Aurora Borealis!

How amazing it would be to have managed a photograph of the Merry Dancers.
I hadn't realised they were happening until I read this - http://www.orcadian.co.uk/2011/08/merry-dancers-light-up-august-skies/

(Image by John Vetterlein)

So, I packed up my camera gear, filled up my flask and went up to Wideford Hill to set up my camera in the hope that I would see the Northern Lights.
I was so excited when I saw the first flash of green dancing out from behind some cloud. I was told that it would be really slow to begin with and then build up so I didn't hit the shutter release straight away.

Unfortunately, the lights only danced for about 4 seconds and then disappeared. Sigh!! I lay out for several hours watching the Perseids shoot by and waiting for another show but the lights never re-appeared.

I tried a few more nights at different spots but, apart from a green coloured sky one night, there was nothing. Oh well, 4 seconds is better than none.

West End Festival (and bloody photographers!)

I went to the West End Festival in Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow, on Sunday. The weather was great so the park was mobbed with people, animals and.... photographers.

I don't know if this has always been the case at these types of events and I've just never noticed before or if it's the advance in photo-technology that makes everyone suddenly want (be able) to be a photographer. They were everywhere!! Most annoyingly, they were always in my frame!!!

Every shot I tried to take, there was a photographer in sight. Worst of all, if I tried to take a shot of something without people in it, a PHOTOGRAPHER would jump in my way. One guy even looked at me, saw I was trying to take a shot, but just stayed there, staring at me. How rude!!

It did occur to me that perhaps I was in a lot of photographs but I do try to stay inconspicuous. I would prefer to have a sneaky, little Leica to snap away at scenes without anyone's knowledge. Or a medium format, TLR camera where I can hold it at my waist to take shots. Scenarios where the audience are caught unaware are always better for capturing true emotion and genuine activity, in my opinion.
I know some people would object to this approach as it does seem a little 'peeping tom'-ish but I would try not to be imposing.

In hindsight, I should have simply taken all the photos that I was going to take, with the photographers in them. It would have made a pretty nifty little project - something I might toy with for future events (starting next Sunday at the Mele in Glasgow??).

There was a female who was taking photographs of the bmxers at the ramps whilst the Beatles tribute band were on. She wasn't so obtrusive like the others. She even saw me taking a photo and smiled.
As I watched her give her card to the best biker of the crowd I realised that my problem, perhaps, isn't so much with all those invasive photographers but with competition.

Ha!

Here are some shots I took of the day on my dslr (Sony A100) - [still to come].
I also used my 35mm camera (Centon), with colour film, for part of a project I am doing with my cousin - all will be revealed in a future blog....

Star-trail attempt at Beecraigs

Travelling for a while in the pitch, black of night, Dhana and I finally reached Beecraigs Country Park where we thought we would have peace and quiet to take our 45minute long photos of the starry, night sky.

Your hearing picks up when you can't see a thing and I could hear people talking. I was convinced there were people in the woods but, how could I have heard people as we were in the middle of nowhere? Wind in the trees, perhaps?

We set up our cameras as quick as possible and got ourselves back into the car, lights off and doors locked. I had a small baseball-style bat with me the whole time. We got the flask of hot-chocolate out, which is almost impossible to pour when you can’t see what you’re doing, and ate about 2 crisps before things started getting exciting.

FIREWORKS!!!! In the field, right next to where we were. It does explain the voices that I heard, which makes me feel less of a paranoid scaredy-cat. We decided to keep the cameras running as the fireworks weren’t going into the sky but were flaring all colours at low, ground-level. They were behind the cameras and far enough away from us that they shouldn't affect the shots.

15 minutes later and a car comes past with full headlights on (understandable as we were sitting in the pitch black). It saw us, slowed down and I thought it was going to stop but it went on a bit. The shots were ruined so we got out of the car to retake the shots when we saw the car reversing. 'Get in the car....GET IN THE CAR!!!'
The two of us failed to get our tripods down quick enough so we stuffed ourselves and the fully-open tripods with cameras on the top into the car and locked the door. Not without a bit of a comedy struggle, I might add. The car went by us slowly but drove away. Phew!

We'd been laughing about taking some 'rabbit in the headlight' shots for some of Dhana's Reportage images, as well, but there was not a chance that we were getting out the car again. LOL!!!!

When I think about it now, it was probably just a voyeur hoping to see something fun but I think a safer location is in order for the next attempts of star-trail photographs.

Here is the only shot I have, affected by the car headlights. It would have been such a good star trail shot if I'd had the full 45 minutes (except for the pylon lines that I thought I’d managed to avoid). Sigh!!



Hopefully we’ll try this again soon and with more success.

Dhana in the park

Dhana (a friend from college) was kind enough to pose for some photographs in Almondell Country Park today. Thanks Dani :)

I'm trying out a different technique in-camera and in Photoshop. I happened upon it by accident but I'm quite liking the results.

Liquid Motion

Something different with the camera today.

I set up the tripod next to the window as the light was quite bright and got the macro lens onto the camera. The subject (an 80’s, coloured-liquid toy) was placed on the window sill with a sheet of white paper behind it to diffuse the harsh backlight.


Getting the shots was a bit of a challenge. I had to turn the object upside-down to start the liquid motion and to capture the droplets/bubbles in action I had to have a fast shutter speed. This meant I had to have a small depth of field and trying to get the image focused every time that I turned the object was so difficult. The toy is also pretty small so the time-frame for this was only seconds.

