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Startlingly beautiful beech woods, but blink and all the leaves have fallen. Went down to Clifford Bridge and caught an hour of morning light before the rain came in. I took this one in RAW with tripod, polariser etc.
This was the best of the bunch. I think the muted sunlight and the green edging to the path give it just/almost enough lift.
Only a week ago there were many more leaves still on the trees.
These ones were quick snaps handheld with the Fuji and no editing.
This one isn’t pin sharp but I just liked the shiny chestnut peeping out beside the fallen leaf.
Took my camera in to Devon Camera Centre yesterday where they were as helpful as usual and said the problem was definitely sensor dirt. Choice of leaving it with them for £35 collect on Monday or pay £30 for a kit to do it myself (several times). Opted for the Introductory Digital SLR Cleaning Kit and all seemed fairly straightforward. Photographed a piece of white paper (aperture shut down and with the telephoto lens where the problem had been most obvious) and can’t find any marks. So here’s hoping. What I should have done was take the same photo before the exercise to check before/after and that my test photo was indeed picking up the problem. Anyway, will keep an eye open.
Spent an absorbing few hours on the footpath from Forder to Dogmarsh. My head says this one of birch trunks isn’t especially interesting, but something keeps bringing me back to it. Maybe the softness of the atmosphere.
The fungi really caught my eye clustered in the centre of a beautiful rotting tree stump. The stump was in shade with rather bright light behind so I had to frame in really close. It’s beautiful quality printed up but the complexity of it makes it not so easy on the eye.
Was taken on a 6 hour trial walk on Dartmoor with a fundraising challenge in mind. Great weather. Took my Fuji compact as I wanted to grab some flavour shots but knew I wouldn’t have time to hang about taking careful shots and didn’t want to carry a bigger camera anyway. Most of them do the job, but had a look through to see if any have artistic merit. The carpet of gold sycamore leaves caught my eye on the one above.
I quite like the moodiness of this one (and it’s always easier to get a shot when pausing to admire the view than walking at full speed!
This one is my homage to the iconic Buzz Aldrin moonboot print – the bootprints of my two walking companions. Although as I (think I) know from the lecture last night it’s an iconic sign in that it bears a resemblance to the boot, but it’s an indexical sign because it is caused by the action of the boot, and maybe a sinsign because it’s a singular instance rather than created according to a rule. Or something like that. It was late. But very interesting!
Scanniclift Copse
The copse is utterly lush with bluebells and wild garlic. Spent another 4 hours there today. Decided on wellies and waterproof trousers after getting so wet last week, but still got just as wet. Not that it mattered. Focused on the deadwood as focal points. This one printed up quite well. Even though it was overcast the bluebells rather washed out in the pictures. In the RAW conversion I reduced the lumninance and increased the saturation of the blues and greens. Am slowly learning to love the histogram and believe that rather than the screen. Played with the menu of my camera while I was sheltering from a downpour and discovered I have a mirror lock-up on my Canon 350D. Buried deep in the menu so I didn’t know it was there. Also darkened the preview screen a little to better tally with the histogram. Tried with some of the pictures to take several with a different focal point for each in the hope I would blend them in photoshop and get a full foreground-background sharpness. But each movement of the focus ring slightly jogged the zoom as well so they don’t match well enough.
Ramson and fallen sycamore
Not sure if the dead tree trunk is Sycamore, but I liked the unusal markings and used it to contrast with and give depth to the carpet of Ransoms. Fairly pleased with the focus and depth of field in this one.
Lone orchid in Scanniclift Copse
Spent a happy 4 hours moseying round Scanniclift Copse yesterday. Quite hard to pull a satisfying image out of the lushness, wildness, clutter. Sort of had a hunch that I wasn’t getting focusing quite right. I love the vibrance of this picture put it is spoiled by not having the pieces of wood pin sharp. In fact they are slightly less sharp than the tree trunk behind which misses the purpose of the picture. What I was seeing at the time was the orchid framed by the bits of rotten trunk. Now I see that the pieces of wood look like a pair of hares and that shoudl have been the focus. It looks very different printed out. My printer has rendered the blues of the bluebells much closer to the purple of the orchid. I took a lot of variants but it was quite tricky as my tripod and I were perched on a steep slope that was fragile and cumbly. Really need to go back in a week’s time when things are in fuller bloom – the flowers were only out in patches and in another week or two it will be a sea of colour. Hopefully by then my nice long lens will be repaired and back. Delighted to get the cheque through today from the insurers – very prompt thankyou!
Bluebells and log in Scanniclift Copse
This was the other one I liked best – the simplicity of it - and it has printed up well.
I also found this rather wonderfully grumpy face in the rocks.
