Sky Library

I went out this morning to get what I thought would be a great sunrise and ended up sitting in the car for an hour as it started raining pretty hard and the sunrise didn't look too promising, the joys of landscape photography! I decided to come home and although the sunrise wasn't that great and there certainly wasn't much foreground interest to properly compose a photo I decided to add to the sky library. These are great to have on your system if you ever need to replace a dull looking sky from an otherwise ok shot. They can be taken whenever you see interesting sky. I have a few sun rises, sun sets, midday blue skies and some moody cloud shots. I don't do a great deal of composite sky shots but is handy just to have the option.

Bolton Abbey Shoot

I was doing a shoot at Bolton abbey with some friends but they were busy at a service so I just got some shots of my girlfriend/assistant.

Conditions were very overcast which I don't generally like as the light is very flat and it's difficult to create any depth but on the otherhand it is very soft with no sharp shadows or 'panda eyes' you can get in harsh afternoon light. I got 5 shots I was happy with and thought I would put a couple up, they were taken around ISO200, 1/500, f/4 at about 70mm, processed first in lightroom then in photoshop, 4 out of the 5 were black and white.

Cows Week

A couple more from the back catalog, I have not done a lot of processing with these really but as you will have noticed I'm back in Black and White mode, I really wanted to use one of the cows bright orange colouring but it just wasn't happening. I was a bit annoyed as when I was snapping these my mate was getting shots of the bull, which I thought was probably a little more photogenic but I had not noticed him until we were leaving, breaking one of my main rules - Avoid the 'walk up' shot and have a look round. Anyway just thought I'd put these up to keep my post rate up.

Smooth Infrareds

I got an infrared filter a few fays ago and have yet to use it, it's just so much easier getting a similar effect in the digital darkroom. This is a shot I have processed largely using silver efex pro. I like the IR effect, especially on the sky but I'm not a great fan of the glow you tend to get from traditional IR photos. The benefit of doing it digitally is you can experiment and see the results straight away. With this shot I wanted to retain some detail in the grass and the leaves that the IR glow would lose.

Last of the Mud Flats

These were from the maybe pile from last week that I decided to tinker with and was quite happy with the results. The light was going quite quickly in these shots so there has been a decent amount of recovery both in lightroom and in photoshop. Lightrooms gradient tool and local adjustment brush are awesome, I highly recommend it if you shoot a lot of RAW's.

These were taken at similar settings, 16mm, f/16, ISO100 and around 2 seconds exposure. Again I warmed the tones up by adjusting the WB in lightroom, I wasn't after a high contrast HDR look but I did bring back some detail with the local adjustment brush on the rocks and the gradient on the sky.

Highland Cattle

I got this one a few days ago at the end of a bit of a photo walk, We came across a field of highland cattle who must be fairly used to visitors. I managed to get closer and closer until after about 10 minutes this one came over to check out what was going on. This was taken about 0.5 a second before he licked the front of the lens. I wanted to get really wide so I was at 16mm at f/5.6 and 1/250 to ensure there was no motion, I still had a circular polariser and an ND grad on the lens, as I'd been shooting landscapes so I had to pump up the ISO to 400, the colour version has quite vivid blues from the sky and oranges from the cattle but I like the mono version as it accentuates the low sun side lighting we were getting, especially on his nose!

Seascape at Sunset

Another one from our trip to the lakes, this was overlooking the Morecambe Bay area during the last few minutes of sunlight, the tide was very far out leaving large bodies of water between the sand (or mud) banks, as there are no waves the water is very still and ideal for reflections, I was a little annoyed at the ripple saw after we got back but there you go. The original was quite a cool tone so I warmed up the white balance in Lightroom, one of the enormous benefits of shooting in RAW. This was shot with my 3 stop ND grad at ISO100, 17mm, f/16 at 1/2 second.

Boat at Low Tide

I've just come back from a few days in the Lake District and have started processing some shots. This one was one of my favorites. I used a very low angle to really include pebbles and hyper focal distancing to ensure all but the very closest stones were in focus. I have a colour version which I really like but I've decided to post this mono version. I'll hopefully put a few more up this weekend. As I didn't have my tripod I had to make sure any exposure had to be over say 1/100 as I was lying on the pebbles I wasn't confident to go any slower and keep the camera steady. I had a 3 stop ND filter attached to keep the sky from going places it shouldn't! This was taken at 16mm at ISO200, 1/160 at f/9.