Life Observed

I am mighty impressed the sea can lift this gravel two meters and dump it all against the beach huts. After all it's only salty water. It doesn't have a mind or anything. I'm just as impressed that the council will come and put all the gravel back eventually.

Twenty nine of your Celsius degrees is forecast. Is that too hot for you?  Perhaps this will help you chill out: The day I took this picture it was probably an uncomfortable minus three degrees with a twenty mph wind. We are not very well adapted to the universe, temperature wise, are we? For us, too cold is 270K and too hot is 300K. When you consider the Sun's corona temperature exceeds a million degrees K, perhaps we should get out more.

Here are a couple of recent pictures. Yes. Autumn leaves I'm afraid. Anyway, I found myself somewhat disappointed with the results: Why so? you may ask.. Well it seems to me that much of the photographer's efforts are expended in creating the third dimension on a two dimensional medium. The tree concerned is very three dimensional. As I walked towards it I was impressed by the colours and the shape of the foliage and also by the depth of the subject. Now we come to the heart of the problem: How do we portray the third dimension in a flat picture? I have a selection of methods I call on to show a sense of depth:  The first method is to get in close and use restricted depth of field to pull the subject away from the background. The two shots above are an example. I like to use receding tones to imply distance. A foggy day is ideal for this, you can't beat mist or fog for creating a sense of place. Here are two pictures that use a foggy day to ...

Stoney Royd cemetery. This is the dead centre of town and they are dying to get in here.  No, but seriously, the Victorians have to be applauded for building a cemetery on a steep hill. I've not seen anything quite like this before... I won't dwell on the gaudy fake flowers everywhere or the stone teddy bears and plastic windmills in the children's section. I gave it the monochrome treatment to spare your eyes, dear reader.. Still, you do get a Tomb with a View.

A biting cold westerly wind greeted me yesterday on by short walk round the village. Westerlies are not generally cold, so there must be something odd going on up there. Here's a big sky picture aided by my new ultrawide* lens . If you place the horizon at the bottom of the frame, then the view at the top of the frame is almost directly overhead. I rather like the range of colours in this one. Even at this time of year the Sun can still show the promise of warmth for the months to come. *If this lens were any wider, there would be a danger of getting your ears in every shot :-)

Out for a walk in the winter sunshine in the village. I came across this rather seemly patch of fungi next to an equally seemly thatched cottage . Using a combination of ultra wide angle lens, ungainly squatting and holding the camera in the grass, I managed to obtain this worms eye view. Of course you could also see the world this way if you fell over on the way home from the pub...

I feel there is very little to recommend the Winter months. O, dark dull dreary dismal depressing December... However, the low angle of the Sun, when it appears, produces these lovely long shadows and gives shape to the landscape. Here are some Long Shadows enhanced by a fresh fall of leaves and a wide angle lens. Photographers trick: If you are going to shoot straight into the sun, then place it behind a branch or tree trunk. This helps sort out the light metering, and gives the lens an easier time. Although Zuiko zooms are quite good at resisting flare, there's more glass in there than a public bar, and we shouldn't push our luck, eh?

Here's to the new lens. It is an ultra wide 9-18mm zoom: Great for building interiors, wide skies, landscapes and... macros?  OK. It isn't the right lens for this but that mad ultrawide perspective combined with a close focus distance of an inch or two means you can create pictures like this one... Not mushroom for a game of football with a fungi like this.

Goodbye old friend.  I sold my 11-22mm wide zoom yesterday, which has been providing my big perspective pictures for three years. Here's a parting shot: The leaves on the footpath past the churchyard. Fear not. There is now the madder, wider 9-18mm ultrawide zoom in the camera bag. Let's see what that lens can encompass...

It seems to me that the harvest has come around early this year,. Some of the local fields were cleared in late July while others stand golden and ready to cut. It makes you wonder just how many grains of wheat there are in a field like this. Answers on a postcard please... The local farmers use agricultral contracters with their huge harvesters which can cut and bale a whole filed in a single day. Scarey stuff, especially down the local narrow country lanes.

