Catch up….

Published by Matthew J. Ward | Filed under Digital Photography, My Comment, Macro, Flash

It’s amazing how time flies when you keep yourself busy! I’ve been up to a few things recently.

A Visit to Wales

This year one of my resolutions (I had a few) was to try and keep in touch with my friends more. It’s all too easy to lose touch especially with people who don’t live on your doorstep. So last weekend I had organised on a bit of a whim to head over to North Wales to spend some time with Jimi and Ben. The plan was to have a catch-up and do a weekend of photography at the same time. I headed on over to Llandudno on Friday night (15th Feb) and got to Jimi’s for about 9ish if I remember correctly, we had a bit of a catch up before going to bed, ready for an early start. I say ‘early’, but as Ben decided he would get pretty drunk and wouldn’t make it to Anglesey before 10:00am and due to the fact I had not been to the location for years, there probably wasn’t much point scouting at sunrise for locations. So instead we got up at a reasonable 8:00am heading off shortly after. Newbrough was the destination of choice for the day. The journey took a couple of hours (due to some navigation troubles :-)), but we got there in the end. The barrier to the area was broken, so free parking for the day was a bonus! We were soon walking through the forest admiring the soft light falling through the trees; we stayed in the woods until early afternoon. Eventually! Ben decided he would join us. From there the rest of the day was wondering around the beach and buildings out toward sea. It really must be around 10 years if not longer since I had last been there, but memories of the area started flooding back. It was a good day and there are some photos at the bottom of this entry. After sunset we headed back to Bangor to meet up with a few people for a ’semi’ party, which ended up being a good laugh! Sadly the next day Jimi wasn’t feeling great (hope your better now), so we headed off back to Llandudno, where I then left Jimi to recover and headed back to the delights of the Midlands. It was great to catch up with people and nice to visit vastly different scenery to what I have locally. Thanks for the weekend chaps!

Exhibition Day

As a resident of my village for the last 24 years, I decided that I would make the effort to enter some of my photographs into a ‘Local Talents’ exhibition in the village. I took this as an opportunity to showcase some of my most recent work to a larger audience than would usually view it. I decided I would treat this as an opportunity to display my work in a professional way, which in this instance meant the following;

Entering 10 photographs covering different areas of photography, only using shots taken in the last year.
The selected images would be printed at 12 x 8 Inches on matt photo paper.
The printed images would be mounted in a black frame that were 14 x 11 with a pre-cut bevelled aperture of 11.5 x 8
The images were then backed with white card 14 x 11
Image tags were created in Photoshop, featuring the ‘Date Taken’, ‘Location’, ‘Description’

I was very pleased with the look of the images, and everyone I spoke to at the event (for the brief time I was there) thought they were fantastic, and I was asked if I did photography professionally, which was a great complement. The event and preparation left me with a buzz that comes from sharing my work with others and realising how much I do enjoy my hobby! I’m sure I will have other opportunities like this one; at least I can sleep knowing that I put 110% into getting the best results I could, which paid off.

The exhibition has also prompted me to really crack on with the galleries and redesign stages of my website. My portfolio of stock and other images is now growing and I need somewhere to display them!

A day indoors

Weekends always seem to attract the worse weather out of the week, and today was no exception. I don’t own a waterproof body or lens for that matter and so rainy days are difficult to work with. So instead of going out for landscapes I decided to dedicate the day to indoor close up photography. Well that’s a partial lie as the I knew exactly what I would be doing. The first thing I wanted to do was get the Snowdrop image that I tried to get a shot of a couple 2 weeks ago. The snowdrop season is nearly over in the area, and this would be my last chance this year to get the stock image I was after. I did a very similar setup to last time I did this shot (will post a diagram at some point). The only change I made this time was to add a persistent light source onto the main area of the flower. This was a bit of fudge, due to having no high wattage lamps and nothing that would give the correct colour temperature, until I had the idea of using my small Maglite which I had upgraded to an LED setup a few months back for travelling. It was the perfect solution. I created a small snoot so there was no light spill onto the background or tile, and there was no colour cast. So I managed to push light onto the area I wanted reflected, and filled with indirect flash. The end result can be seen below.

The second part of the days photography was to try my hand at ‘Smoke Art’ which consists of taking photos of smoke and then either leaving them as they are or selectively colouring them. That sounds pretty simple!

If you are reading this and have thought about doing something similar this can be a nightmare. The general idea is to light the smoke without lighting the background, which means that you cannot use the onboard flash and ambient light is out of the question (due to low shutter speeds). The setup I used consisted of my new SB600 which was set to the rear right hand side of the smoke. A ‘flag’ was used to stop light falling on the background and another to stop light falling directly onto the camera lens. The effect is the same as a snoot with no top. The smoke was created by using incense sticks. A window was opened to allow the smoke to bellow, and when that didn’t work the smoke was manipulated by my hand. The commander mode on the d80 was setup so that the onboard flash only fired a pre-flash to fire the off camera strobe, by doing so the built-in flash did not impact the exposure at all (love Nikons CLS) The flash was used at varied powers depending on how close I was to the smoke etc. The camera was on full manual and the lens on manual focus. With the nature of smoke, the focal distance is always changing, and so for almost every exposure taken the focus was also fractionally adjusted. Due to the nature of macro lenses, and close proximity the shallow DOF does not help either. All in all I was pleased with the exposures I got. The next stage was to process the images, which was done in two different ways. Some images were simply split/duo toned to colourise the highlights and shadows and left on the native back background. Others were taken into Photoshop, where they were inverted, and selectively colourised. A few of the images can be seen below.

Comments and feedback are greatly appreciated as always.

And yes I know the gallery layout is rubbish atm and so I have posted the images on flickr in the mean time.

Wales Photographs
Snowdrop Macro
Smoke Photographs