photographs for larger view

I was beginning to think it would never snow like it did when I was a kid - you know, enough to close your school and deep enough to build a snowman in - and then 2009 saw the return of some decent wintry weather.

It always makes me laugh how the most mundane things suddenly get photographed because they have a few inches of snow on them. Benches for example. Surely everyone at some point has taken a photograph of a bench covered in snow.

I was up in Shropshire staying with family, and the beautiful countryside a short walk away made it impossible not to grab my camera, pull on some fingerless gloves and go out and explore. It was the first time I had ventured out alone with a camera, and it's amazing how much more you take in when you aren't half focused on people around you.

Even graffiti on the railway bridge demanded my attention - normally it's just background noise.

As I walked off the bridge, I was totally smitten by the frost on leaves by the side of the railway. I took this shot, which has astonished me with its popularity on flickr - 220+ favourites and increasing daily!

I would love to show you the rest of the beautiful photographs I had taken that day... but I had a computer malfunction which resulted in the loss of all the other photographs I had taken that day. Including the bench photograph.

Frustration.

Even more annoyingly there was a thaw overnight, and I never got to retake the bench I had found, when it was all snowy and abandoned.

Not quite as atmospheric, but just as abandoned - here is my bench.

The thaw brought about some other photo opportunities though :

Birmingham provided more frosty scenes later that January, so I decided to take some photographs of someone elses garden:

I love the texture frost gives when you convert a photograph to black and white!

my flickr