What do these two pictures have in Common? Well. They are in fact the same picture. I tried to take a three shot panorama of St Nic's church in Newbury as an experiment. I used my ultrawide angle lens but I was still far too close really. I passed the three files to Photoshop and started the autoalignment routine. I cannot imagine the maths involved to make these transformations. I can report that my attempts to do it at 16 bit resolution brought the PC to its knees and I had to abort the process. Photoshop creates various new layers and the image quickly grows to 570Mb. Task manager showed that 2.5Gb of memory was commited at one point. I guess the attempt to carry out these transformations on that much data proved too much.So, I started again at 8 bit resolution and eventually those two different projections came out. Here is my attempt at joining the three shots without maths. As you see it is less than optimum...

Wild skies over the Hampshire Village today, with huge wind shear and ice trails. Quite a mild day with warm sunshine. And... By contrast, from a couple of years ago, on the same spot, a winter scene with a front moving across from the west. This was a bitterly cold day. Looking Up. Part of the duties of a Landscape Photographer...

About three years ago I had just bought a 11-22mm wide zoom second hand,. I do like wide angle lenses for certain applications. Anyway, I found myself on the south coast. and made a point of visiting Bosham, an excellent little village that seems to float at the very edge of England, near Chichester harbour. I photographed everything that day with the new lens (like you do) including these views of the ancient crypt under the church. Bosham has links with Canute, Bede, the Bayeux Tapestry and Harold, so a little respect is due. It is also rather tidal and some of the roads and car parks have a tendancy to vanish twice a day.  Be careful where you park... These early attempts were shot with my first Olympus DSLR. No Image stabilisation, and I forgot to take a tripod. I did not shoot raw files then, these days I would bring back much better images.  Ah well, we all learn by our mistakes :-)

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...

Piglet famously said "I'm looking down " when threatened by Jagulars up in the trees. Well, I'm not afraid to look up when it comes to pictures. Aiming the camera skywards can produce a new perspective on a familiar scene. In this case the image needs very little explanation, apart from the information that the woodland is at Basildon Park. Here is another uplifting picture: This time the magnificent fan vaulting is to be found in Bath Abbey.  Its a shame that so much artistry goes unseen. However,  I have noticed large mirrors are now placed in historic buildings these days so those interested in ceilings can see the workmanship without all the tedious falling over or debilitating neck pains. Some times the view upwards gives very little away, although it can be just as rewarding. This is in fact a side alley in a Yorkshire Dales town. The narrow lane was flanked by high stone walls hiding the private gardens of shops and large town houses. T...

One of the curses of the wide angle lenses is the damage you can do to verticals, as discussed recently. You can bend your pictures just as much by aiming the camera downwards, and here's an example from the Tate Gallery in St Ives. This modernist building is worth a visit for the minimalist interior. I'm not so certain about the Art, but the building is nice... I am willing to accept this example of converging verticals as it stands because it represents the view down the stairs.  However I have also straightened it using the excellent PTlens plug in. This can correct perspective distortion as we see here, plus it can sort out Pincushion and Barrel distortion and Chromatic aberration and Vignetting. I'm glad to report the Zuiko 11-22mm wide zoom suffers from very little of these failings, but nothing can prevent the photographer from tilting the camera... Here is the straight version. Which do you prefer?

"You know what you've got there mate, you've got Converging Verticals..."   This is what happens when verticals go bad. You put your wide angle lens on, because you're standing in front of a large and imposing building and point the camera up to "get it all in" and out pops the old Converging Verticals .  In a way it makes the building look like its falling over. Equally you could argue that is what we see when we look up, so it does represent a true view. Now there are various ways to tackle this, you could buy an expensive tilt and shift lens, but that's really intended for serious students of architecture, or formal interior pictures. (Next time you look at a quality interiors magazine, check how straight the walls are...) You can attempt to straighten the image in Photoshop, and this can be successful with small amounts of distortion, but try too hard and the results will look very wrong. There is another method. You can st...

Is anyone else addicted to their wide angle lens? I have used a few over the years and I find I end up using them at their widest settings almost all the time. They provide that perspective stretch that you can't get any other way, and they force you to get closer to the subject in order to fill the frame. Here are some examples extracted from my library of shots. Woodstock A coffee shop out of season in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. There was rain on the way and I wanted to get the decking pattern, the table and the sky in one shot. This used a Nikon 20mm wide and it created a dramatic look out of an otherwise ordinary scene. Canterbury Cathedral For one month a year they remove all the seats from the nave. I was fortunate to be there at the right time. In this case the wide angle is essential to show the scale of the building. There is a real possibility of creating a very distorted picture when you use a wide angle with architecture. Tilting the camera upwards ...