Another problem I encountered was, even with the continuous frame setting on, the shutter release cord wouldn’t always take a photograph. Sooo frustrating. You would think it was a matter of life or death the way I was carrying on, hehe. “Shoot, SHOOT Dammit!!!!”

I missed a number of amazing shot opportunities, like a droplet forming with loads of tiny bubbles inside then bursting slowly!!!! I am so gutted I missed that one – damn camera!!!

However, lots of swear words and several shots later, I managed to produce the following images.

Star Trails

Tonight I tried something a bit different. Star trails.
I left my camera on for about 10 minutes (bulb setting) at aperture 3.5mm just outside in the backgarden. I knew I'd have a problem with light pollution but I was just testing to see what I would get....and here is the result (with a slight bit of fixing in Photoshop for the sky and ignoring the house detail - the house is only there for a reference point).



Now that I know how it should be done I will be venturing out to less light polluted areas for my next attempt.

Wet Nose

I'm going out to photograph using film today so the images won't be available for a while.

In the meantime, I'll show you a pic that I should've included in my last post to show you the detail brought out by the macro lens. It's a bit grotty, to be honest, but it's nature. My little Cat Features nose :)



I'm not sure cats are supposed to have wet noses, though, are they?

Garden spider

It took quite a bit of patience and steady hand to take this image. There was a little bit of wind that caused focusing issues and I didn't have the tripod out with me. I've learned that, when using the macro, it doesn't matter how high the shutter speed you will still need a tripod. I can't believe that even less than a millimetre of movement can throw the subject out of focus. It's absolutely amazing.

This little garden spider (not fully sure what the actual species is) was only about 1cm in length. His web was in a prime spot because he seemed to be catching all the greenfly. Unlike his friend, whose web was empty. He was running about like crazy trying to fix his little web, which was obviously in a poor position compared with Mr."wind-blows-them-here-first". I wonder which spider built his web first!!

From high above.

I absolutely love the work of Masao-Yamamoto. He prints his photographs onto specialised papers and uses dyes and inks to create the images as though they were paintings.

I aim to, eventually, experiment with papers and dyes but for now I am using Photoshop.

This bird was taken from the spare room window and I cropped the image to include only the very top of the tree and then manipulated it in Photoshop to give the following result.



(I am aware that my framing skills will have to improve dramatically!!!)

Trying something new!

I thought I'd try my hand at the mini-planet effect tonight.

I used a photograph I took of Chloe-cat, sitting at the window in the living-room this afternoon. I love the repetitiveness of the vertical blinds and I thought this would look great in the 'round'.
The photo was taken on my Nokia N85 but the final result is still impressive (I think).

This second image is of Doune Castle (where part of Monty Python: The Holy Grail was filmed - yes, I did knock the coconuts whilst riding my pretend horse up the hill). I think the finished result of this image looks brilliant and it has inspired me to look for bizarre scenes that may fit this type of effect.

I think I could improve this image a lot even just by cropping inside the 'circle'. However, this was my first attempt so I can only get better....

Studio - Portraiture!

I'm not sure if I like working in the studio, yet, or not. Even if the lighting was mastered (I have only been shown two simple lighting set-ups) there is still the skill of getting your model to look natural. I guess it will come with practise for putting the model at ease and knowing which poses suit which type of person best.

One thing, for sure, is that I cannot afford to be shy if I want to get the image I want. I've only taken shots of a few people so I have a long way to go before I exude the confidence of a professional photographer!!

I wish I could have more time to try things out that are not for my assignment. Test out the scope of the flash lighting. Vary the intesity and all that malarky. It doesn't help that my Sony Alpha 100 DSLR does not have a synch connection or the correct hotshoe attachment for the wireless transmittors. I have to share the college's Nikon and the buttons are in all the wrong places!!!

Here is me at work, using fellow student Laura's Canon that she kindly let me borrow for my shots (photo taken by Laura Ledbetter)

and here are a few of my images.

Reflections!

A colour assignment for College....

My Plan A (window reflections) didn't really work as too many things went wrong.
I was 'grilled' by a drunkard who wasn't happy that I might be taking his or anyone else's photograph without permission. I couldn't be bothered putting him straight about the laws but did try to explain that, as my camera was pointing up near the top of the 5 story builing in front of us, no-one would be in the photograph. It didn't stop him from trying to be in the shot as he moved from left to right while he tried to figure out just where to stand so that the lens was facing him. His comprehension of physics was obviously skewed by his alcohol consumption but it was quite amusing to watch him dance around for a while. He got fed up trying to get in the frame and came back for a second mega-rant. Time to move along, Ams, before this gets too scary!!

Even more of a problem was the fact that the beautiful Arch windows that I had spied, from a distance in the car, didn't actually have glass in the frames. Even the drunk guy would know that I could never get a reflections shot from them. Gutted!!

By this point it was too foggy to be able to see anything, anyway. Back home to mope about my lack of success.

Returning to Glasgow another day for Plan B (reflections on water) and I completed my second roll of film. Only after taking all, bar 2, of my shots did the reflections become really colourful so I'm not sure how this will turn out on submission. Acceptable? I hope so.

Here are two of the images, scanned from print. Both are taken at the River Clyde in Glasgow.

BBC Building


Finniston Crane [Clydeport] and the Squinty Bridge

Digital Images

I seem to be less inclined to take my digital camera out with me these days. I imagine it must be that I'm loving being in the darkroom so much. However, I do still love the fact that I can see my images immediately after I have taken them with the Digital camera.

Here are some images that I have taken on my Sony Alpha 100 DSLR.