Sabbatical

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So 2014 was pretty much a sabbatical for my photography. Long hours in my day job and a lack of travelling opportunities means my camera rarely made it out of storage for the whole year.

I did make a few excursions, but as the year went on they got fewer and further between. With the exception of our trip to France and an outing towards the end of the year to Kenilworth Castle, my camera spent the rest of the year in storage.

I did manage to make a nice set of images from my visit to Oradour-sur-Glane, but my trip to Kenilworth was a bust. I managed to take a couple of half decent images but the rest just weren’t up to much.

In 2015 I’m going to make a concerted effort to get more camera time. I have a list of places I’d like to visit and I’m going to do my best to put a good body of work together over the coming twelve months.

I hope you’ll check back over the coming months to see my progress and checkout the new work as it appears here.

Have a good one.

Washed Out

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Camera time has been hard to come by so far this year so when I had an appointment for 10am one morning in Glossop. I decided to throw my camera bag in the car as well.

For people that don’t know, Glossop is on the edge of the Peak District National Park and the scenery in the area can be stunning. The morning looked promising, there was a lot of fog around and I had high hopes of capturing some good images of the Peaks with mist rising.

My route to Glossop would take me up to Bamford and the Ladybower Reservoir, then on up the Snake Pass to Glossop. The reservoir is one of my favourite places to photograph and I was looking forward to seeing it under different conditions.

Unfortunately, but the time I made it to Bamford, the fog had become very thick and the rain had started. I stopped briefly, but the weather was being uncooperative so I continued on to Glossop hoping the weather would clear on the way. The weather had other ideas and by the time I reached Glossop it was raining hard.

Oh well, the best laid plans and all that. I hope I’ll have better luck next time.

 

2014 So Far

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You might have noticed by the lack of updates and fresh work here that 2014 isn’t going exactly as I’d hoped.

It doesn’t look like getting better any time in the next couple of months either. I have a Cisco exam to recertify for my full time job, and also a trip to France coming up in June. Hopefully I’ll get some camera time while I’m out in France, it will certainly be packed in the car along with all the archery equipment.

I have managed to add some work here this year, if you haven’t seen it already you can check it out over in the projects section. I spent a few days watching the Red Arrows practice over at RAF Scampton. Luckily it’s only about a 45 minute drive from my home so I could make it over there a few times before the display season starts.

Hope you enjoy the images.

New Year, New Projects

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Well, it’s not a new year any more but this is my first post here in 2014…

Last year was quite a slow year for me photographically. This was largely due to full time occupation being anything but slow. I still managed to get some good images in 2013, my particular favourites from last year were the twilight shot of Whitby harbour and the long exposure shot of Monsal Weir. Both of those images can be seen in my Landscapes Gallery

Over the Christmas period I spent some time sorting through my catalog of 150000 and deleting a lot of the older images that were never likely to be seen in public (yes, I’ve taken a lot of them). The rest have been catalogued and some are ready for editing, so you may see some new images here over the coming months while the weather is less than cooperative.

On to 2014 and I’m hoping to have a much busier year with my camera. I’m not a big believer in New Year resolutions but I do believe in setting personal goals. My photography goal for this year is to have 10 new images in my portfolio and available for purchase. If I manage to make enough time to reach this goal, this year will be a successful year.

I’m also hoping to spend more time on personal projects. These are images that I want to create for me personally and not necessarily for sale. I would like to spend some time exploring long exposure photography with a particular focus on moving water.

Well, that about sums up what to expect from this site over the coming year. If you have any comments or suggestions, as always, you can contact me using the social networking icons below or by filling out the form on the contact page.

See you next time.

Gettin’ my macro on

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I haven’t had much camera time lately, but as I was having my morning coffee and a cigarette in the garden I got an unexpected opportunity to break out my macro lens.

As you may have noticed from the images on the rest of the web site, I’m not a big macro shooter. When I first started getting in to photography, I would spend hours surfing websites packed with so many amazing macro images of just about anything you can name. I was particularly fascinated with insects and butterflies. After getting my first DSLR and a standard telephoto lens, my next target was a macro lens. I searched around and eventually settled on a Tamron 90mm f2.8. It seemed to be getting the best reviews at the time and everyone was raving about how sharp it was. So I parted with my cash and eagerly anticipated it’s arrival. I made lists of all the great shots I was going to take.

When the lens arrived, I immediately put it on my camera and set off in to the garden to start taking some of the amazing images I’d seen online. At this point, I got a major reality check. Macro photography isn’t as easy as a lot of the tutorials you find online make it out to be.

Since then, I haven’t really spend much time trying to shoot macro. Those people that know me will know patience isn’t my greatest virtue. On Sunday morning I decided to give macro another go.

Whilst wandering around the garden, I noticed something had started to devour one of the rose bushes. On closer inspection I found a lot of what I assumed to be caterpillars busily munching away on a leaf.

Larvae

I did think it was unusual to find so many caterpillars in the same place, but I though nothing more of it and proceeded to try and get some good macro shots.

After getting the shots I wanted, I decided to try and identify the type of caterpillar that was devouring the rose bush. After searching numerous websites, I could find plenty of images of caterpillars that were similar, but none that were close enough to be 100% sure. I eventually widened the search and discovered that these are actually sawfly larvae and can strip a rose bush in a couple of days. Needless to say, these little critters are no longer on my rose bush.

The above shot was taken with the Tamron 90mm f2.8 lens, the shot below is taken with a Raynox DCR250 attached to the same Tamron 90mm lens.

Larvae2

So lesson learned, persevere and your images will get better. I hope you enjoyed these images. You can find a third image from this set over in the Nature and Wildlife gallery of my portfolio.

Thanks for stopping by.

Version 2

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After a couple of weeks playing around with the Lightroom web engines from The Turning Gate, I think I’m also finished with the design for version 2 of my website.

When I first started using the plugins, I found them complicated and got lost very quickly. Thankfully, the documentation and tutorials available on the website are really helpful and after a few attempts I started to get the results I envisioned.

The two things I really love about these plugins. Firstly, how easy it is to share designs between the different engines and secondly, the publisher and how it integrates in to lightroom. It saves so much time and quickens up your workflow immensely.

 

The New Site

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I’m testing a new site layout, I hope you like the look of it.

It’s still a work in progress but I’m departing from my long standing practice of trying to do everything inside WordPress. There are some things it just isn’t very good at and a portfolio is one of those things.

The new site still uses WordPress for this section but the rest of the site is built using Lightroom plugins developed by The Turning Gate. I hadn’t heard of this company previously and only happened to find them through an episode of The Grid from Kelby Media. If you want a professional looking portfolio site that’s easy to update I urge you to check them out.

I’ll add more updates as I continue to work with these plugins. As always, any feed back is more than welcome.

Andy