SIDEBAR

Into the sun…..

9 comments
Aug 07 2015

I may have covered this one before, but I was out wandering around the Brecon Beacons yesterday just doing what I call a ‘potter shoot’, pottering round just looking. One of the locations I visited was Pontsticill Reservoir, a long strip of water roughly north south orientated. It suddenly occurred to me just how much more dramatic the shot into the sun seemed. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with the shot towards Pen y Fan with the sun behind me but…………..it just didn’t seem to have the ‘zing’ or just plain mood of the shot towards the sun. […]

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Size Matters?

12 comments
Jul 12 2015

Fairly recently there seems to have been a significant swapping of meaty DSLR (or indeed film) cameras for smaller, more compact, lighter and also mirrorless cameras. The comments read on Facebook and camera reviews all seem to contain the same theme. This generally hints at: “oh, my back”, or “can’t be doing lugging all this around” Friends and photo colleagues of mine have recently made the change, opting for Fuji, Olympus and others, just to get that weight down. Now – this might be because some of us are getting older and/or it might be because put simply, technology is […]

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Experiment – go on!

8 comments
Jun 06 2015

Every so often my photography goes off at a tangent, or to put it another way, I have a go at something I had at no time, ever in my life, planned to do. This might be because I have spotted an unplanned event or because I just want to see what else I and my box of tricks can pull off. If it works I might share it. If it is an epic fail I might not. BUT, the point is, I had a go and if I pull it off, to an acceptable degree, then I will diary it […]

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Sunrise!

17 comments
May 14 2015

All right minded photographers I know just CANNOT wait to set the alarm for ridiculous (or as a good friend of mine would say, ludicrous) o’clock, leap purposefully out of bed, stub their toe, and race to their chosen spot in pursuit of a sunrise photo. More often than not the sun will be lurking behind clouds, laughing its head off but sometime it does play ball and we return home happy chappies/chappesses. I was, for a long time, guilty of shooting a lovely sea with the sun rising out of it  – hey presto. But…..recently, on my latest Scillies […]

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Why RAW format?

7 comments
Apr 03 2015

One of the conversations I often have with clients/friends is what is so special about RAW? Well, this is a personal choice – to shoot in RAW or .jpeg format – but for my work I will try and explain why RAW is my choice most of the time. RAW is one of the available ‘quality’ settings on the camera which you can set and the camera/sensor/processors then accepts the image given and does minimal editing or tweaking to the shot. In other words, the image is RAW not ‘cooked’ – whereas the .jpeg setting DOES edit.  It adjusts colour, removes redundant […]

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Into the sun?

2 comments
Mar 24 2015

Last Saturday, one of my clients on the Glamorgan Coast workshop asked me the question (or, more accurately made the statement seeking clarification) – “should I always photograph with the sun behind me?” This took me straight back to the good old days when my Dad always told me to photograph with the sun at my back – not even with the sun to my left or to my right. He later admitted that this was what he had been taught and this was also reinforced by the instructions that accompanied rolls of Kodak film. Do you remember those little diagrams? […]

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Never fear, Kelvin’s here…

8 comments
Mar 13 2015

If you don’t already know Kelvin, he could be a best friend when you are out taking photographs. Kelvin is the measurement of colour temperature and is a digital camera’s way of handling the ambient light around you to give a balanced output that matches pretty well what you see. The white balance function on DSLR cameras holds a common set of ‘presets’ from Auto through to K (Kelvins!). By dialing the white balance to K you are NOW allowing yourself total control over the camera’s white balance, and not allowing the camera to give you one of its preset […]

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Hip to be Square?

8 comments
Feb 27 2015

A good friend of mine, and a keen photographer, is very fond of the square presentation. I have always advocated looking hyper-critically at your own work to see if it might benefit from a crop but to be sure I hadn’t really ‘got my head around’ the square presentation. The working ratios of most cameras give a fixed format which generally looks good and works well. So what better reason to have a change? I have offered up here a shot as taken from the camera, of a swirl pattern in the sand of a nearby beach, spotted and shot […]

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I’ve looked at clouds…

3 comments
Feb 10 2015

Just not long back from leading a one:one photo workshop with a great client and friend in that beautiful part of Wales known as Gower (NEVER The Gower, as I once found out!). The weather was favourable and the subjects he wished to photograph were there in abundance. We were, however, particularly blessed with interesting skies and clouds – especially clouds. Clouds are those funny things that can elevate a photograph from being ‘nice’ to being something rather special. Why? Well, in my view, a rather special or unusual cloud pattern or formation, apart from an additional eye catching interest, […]

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The long or the short of it?

10 comments
Feb 01 2015

Landscape photography – I started off years ago with the broad assumption that for all landscape photography we had to use a wide angle lens. I confess I am not too sure where this assumption originated from but it was there, in my head. Wrong! Landscapes are not at all easy to photograph in the sense that we are seeking to capture and convey a deep sense of what attracted us to the location in the first place and want to share that wonder with others. True the landscape could stretch out before us, or contain a sweeping oxbow river […]

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