Month: October 2014

Over the years some of my photography shoots have gotten more and more complex as I work with more lights, mixing daylight and flash or working in unusual conditions.

A few months ago I did my most complex shoot yet to produce the image above.  Shooting a model underwater is a major challenge!

One photographer I greatly admire is Joe McNally, I managed to get to meet him this year and he gave a talk on some of his photographs.

With halloween being tomorrow I thought I would share one of his recent ‘scary’ photoshoots and the planning that went behind it.

http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2014/10/29/it-started-with-a-shimmer/

Whether you are shooting unrealistic HDR landscapes like above, or just wanting to give your Landscapes a bit of a glow like below, auto bracketing is your friend.

In very tricky lighting conditions auto bracketing can be a great benefit especially when things are changing fast.

The problem we have with most cameras and something that Chris Bennett has complained about as well as myself is that auto bracketing on most cameras does not go far enough.

Todays modern cameras have a lot of dynamic range, together with modern RAW processors we can easily save a shot thats over or under exposed by a stop, but the majority of cameras only give us a maximum of 1 stop over or under, which means instead of shooting a three stop bracket we have to shoot five or more.

So I was very pleased to read recently from another landscape photographer that the new Nikon D810 now has auto bracketing up to 2 stops different per shot.

So come on camera manufactures lets get 2 stops or more.  Personally I would like to see 1/3, 1/2, 1, 2, 3 as options for bracketing.

While visiting Ireland we went through a little village called Grey Abbey on a number of occasions.  So one day we decided to stop and have a look round.

Next to the village is an old ruined abbey, unfortunately it was closed and would not open until the day we had to catch the ferry back to Scotland, so the only photographs I could get of it were from the graveyard in church next door.
The village itself seemed mainly to be made up of coffee shops, gift shops and antique shops.  Again nearly all were closed, it seems its one of those odd little villages that only open a couple of days a week, you wonder how they ever make any money.

Still a pretty little village and it looks like its worth looking around; at least when its open!

I find that one can start to drift in ones photography unless one has a goal in mind.  For that reason I always have a couple of projects on the go.

In my day job working in IT I occasional have to travel and this nearly always a trip through or to London.

I aways take a small camera with me, either the Leica M4 or M8 and have spent the time while waiting for trains looking for interesting imagery within the train stations.

Being able to continually revisit an area allows one to develop themes and thus put together a nice set of photographs.

I spotted on Leica Rumours the other day a special edition Leica X coming out shortly.  Now I am sure some people love these special editions as they certainly sell well, but its the major thing about Leica that people hate, milking collectors for money with these sometimes awful special editions.  Now there have been a few nice ones but generally they are few and far between.

I understand why Leica had to do all these special editions during their transition to digital as it was one of the few ways in which it brought money into the company when they were struggling to come to grips with the digital photographic age.

Now I feel they should be more selective.

The Leica M 240 60 special edition announced at Photokina was a stunning special edition.  If I had a spare £12000 it would make a fun camera to use and after a few years of use you could sell it for more then you paid for it.

So Leica, better special editions and less of the trashy.

For the last several years there has been a National Stockings Day, well today is again the day.  This year its to raise money for Breast Cancer Charities.

Here is one of my stocking photographs:

Enjoy.

When Caroline and myself got married, we both had homes, so when it came to wedding gifts there was not much we needed.

Being keen travellers of the United Kingdom we asked for life time memberships of the National Trust and of English Heritage, this enables us to get free access to many fantastic places across England, Wales, Scotland and of course Northern Ireland.

So when we are on holiday we always look out for NT and English Heritage locations to visit as many are photogenic.

Here we went to the magnificent Mount Stewart, a place where many current movies have been filmed such as the new Dracula movie.

It was a very bright and contrasty day, and without using HDR many of the photographs could not capture the full exposure range, but still even these look good I think.