Leica M10
Leica Elmar-M 24mm f/3.8 ASPH
24mm, 1/250 Sec at f/5.6, ISO800
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom Classic V14.0.1
Photo of the Month
Studios and location photography
Trying out new studios and locations is always a slightly nervous affair. Some studios have little height, getting the centre of a brolly or soft box above eye height of the model to give natural looking light with big lighting modifies can be difficult
Some old buildings and farm houses are often hired out as locations. Life style shoots in modern kitchens or boudoir in a bedroom can often be done well but space and light is often an issue.
In older larger buildings you can often get away with a 50mm or longer lens as there is room to get back, but high ISO or portable lighting may be necessary as the light in older buildings is often not good.
In a modern building light is often better but then many modern building are small, leaving you to work tighter to your model and use wider lens, sometimes 35mm or even 28mm or wider that can be tricky to pull off a pleasing composition.
Aurora – visible in the midlands
I was out walking the dog last night and was surprised to see the northern lights, or the Aurora Borealis was visible. From the village and naked eye a pale ghostly red glow, with an hint of green.
For a moment I wondered if it was light pollution from the near city or the local village tennis courts, but then realised with the positioning it could be none of these things. Finding a dark spot I took out my iPhone and quickly took a few snaps.
With these kind of results you can see why smartphone cameras have killed the cheap compact camera market.
Its low light performance and shake reduction for the long exposure is quite something.
A wonderful sight and something I hope to see again when I am maybe in a darker part of the country with a tripod and my more serious cameras.
Do you buy music or stream?
Like most people today, I tend to stream music rather than play physical media, but streaming services pay artists very little money.
So I occasionally buy physical media. So far this year I have bought eight new CD’s and a few second hand vinyl albums.
I rip my CD’s to Flac and import them into Roon to manage, thus I can stream them when out on my phone and around the house to any Roon end point.
So every few months I run a report in Roon on my listening, and any artist that comes up high on the list I go out and buy their CD. I have a physical copy and they get paid better.
Recently we had workmen digging up the road and they cut through the main fibre optic cable delivering broadband to the village.
We have very poor mobile phone signal in the village so suddenly no streaming services. With the several hundred CD’s I own ripped to my own media server I could still stream to devices around the house.
I also buy DVD’s still. These are also ripped to file and held on my media server, so we could still stream movies from our own library.