Now i’m not saying go hug a tree, but spare a thought once in a while for all the amazing creatures that play a vital role in securing our future.
Every garden has it own unique collection of creatures. Have a go exploring in your garden or local parkland to see what you can find and i’m sure you will be pleasantly surprised!
This magnificent dead oak tree is sadly going to be felled within the next year to make way for a new housing estate.
I’ve known the tree my whole life and have always admired it when passing buy. It’s been dead as long as I can remember and I have never seen it lose a branch. It just shows how tough they really are.
They are such impressive trees even when they are passed their best.
Canon have really treated me and granted me the opportunity to play with their new pro camera the 1DX. It arrived in a flight case to my front door and believe me it was like Christmas day.
When it was first announced on the market I thought nothing of it as it didn’t seem a huge leap forward, but once I read all the hype about it, I just had to have a go.
First impressions was that was it focused extremely well in low light, but the thing that shocked me most was the quality of the high ISO’s, they were just amazingly clean.
The autofocus tracking for me is the best part, it’s so nice to have more focused images to choose from. Theres nothing worse than looking at the images you have just taken to find that the best ones are slightly or completly out of focus. Looking at images from the 1DX on a computer i’m just in awe of how many images have been tracked and tracked really well.
These are a few images from a couple of test shoots.
ISO 2000
ISO 400
ISO 2500
ISO 1600
Correct color in photography drives me mad. Seeking perfection in getting the white balance correct is challenging with outdoor photography. The lighting conditions are changing all the time and even though you can correct a large percentage of the colour cast in raw converter software I find that getting it exactly right is still challenging.
Then you have the worry of not having a calibrated monitor which can add to the dilemma.
The image below shows a mountain hare taken in afternoon light. Once I had edited it, I could still see it was slightly warm and with my lack of understanding about colour could not correct it without it going too blue. White balance also contains tint which im my opinion is dangerous to play with.
Then I found this approach;
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/neutral-gray/
Have a read then give it a go. You can seen the results below. Keep in mind it works really with some images but can cause weird results in other. So be warned.
At the end of the day it personal preference on what colour temperature you decide you want for your images.
(Before)
(After)
This year has been a terrible year for fruit. There are some apple trees that I know of that have produced little or no fruit at all. This image was taken 19th Dec 2011 and as you can see its absolutely laden with fruit.
It was a real specticle walking out the door late at night and seeing fruit almost glowing. The subtle luminance from an outside light made the apples really stand out aginst the dark backdrop crating this vivid image.
I’ve recently been away to Dorset for a few days in order to visit my favourite reserve, Arne. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t as good as i was hoping for, but I stuck it out as there’s always an opportunity out there sumwhere.
I spent a lot of time driving around exploring dorset and finding new places to potentially photograph. Whilst driving over one of the many old bridges across the river stour I saw an otter casually going with the flow of the river. I was able to stop on the bridge and admire it before it disappeared out of sight. Where theres one theres more, so i did some research and headed out the next day early morning.
With the Stour being incredibly full from all the rain we’ve had I thought my luck would not be so great. But I was wrong. I saw two otters, each in separate parts of the river. I was shooting on my 500mm which at times was too powerful and other times not powerful enough. Below are some of the images I took.
Unfortunately with the otter being so close at times I ended up with just a head shot cutting the body in half which resulted in a image looking like it was taken in captivity. Not really the type of shot I was looking for. But all in all not bad for a couple of hours luck. I definitely will be returning to work with this subject properly.
I found this tiny grass snake which was only as narrow as a pencil and slightly shorter. They are absolutely amazing creatures. Ive only seen a couple over the summer so this one was a real treat when i came across it.
The idea behind this first image was to create a photograph that didn’t involve cutting the subject in half (with the frame that is). Im not a fan of leaving part of the subject out of the frame as it looks unnatural, as you would never see it like that in real life plus it just looks bad in most cases.
With snakes being annoyingly long to squeeze into a tight frame the option I went for a favourite of mine which was a head on portrait. I really wanted to draw the attention to the the eyes, so to enhance this effect I needed to throw out the background which meant finding an angle with more than several meters of empty space behind the subject. It was important the background had to match an angle with sufficient foreground (in this case the moss) for it to be as perfect as I could get it.
