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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.
Got out with my camera for half an hour last Sunday with mist moving through the valley at about 7.30am. Quite cold and I didn’t think I’d captured anything of much interest. Then I downloaded the few I had taken and really like this hedgerow Hawthorn. Could be any hedge in any field except for Haldon Belvedere perched on the horizon. I thought the touch of colour in the hedgerow was good and boosted a touch of pink in the sky. But when I printed it didn’t look right so went back to the RAW file and converted to monochrome instead. Did 2 conversions with different exposures, layered the lighter one ontop and then brushed out the sky as a layer mask. Gives it a moodier effect and highlights the horizon. Also patched out the small bright streak of sky as it was distracting. Here is the original camera-converted JPEG.
Thought I might never take another photograph after seeing the John Gay retrospective at the Guildhall in London a couple of weeks ago. I had googled fairly extensively looking for photographic exhibitions without much luck, and just chanced upon this one. Really is a must-see. So many pictures just utterly perfect. So different seeing them printed up large, and there are lots of them. Great to have a chance to look at some books of contact sheets as well. This one of the the old man wading at Blackpool was the only one with him in – lots of others that were ordinary photos (mostly closer up to more people and people facing the camera) and then bam – there’s the one. The reaction to never photograph again was feeling everything possible had been done and said. Which of course it hasn’t! Seeing the contact sheets was helpful because it’s a reminder that the next frame could be “the one”. The John Gay archive is with English Heritage.
Have decided to keep an eye for photographic competitions and try and regularly submit material. The series “if you only do one thing this month” from Outdoor Photography magazine has been running for a while now and several times I’ve looked at the winners thought it might have been worth putting something in. Entered 6 for this month’s subject “trees”. Considering what a tree lover I am I could find remarkably few photos in the last 3 years that were worthy of entering. Took surprisingly long time to get them all into the right size, dpi, file format and mode, along with needing a high res and low res version then burning to CD. Some of the photos (like my hedgerow Hawthorn) could have done with a bit more tittivating before entering, but I was up agains the deadline.
Have received my 6 copies of the Environmental Art 2010 calendar with my picture for October. Have just looked on the Green Museum website and rather surprisingly can’t find any mention of their own calendar there. This is the only place I could find it for sale, and nowhere in the UK. Very nice to be in print, and the $200 has been spent several times over on paper and frames.
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.
Thankfully the credit for my HP printer is now in my bank account. No doubt HP will tell me in due course what they would actually like me to do with the printer. Spent a very cold and not very artistically productive couple of hours up at Haldon first thing this morning. This one has a bit of atmosphere but rather lacking either a focal point or sufficient uniformity of pattern to catch the eye, or even a lower viewpoint might have sparked it up. Frankly I was too cold to care much! I wanted to get the granite cross in the picture as well but would have had to wait another half hour for the sun to come round to it I think. Must give some attention to buying a new tripod. The one I was using is tiny, flimsy and impossible to actually move into the position you want.
Windy Cross
Oak tree (HDR)
Family duties done and the sun obligingly shone for a camera walk in the woods above Fingle Bridge. Got lost, tore my trousers, broke my tripod. The most atmospheric shots were taken with the sun placed behind the trunk of a tree for a contre-jour lighting effect. I knew I would need to do some post processing because of the high contrast. Without a tripod, I leaned the camera against another tree and held as still as possible for a series of exposures. Had a go at the Photoshop “merge to HDR” (File/Automate) from the RAW files of the two thumbnails below. The merged image is 32bit so has to be converted to 16 bit (Image/Mode) and I used the “local adaptation” option. The file looks good on the screen I think, but first print doesn’t look too great – rather dull compared to the screen version. Tried using the paper profile in the View/Proof setup/Custom, but that shows far too little red on the screen. Correcting to look good on screen gave me a rather lurid red print. Part of the joy of the Natural Soft Textured paper is its subtlety, but that’s different from dull. There is something different about the actual file created from HDR because there was no option to save as JPEG (and quite a few other options missing also). To upload it to my blog I had to use the Save for Web and Devices instead. For a third print I have just given it a touch of extra curves and saturation in the red and blue channels.
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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
Having studiously ignored my blog for over 6 months I got an email out of the blue asking permission to use one of my images from an earlier post for a 2010 calendar published by greenmuseum.org. Very exciting. Look forward to seeing it printed.
Prompted me to rifle through images taken in recent months. Brilliant holiday on Mont St Michel at the beginning of September. Naturally the Abbey was very full of tourists (like me!) so I had to be patient and grab less populated moments. The place itself was amazing, but also enhanced by an exhibition of photos of high holy places around the world imaginatively hung to blend and contrast with the setting.
Mont St Michel
Went to see my nephew playing rugby – not a game I begin to pretend to understand. Only 2 good shots out of a hundred frames but I printed them out for Tom. I wonder if they are pinned up above his bed? I love the detail of the facial expressions and the guy crawling out of the side of the frame. But don’t think I’ll be making the grade as a sports photographer.
Tom playing rugby
A walk near Merrivale yielded some beautiful, still, moss-covered stones and trees. I think at least half the photos in my collection are moss covered stones and trees. They just touch the spot I guess.
Woods near Merrivale, Dartmoor
And finally – I’d seen this place referred to on the map, and just had to find it for myself. I spent ages trying to get a really good angle, but this was the best I could find. Maybe needs a frosty day or something else to give it a bit of an other-worldly lift.
Heavens Gate, near Lustleigh, Dartmoor
Started this out as a 6 month project. Haven’t posted for a couple of months. Got bored with putting stuff “out there” for no particular reason. But the focus has carried on quietly. Haven’t achieved a single one of the targets I originally set, but have done some that weren’t there to start with. Done a lot more software learning than I expected, and branched off into Flash, Audition and Premier Pro. Have printed and hung some decent size pictures. Become more dissatisfied with the quality of my photo taking but not done much about it. Haven’t made as much time as I intended to get out taking pictures, but it has been very good to have a default option for days off. I have learned to value and enjoy more the creative arts aspects of my job such as book, poster and website design. To look for them and enjoy them in their own right in a new way – that has certainly been helpful. I’ve also got better kit than I had 6 months ago (part personal part work) but have yet to really make full enough use of it. I have been taking my art more seriously and putting money behind doing stuff to the best quality I can rather than trying to skimp on costs and do things on the cheap. Don’t know at this point whether I will bother to continue with the blog or even the project as a specific focus – need to think about that. Here’s from a recent trip to Steps Bridge. Wild daffodils
Fabulous effects this morning with mist rolling up the Exe. Only had a pocket camera with me when I was out for an early walk so went back with SLR later. I love the way a mist pulls trees out from the clutter of the landscape. I drastically over-exposed this one (by accident) but rescued it in photoshop.
In the last month as I’ve been busy getting the server set up, moving all my images into one place and installing and starting to get to grips with CS3. Have had several abortive attempts at image filing in a way I have a chance of finding what I want when I want. Anybody got any good ideas?
