Life Observed

A post in praise of the humble Tea Shop, and the most excellent coffee break. Surely there is no day out that cannot be improved by a nice cup of tea or an Americano and a Danish Pastry. Here we are in Le Cafe Journal in Warminster High Street, enjoying the latter. Later that same day we had a nice cup of tea in a WI tent at a churchyard fair and on both occasions we watched the world go by. Now that would be an achievement : To be able to write "Occupation: Watching the World Go By"

Turn it up to Eleven, its January. Three years ago this month I bought my 11-22mm wide zoom from a member of the UK e-group forum . What a great lens it has been, wonderfully wide and free from corner vignetting faults. Here is an early skyscape I took using it at the 11mm end. This is dawn, January 2008 and the first week I had the lens. This is a year later. Here is a moody shot from January 2009, on the way to work and taken straight into the sun through the mist. I am well pleased with the lack of lens flare in this. It was taken at the 11mm end of the zoom range. Another year. Here's a floodlit Saxon church. I took this one foggy evening after work in January 2010. This also uses the 11mm end of the zoom. Finally, from just last night, a pleasing tree and dusk shot, once again using this lens at its widest end, 11mm.  Do you see where this leads us? Yes, I am an incurable wide boy and if I always use this zoom lens at 11mm, why bother...

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...