Stover Country Park Devon

I spent the weekend in Devon, and was able to spend an hour with my camera at Stover Country Park. It was absolutely beautiful and a great way to get in touch with nature. It's not always easy to get ducks to pose, but these two beauties seemed happy to give me a good pose!

I have yet to master the art of photographing flying birds, which is a bit annoying as there ample opportunities to get decent shots.

 

There were some amazing dead straight tall trees. I really should have looked at what they are called, but I was too busy getting up close and personal!

Not quite a perfect line up, but they weren't going to listen to me!

One Man And His Drill

I spend many hours driving for work, which I really enjoy as it makes every day so completely different. However there are times when I have to knuckle down to working at the unit doing the occasional labour intensive job, which is what I am doing today. At a natural break I took a picture of the drill I am joined at hip with all day. If this had been taken a couple of days earlier it would have been a contender for my other joint blog in our machinery topic. For such an "uninteresting" object the drill came out really well and I was really pleased with the close up detail, the depth of field and the contrasting colours. Plenty going on in the picture says this rather obsessed amateur photographer!

Reflections

I am currently taking pictures of water for my other joint photography blog and the aftermath of a rain shower gave me ample opportunities. I love looking at reflections in water and sometimes you can see some amazing reflections in puddles. Sometimes I can look into such reflections and have a period of reflection myself. I took this picture in a little lane near Maidenhead where the poor road surface with potholes made for great puddles!

Winter Sunrise

Over recent weeks I keep seeing amazing sunrises on my drive into work, but haven't had an opportunity to capture it with my camera. This morning the camera was primed and when I saw the amazing colours as I approached work I managed to pull over and get snapping!

Just to show what else was going on, the view looking back towards the fading night captured the moon, a perfect clear sky and a very frosty morning.

Winter Sunset

I took a step back today from my photography in terms of techniques and trying to get the best shot, and went back to a spontaneous moment /scene. I had my compact digital camera with me this afternoon, and as I returned to work from a delivery I stopped to capture the Winter sunset. January and February are usually pretty cold dismal months as we wait for Spring, but sometimes it's also easy to forget just how stunning the countryside and views can be even at this time of the year. Both photos were taken from the same position with a different level of zoom and I just adjusted the camera angle to alter the exposure.

Learning Photography

I have spent some of my Christmas holiday taking pictures which can be seen at the twoviews blog pages, but I am also reading up about techniques including software editing.

Using editing makes it very simple to change colours and the same image can appear very differently. In both cases I used Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 and put in a solid opaque base layer and then merged the original picture and the opaque layer to get new images. The blue cyan image was done as cyanotype. Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints.The English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel discovered this procedure in 1842. Though the process was developed by Herschel, he considered it as mainly a means of reproducing notes and diagrams, as in blueprints. It was Anna Atkins who brought this to photography. She created a limited series of cyanotype books that documented ferns and other plant life from her extensive seaweed collection. Atkins placed specimens directly onto coated paper, allowing the action of light to create a silhouette effect. By using this photogram process, Anna Atkins is regarded as the first female photographer.

The software editing attempts were pretty experimental and reminded me just how important it is to get the right shot with the camera first and foremost. You can edit for hours and hours, but you need to ensure the photo is actually good enough in the first place! :)

New Years Day 2012

It was nice to hit 2012 running without a hangover. Spent a lovely New Year's Eve with the family and this continued into New Year's Day with it being my big brother's birthday. It was nice to capture 3 generations of the family in one shot with my mum, sister and niece all out together as we walked up to the local shop to post a letter. I am not setting myself big goals for 2012 with health and happiness top of the list and possibly the odd dream or two coming true would be nice :)