Ok so first of all I’d like to apologise for my absence of
late; I’ve just been crazy busy with just about everything! I’m pretty sure I
promised a post about my Farne Islands visit about two years ago but I will get
there eventually (even though nobody cares now…including me)
Anyway, I’m away from home at the moment (I’m currently sat
writing this in a small cottage about a stone’s throw from the England/
Scotland Border.) I’m staring out of my bedroom window at a wonderful,
beautiful, wet, stunningly secluded, miserable, relaxing, depressing view of
our private garden and wishing either the weather would improve, or the world
would just go ahead and end as it’s been promising to do for weeks!
I’m determined not to let the rain and wind (and lighting
and flooding and mudslides!) stop my picture-taking however; I think it’ll be
good practise to shoot in less-than-ideal conditions…damn my optimistic nature J I did manage to grab
some nice (warm) shots the other evening when there was a dusk to speak of, so
at least I got them in the bag early on (see below.)
I’m certainly not travelling light though; the relative
closeness to home provided too many gear temptations and I can’t think of
anything I’ve left behind! I’ve got both EOS digital bodies with me (my 450D
and 7D) as well as my 10-20, 17-85, 70-200, 50 and 35-70mm lenses, plus a
flash, radio triggers etc. and I’m hauling it all around in my Lowepro Vertex
200AW. I’m hoping to go back to the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens before we head
home and we’re here ‘till Saturday so hopefully I’ll come back with some
“Keepers.”
I finally managed to get out and shoot a landscape in decent light the other day, jumping at the opportunity to head up to Waldridge Fell, near Chester-le-Street, County Durham (where I live) at dusk. I really underestimated the Fell at first, thinking that because it was only a few minutes in the car from home (and being open/flat) that there weren’t many in the way of photo opportunities. However, I’ve come to realise that this openness is actually a major strength- you get clear views of the landscape at both dawn and dusk. In particular I’m drawn to a small lake (actually it’s more of an over-sized pond!) that makes a great foreground feature no-matter what time you shoot. There is the added compositional element of a lone tree on one bank that can give your images a wonderfully peaceful, solitary feel, especially in low light. It doesn’t look like much when you first see it but it has provided me with what I believe are many successful landscapes. The low foliage around about 70% of the lake means clear, uncluttered photos and great minimalist reflections when the light is right; and on this occasion I was lucky in that it was close to the perfect sunset.
The sky was very clear which was quite disappointing at first since I obviously wanted to avoid including too much of a boring, blank expanse at the top of my pictures, although before long a few attractive clouds drifted in to hold the colour of the setting sun. I remained mostly and the East bank this time, making the most of the sun-burst, shooting directly into it. I tried several different approaches, shooting wide to get in more of the opposite lake-side and then racking in tight on that lone tree, with the sun behind it. I also made a point of shooting a couple of panos, taking images in landscape followed by portrait orientation to see what would work best-since my current workload meant I didn’t know when I’d be out again, I wanted to covered my bases and make sure I got something usable. A image that turned out nicely is the one below, which is actually a pano of 3 portrait-shot pics, extended using PS CS5. The initial stitch turned out a funny shape, but instead of cropping I used CS5’s Content Aware Fill function to fill in the gaps. It needed some retouching not a lot.
Overall I must have taken a good 150 images- enough to keep me happy for a week or two in Photoshop. I was really impressed by the gradation of colours throughout the evening, from deep reds and oranges to subtle blues and purples. I took far more bracketed sequences than is normal for me as I’m presently having a go at improving my HDR skills, although most of the images here are single frames, balanced through the use my trusty Cokin ND grad filters. As it happens I think I need a new ND8- this (my most used grad) has a few too many scratches which light up like a beacon when photographing into the sun; they were a real pain in the &^%! here and I spent far longer than I wanted with the patch and clone tools!
An HDR shot of 7 merged exposures
Equipment
Simple list this time; I shot all evening on my Canon EOS 7D and EF-S 17-85mm lens, on a Manfrotto 190XproB + 496RC2 head, complete with cable release. Filter-wise I was quite a bit kore stacked than I usually like to be utilizing a Polarizer, ND4 and ND8 grads (although not for long at the same time) and a full ND8 to reduce the ripples in the water.
Let’s just hope that once my upcoming Uni exams are over I’ll get out and about a little, well actually quite a bit more often J
Oh and watch this..!
I love Photoshop (oh sorry Fotoshop) but you have to admit this is funny :)
