Life Observed

Sometimes all you need from an image is impact. Maybe you see the possibilities as you pass by and take the opportunity to grab the picture. Sometimes the image has to be created. By the way, all these images are from film at least a decade ago. This first image is the yacht club at Herne Bay. It was a winter sunset, very windy and cold. I liked those masts against the sky so I used a wide angle lens to emphasise the look. Here's another one that was just waiting for me when I looked out of a hotel window in Richmond. Strictly, I was there in the Dales on a landscape photography course, but this old style urban skyline was too good to miss. However, this next image was engineered and created with black background and bounced flash. It took many attempts to get the curl of smoke just right. No instant review on the rear screen in those days! This last image was also created. I spotted a group of lads one foggy Guy Fawkes night standing around their bo...

I was faced with a day like this once, up at the village where I work. Low cloud had turned the world completely grey. All was quiet, apart from the sound of dripping from the trees. Now, I don't believe there is such a thing as bad lighting: Provided there is enough light you can rise to the challenge to find an attractive picture. So, what was the best picture I brought back from this particular day? It was this one... Time and again I find myself drawn to small or odd details and do my best to make a picture out of them. Is it just me?

My watchword when composing a picture is always "what can I leave out?". This maxim reminds me to look round the viewfinder carefully before that fateful shutter press. So, we must ask ourselves "Is less more", and can we take minimalism too far.... On holiday in Cyprus Here we are on the beach near Polis. I could show you a picture of the sand and the sea, but that would just be another sea and sand picture. I could show you a nice sunset over the Akemas peninsula (and I may well do that one day) but that's just another sunset. So, how do I give you a flavour of a Mediterranean holiday? This is my best shot: Sun, sky, sunshade. It doesn't matter where it was, it was clearly a very nice day :-) A Midsummer night This was taken on the longest day very late at night. This is a time of year I love a great deal, but we pay for it dearly. All those lovely late evenings must be paid for in November and December. I wanted to show the dusk and ...

I now have an Amazon Kindle, that new thin electronic book reader with the astonishing always-on e-ink display. Like many new Kindle owners I have filled it with classics (because many of them are free) and have set about using it to read books. Now I should point out I am not usually a book reader. If it doesn't have an index or pictures, I have my doubts it's a proper book.  If you haven't seen one, A kindle looks like this. If you haven't held one and looked at the screen, I suggest you give one a try. What a great little gadget. Anyway I have started reading The Warden by Anthony Trollope. I have read this decades ago, but I though it would be a good test of the Kindle, to see how I get on with it. The book concerns Mr Harding, who is warden for a small almshouses that gives housing and food to 12 poor men of Barchester, a fictional small Cathedral city somewhere in southern England.  Now this seems familiar.  I commend the Hospital of St Cros...

If it is there in the photograph, it must have been like that, because the camera cannot lie. Oh dear, how times change. So, here for your consideration are four striking images. I rather like them, what do you think?. Kite and Moth The Red Kite and the Tiger Moth were photographed from the same position with the same lens within a minute. Try as I might I couldn't get them in the same shot. So, I combined two image layers seamlessly using the "darken" option. So the question is: Does the picture now seem less striking now that you know that the camera lies in this case? Sunrise over Donnington Castle, Newbury If you have driven along the Newbury bypass, then you will have passed under the place this image was taken. I used the Photographer's Ephemeris to get the right time and place for a sunrise, but the local geography meant that I couldn't get the sun positioned next to the castle as I would wish. So this image is the castle moments befo...

When I grab the camera to catch some fleeting image, or when I am putting gear into the camera bag there's a list of settings I check so I know the camera is how I want it to be. There's a convenient four way control on the back of the Olympus E620 and E510 for some of these. So here we go: Auto focus is "Single AF then Manual". White balance is "Auto". ISO is 200 or maybe 400. Metering is "Centre weighted". Exposure is "Aperture priority" and exposure compensation is reset to zero. This makes the camera behave as much like my old Nikon film cameras as possible. I feel I understand Centre Weighted metering better than anything else, and Aperture priority suits my working method. I prefer to get the depth of field right, and worry about the shutter speed later. At this point, let's have a picture in case you're getting bored... Jane Austen's writing desk. Chawton. -1EV Where were we? Ah yes, checking the exposure compe...

Are you afraid to let parts of your pictures be black ? I like a bit of black in my pictures, I think the eye needs some black to calibrate itself. Yes, there are some high key images that don't need black, but your average scene usually has some light and shadow.  There is a section of the photographic world that strives against  such dark corners. They spend their time lifting the shadows and then complain when they find there is image noise under the bits they have lifted (pun intended). But fear not, a new technique has come to their rescue. I have to admit that I don't do HDR  generally (though I will post one example later). What does trouble me is the Tone mapping that is required to render the extreme range of a HDR image on screen or paper. The results can be very odd indeed. Fortunately you can ruin a perfectly good image using tone mapping without all that tedious tripods and multiple exposure stuff. So, here is one I mangled earlier by over-en...