Scanniclift rock face
I’m very good at spending money on magazines that turn out to be poor value for money – telling me lots of things I know already or don’t want to know. But a couple of weeks ago I hit the jackpot with Focus Guide Photoshop Raw Photo Editing £7.99 from WHSmith, published by www.futurenet.co.uk . I had been shooting RAW for some time and getting better results than JPEGs, but without any real idea of what all the ACR options did apart from just seeing what the sliders did. But this guide told me practically nothing that I knew already, and everything it tells me I want to know! Everything from the difference between vibrance and contrast to how to use the histogram and clipping warnings and how to open 16bit images for further editing in photoshop. Best £7.99 I’ve spent for a long time. Now I’m going back through old digital negatives and improving on the conversion.
Noticed in the garden today a row of bricks ontop of a wall with little lines of moss filaments glowing in the sun. Photographed into the light with a 300mm lens with image stablisation but hand held. Not 100% sharp, but the composition was better than the ones I took with the tripod – the filaments a bit more separated. Not sure whether it actually makes a picture or not, but printed and framed it and see whether I enjoy living with it.
Not taking very long for a theme to emerge – most of my favourite photos are of trees. Always had a strong sense of the “personhood” of trees since I was a child. Came across this one that I took on a misty morning in January this year. I thought initially it would work best as a monotone, but it didn’t seem to. Just realised looking again that the group of pine trees (Homecleave Clump) in the background on the left is on the farm where my sister and I grew up. Which prompted the poem to go with it.
Bereaved Tree
Sisters
The same earth grew us;
Summers leafed us,
Winters bared us,
skies breathed us,
proximity shaped us.
Exposed by the storm
that felled her,
the shape of her absence
remains a presence
into which each Spring
receives new shoots,
slowly growing them
into re-found life.
Obvious really. It boils down to the quality of the original image when it comes to high quality printing. I suppose most of what I’ve been doing so far has remained on screen which is far more forgiving. When I started this project 18 months ago a key target was getting more stuff out and printed. It’s taken me until now to get the printing sufficiently reliable (choosing a printer, choosing paper, learning some colour management, getting ICC profiles, buying frames, troubleshooting then replacing printer, starting again with a new printer …), and that’s the stage where failings in the actual photos start being the only thing left to blame! I have 6 printed and framed so far. Have also discovered, very disappointingly, that I’ve lost some decent digital files from a few years ago despite my rigorous backing up efforts. There was a whole series of bluebells and ramson in Scanniclift Copse that I can’t find anywhere. The odd thing is that I had some photographically printed up and usually that means several duplicates in different places. Here’s the best of my 2008 ones, but I left it several days beyond the peak of the bluebells. I love woodlands and take a lot of photos in them. They are very cluttered places and it takes some searching to find a simple composition, lead in lines, a good focal point etc. I think the ingredients that help this one are the trio of trees, the V-shape badger-paths leading in from the foreground, and the soft late sunshine.
Scanniclift Copse
A week later and HP still not re-collected the old printer, nor refunded the money into my account. Saqi at HP tells me it could take up to 14 working days for the money to arrive (=31st December) and they will advise what to do with the printer after that. In the meantime it’s okay to take it out of its ginormous box so at least it’s not cluttering up the place. £100 worth of inks sold on ebay. Maybe a printer to follow. Meanwhile spending time getting acquainted with the Canon. Discovering that pictures which look good on screen don’t necessarily print up well. Sometimes for reasons I still don’t understand. Managed to print a lovely version of this photo from the steep hanging woods above Fingle Bridge. Sharp detail, good colours etc.
Woods above Fingle Bridge
But this photo – which on screen I like just as well – simply isn’t printing up okay. The main problem is the grass and moss blur into a fudgy fluffy mess. I guess it is down to lack of focus or movement blur, but that doesn’t really account for the lack of quality.
Woods near Merrivale
Obviously there are hardly any pixels in these versions compared to the original (shot with RAW) that I’m printing from. I will have another look in daylight tomorrow and see if I can get to the bottom of it.
Spent an hour or so putting my new Canon Pixma pro 9500 through its paces. Discovered it will print A3+ borderless if I select Matte Photo Paper instead of Other Fine Art paper (for my Fotospeed Natural Soft Textured). Takes a lot longer to print a page than the HP, but lovely lush quality coming out. A bit of trouble with a red colour cast on one of the ICC profiles supplied by Fotospeed, but I’ve emailed them the problem and see if that can be improved. It’s only 3 months since I really started concentrating on getting to grips with the printing, so what’s a few more days between friends. Suspect I shall end up practically giving away my HP inks on ebay. It’s reassuring to see a few “watchers” clocking up but nobody is making any bids! I’m a newbie to ebay, but the one item I bid on a few months back rocketed in price just in the last hour. So fingers crossed. Did all my Christmas cards over the weekend. Had planned to do a sophisticated design and print them up nicely, but ended up roughing up a card from a photo I took several years ago and printing on the photocopier as that was reliable and quick. Still, I suppose anything with snow and garnished with a bit of red will do. With a bit of luck I won’t be tearing my hair out over misbehaving printers in the runup to Christmas next year. And if it snows this winter I’ll be sure to be out there taking photos to make into a truly impressive Christmas card for 2009!
Christmas card
