We are pretty fortunate here in South Wales in having some of the finest network of waterfalls in the British Isles and I never tire of visiting them.
Category: Articles
New Equipment – Old Habits
For a long while now I’ve wanted a camera that I can carry around with me, isn’t heavy, has all the manual features I enjoy on a camera and compliments a lot of the long lens photography I’m currently involved with.
Beat the Epson Printer Scam
I print using an Epson R2400 Stylus Printer, which has proved to be a really fine work horse over the years. The other day however, I was a little alarmed to see two red lights flashing in a way I’d never witnessed before and the printer completely unresponsive. When I tried to print I got a message telling me that “Parts inside your printer are at the end of their service lifeâ€
Nant yr Arian and Elan
Mallard Rape
As a postscript to the article and comments posted on ‘On Location in Cumbria: 3‘ from a few weeks back it was interesting to witness a female Mallard being raped at Llanelli today.
Fields of Yellow
Changes Already!
I’ve always said that editing and selection is the hardest part of photography, particularly with your own images and already I’ve changed a couple of the images for the competition!
Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition
Well I’ve just submitted my images for this competition – as below – So who knows… If you don’t enter you can’t win! You can submit three images per category and as many categories as you like.
The Lark Ascending
Abstract Sheep
Wales has the highest density of sheep in the world, some nine million, so it’s probably not surprising that many landscape images in my collection are dotted with small white specks, and at times I’ve been cloning out these specks not realising they were sheep at all!
On Location in Cumbria: 4 – Waders, Gulls and More
The last posting from my time up in Cumbria. It was good to photograph the Twite and from two different locations. A flock of about 40 were present at Walney Island and later on in the week a group of eight were feeding on Askam pier in some rich low evening light.
On Location in Cumbria: 3 – Ducks, Swans, Coots and a Little Help, Please?
It’s the time of establishing territories displaying and getting on with mating and prolonged stays in hides at this season are likely to produce some good behaviour shots. I’m interested if anyone can shed any light on the male Mallards here and if male on male is common within bird behaviour. It the first time I’ve seen it and I’ve got quite a few images of male on female, as you would normally expect.
On Location in Cumbria: 2 – Red Deer
Many hours were spent in the hides at Leighton Moss and although we were not, on this occasion, fortunate to get any glimpse of the Bitterns, we were rewarded with a couple of brief, but really good, sightings of the small herd of Red Deer that live on the reserve. They are often deep in the reeds but at times break into the open areas to graze.
Working with Ambient Light and Flash at Night
It’s been an interesting 24 hours, with a good fall of snow last night and a further heavy shower for a couple of hours this morning. When it comes down like this, and that’s not very often round here, you have to make the most of it and it simply draws me out. There’s no possible way I can sit in doors knowing of the opportunities just beyond the comfort and warmth of the house. So between 11pm and 1am last night I roamed the streets! The dampened down sound created by freshly fallen snow is something I have always loved and by eleven last night Llantrisant was under the spell.
Workflow and Post Processing
To help explain this side of my work I’ll take a typical days shoot and describe how I process the images from downloading to saving as final ‘print ready’ photographs. Back in the autumn I was at Ogmore Estuary when I came across three Grey Phalaropes. I stayed with them for about four hours and took 701 JPEGS. They’re a fairly obliging bird and continued to ply a predictive route up and down the river all afternoon. As the session wore on it gave me more and more opportunities to try something different as I was confident I had secured some fairly decent ‘stock’ images.
RAW v JPEG
I’m frequently asked which file format I shoot in, particularly when I talk to groups or societies and have a good number of mounted A3 prints for them to look at. There is often surprise when I reveal that the majority of the work is shot in high JPEG. RAW obviously has more information, often as much as ten times that of a JPEG. It has a greater latitude with regard to exposure and more control over the basic settings that are available to the photographer; such as colour balance, contrast, sharpening, saturation and hue – but all of this doesn’t necessarily make it the obvious and only choice. There are advantages and disadvantages in shooting in both. Once you have some understanding of what is involved with each it becomes a matter of personal preference and pragmatism, often related to the type of work you are involved in.
Polaroids from Poladroid
Just come across a quirky little download, but a bit of fun. It recreates your images in a Polaroid style and the images develop on screen. You’d get a little frustrated if you were doing loads, but it does put a real time factor back into the process and the effect isn’t bad at all. But what was originally seen as an instantaneous process becomes one were you now have to wait, all be it for a bit of fun. – thats computers for you! It’s a free download from www.poladroid.net available for PC amd mac
Question the Rule of Thirds
There is a lot written about the rules of thirds on the Internet as an aid to photographic composition, much of it giving sound advice with regard to applying the rule, its origins and the fact that it must not be seen as the ‘holy grail’ for the creation of fine images.
‘Studio’ Lighting
The sun shone on Christmas Day and raised cheers in our house. It has been particularly dull over the last few weeks, not much rain but just those drab flat days that close in a good hour before the official lighting up time. Boxing Day dawned without a cloud in the sky and saw me heading off to the farm.