WW...

A few images from my weekend.  Saturday was spent in Stratford upon Avon with Cath, Sunday was coffee in Warwick with David.

Tudor houses...
(Warwick)

Spooky door...
(Warwick yet again, this is probably
my favourite shot of the day)...

Cath doing a Samson thing in Stratford...

Cath never knew she had these kinds of skills
until she started hanging around with me... :O)

... and just to show

a) Cath is actually quite normal, and

b) I can take someone's portrait without making

them look on the brink of insanity.

Wordless/Wordful Wednesday... Pictures of Winter

What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day?

Henry David Thoreau

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show.

Andrew Wyeth

I love winter, but so far this year I've been disappointed with the dull nothingness of the weather.  No sparkling frost-hardened mornings, no winter sunshine, just camera-numbing greyness.  Then on Saturday night all this changed as we of course had that snow... (deep sighs of happiness).  I love the look of snowy landscapes, of everyday objects transformed by purifying drifts of white.  The downside of course is of course trying to travel anywhere in it, but I did manage to struggle into the local town to visit the cemetery on Sunday morning (it's good for photos ok?).  What I really would have liked is a shot of one of my minions wearing my super duper black velvet coat wafting about amongst the headstones - but of course Helen and Cath weren't there and David blatantly refused to have anything to do with THAT particular scenario.  God some people are just SO selfish...  I digress... the local paper have asked me to send them some of these shots for a piece they're doing, all good for the portfolio.

Of course because it was so bright outside my camera had a 'DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!' moment  and immediately tried to underexpose everything.  What would we do without exposure compensation?  It was however rather trial and error to overexpose enough to make the snow white without blowing out the highlights.

(And for those of a sympathetic nature... I got a wet bum and cold feet from lurking in the snow... plus our central heating boiler broke down and wasn't fixed until this morning so the house was freezing, much to the disgust of the cats, plus I lost my favourite mittens...  You can almost hear the violins can't you?).

I love these gates... and I like the way the open one beckons you through to the path beyond.  I tried this in creamier almost sepia tones too, but I prefer the green tint in this one because it looks as cold as it was.  

This was one of the first images I took when I got to the cemetery - it was very foggy and I wanted to  emphasise that with the processing so kept it light and ethereal.  I really like the way those furthest away trees recede into the mist.

I do like that strong shot of colour against the background. I'd like it even more if that gravestone wasn't dissecting the tree!  You'd think they'd plan things a bit better wouldn't you? ;O)  I'm still not 100% sure about how best to process this one (cloning the gravestone out might be an idea!), I did one in very light,  white and blue tones, then did this instead.  Hmmm, something to play around with this week methinks.

Again I tried a few different effects on this but in the end went for icy tones.  

I obviously developed a bit of an obsession for the same setting in Lightroom...

And because I can't let a week go by without at least one black and white shot, here's a completely different take on those gates.  Just made for high contrast.

WW... How to take that M&Ms shot...

Well I said when I did my first Wordless/Wordful Wednesday post that I wanted to up my photographic skills this year and try and share what I was learning.  Because of the more than kind reaction of people to the shot I took of M&Ms for Scavenger Hunt Sunday I thought I'd show a 'behind the scenes' look at how I did it.  Bear with me on this - I've never done one of these before so if there's anything obvious that I've not said then please let me know.

What I used...

First I got a bowl of brightly coloured sweets - because the M&Ms have now disappeared (!), I've used a tube of smarties for illustration purposes here.  The M&Ms were brighter in colour and there were more of them, ideally I'd have a lot more sweets in the dish.  Then I placed a CD cover on two glasses over the dish - the aim is to put some distance between the CD cover and the sweets to create a blurred background.  For the droplets I used a syringe - but a dropper etc would be fine.  (The strange shadows in this shot are caused by the kitchen worktop down-lighters!)

Next I placed droplets onto the CD case at random - you can experiment with how big the drops are.

Now for the exhasperating part...

I shot from directly above with my camera set to manual focus using a 55mm lens and with the widest possible aperture.  I also put a macro filter on the lens.  Then it was a case of focussing on the drops and moving backwards and forwards until the sweets came into focus within them.  Don't give up if you can't get it first time - (I tried a few different arrangements of drops until I got one I liked).

Editing wise I was pretty limited as I'm still bereft of my software on the MAC, so I used PIKNIK (Flickr's photo editing site), which is amazingly good!  All I did was boost the colours and contrast and clarified it a little - plus the obligatory sharpening.

That's it! Hope that's useful and you have fun giving it a go (by the way I saw a great version of this on Flickr with hot air balloons in the droplets - brilliant!).

WW - I don't do resolutions but...

I'm going to try and link up with Project Alicia each week for Wordless/Wordful Wednesday.  If you haven't been to Alicia's blog yet then please check it out - her photos are gorgeous.  I am also incredibly jealous of the new lens she got for Christmas.

Back to my non-resolutions... This year I want to take my photography further, do it better and do it more (the motto will be LCA or 'Less Crap Photos'), and to share what I learn as I go along.  I have two pet photo shoots lined up which I am very excited about - and if they go well then who knows?  To make me get my camera out every day (it's not a chore!) I am also taking part in a photo a day challenge on Flickr.

Enough words - on with the photos...  

Macro of forks...

Finally found the knack of using a much smaller aperture for macros to get more in focus - doh! This was taken in black and white with the camera on manual using a macro filter (x10) on the lens.  I've got lazy and relied a lot of Aperture Priority mode to shoot so am trying to shoot more in manual.

Olives...

It's become a bit of a tradition for David and myself to go for an Italian meal over the New Year holiday.  Taken in b&w again - wide aperture to throw the background out and create bokeh. Am loving the way the light from the window shines on the oil.  I might try cropping this differently to make it conform to the rule of thirds - (but sometimes breaking the rules can be fun...).

Yet more of the olives in b&w...

David makes an assault on the olives.  I like the sense of movement in this and the angle.  What I don't like is that distracting large rectangle of light at the top and the bottles to the left.  It's amazing how many times you compose a shot but then forget to look around the whole frame to see what you don't want there, just focussing on what you do want.  Again I might try cropping this.

Dusk...

The colour and the lights were what struck me about this scene, so to emphasis these aspects I dropped on one knee, de-focussed the lens and waited for some obliging pedestrians to walk by.  I also used exposure compensation and underexposed it to stop the camera trying to make it much lighter than it really was!  I think the blurred figures help make this shot - they add scale and movement.

Tree with lights...

I love the lights in this tree - and the way it's silhouetted against that beautiful sky.  What I might do is clone out that lamp on the right and the cable on the tree.

And finally...

Detective Dave on the case...

This was a fun shot we tried.  We've been watching the Danish police series The Killing over Christmas (which is brilliant!  More twisty-turny than a twisty-turny thing!) and I loved its dark and atmospheric camera work.  As an homage to it I got David to kneel down in front of our car with the headlights on so he was backlit.  Am loving those shadows.