I woke up at 7am this morning with the intention of going for a jog with my lad. His alarm went off but he went back to sleep. So I ran alone and headed over to Bedruthen Steps on the Coastal path. This shot was taken with the iphone of the view of the cliffs on the way over. It was the first and last time I wanted to jog early in the morning!
I been away for the week in Cornwall. I didn’t have great access to internet so decided to leave the blog until I got back. So now, after catching up with all the work stuff, I’m going to catch up by posting photos I’ve taken each day for the photo 365 project.
The first one was taken on the night I arrived at our destination after an afternoon in Newquay. It’s a sunset on the beach at Mawgan Porth..
I decided to go light this holiday and just took the Olympus Pen EP-2 with 14-42mm and a vintage miniature but fully expandable Dia Tripod. The beach didn’t have a lot of interest so I’ve gone for the mirror effect on the still wet sand. And cropped slightly to elongate the result.
So the Solar panels have been in for a week now, and today it’s rained most of the time so the energy being generated is a little low. But in one week I’ve fed 104Kwh back into the grid and despite using electricity in the house my house meter is 10 units back. So it’s starting to work. £50 earned so far and no electricity spent.
Today’s photo is a a shot of the new consumer unit with AC isolater and warning stickers.
I decided to start to improve on my levitation skills. So this evening I cycled off into Clumber to do some woodland levitation.
I’ve admired the work of the highly creative ePHOTOzine member Beckas and the world famous Miss Aniela, but a few weeks ago I stumbled on the work of a Japanese photographer yowayowacamera Her work is more raw and natural everyday looking. So I’m going to attempt to recreate that look.
In my practice run I realised it can be done in daylight without flash but a fast shutter speed is necessary and tonight the light wasn’t bright enough without going in to the higher noisy ISO settings of the Olympus EP2. So I had a choice of noisy or blurred. I took several pics with each option and preferred noisy.
Then you have issues with timing. I was alone so the camera was mounted on a mini tripod and the self timer set. I jumped after a count of four when the red light started to flash. Being in the right place at the right moment using this method is hard work.
And then thirdly the big skill is adopting a natural looking mid flight pose. I had shots with buttocks clenched, tongue out, hands stretched unnaturally, fists clenched, neck tensed and just about any other unnatural looking features. Look at the work of that Japanese girl she’s incredible. It’s as though someone has just picked her up bent a few joints and stuck her on the spot. That as you see if you have a go is quite a talent in itself.
To get the height I positioned a sawn log just out of view and jumped up off that to give me a bit of a higher starting point.
This is my best attempt…noisy, chopped off limb, and slightly unnatural pose but it’s not too bad!
A simple idea where you desaturate part of the picture and make it look as though you are painting colour onto it.
I set the Olympus E-P2 camera up on a tripod and on the two second delay. Positioned the left hand in shot so the camera could focus on the correct position and then pressed the shutter and moved my right hand in to place to do the painting.
I then opened the photo in Photoshop duplicated the layer, created a layer mask on the duplicate. Desaturated the layer and then erased the mask so the colour layer below showed through in the necessary areas. I used a brush with a rough edge to paint the mask away so it looked more like paint.
I also selected the skin colour as the brush paint colour and painted that onto the bristles of the brush so it looked like it was loaded with paint.
I bought a Micro 4/3rd to T2 adaptor to use on my Olympus E-P2 the other day. I was messing around with different lenses and added a El Nikkor 50mm f/4 enlarging lens on the front. I just held it in place and it provided a very close focus. Infinity was way out of focus. I could move it forwards to blur even more.
I started to experiment with the out of focus views and wandered around the house looking for interesting abstracts.
This was one of them…a reading lamp.
There’s a skill to getting out of focus subjects looking interesting. I hope you think I achieved that here.
This is actual an old photo (transparency) but rephotographed today using a new adaptor I bought for the Olympus E-P2. The adaptor converts the micro four thirds mount into a t2 mount…and onto that I attached an old Ohnar Zoom slide duplicator. The dandelion was a portrait shot cropped due to the effective 2x magnification of the sensor and using the zoom feature of the duplicator. As I made the exposure I adjusted the zoom to give a bit of motion blur resulting in a more surreal seed head. I also applied the cyanotype preset in Lightroom.
Day two of the stream of errors (see yesterday’s blog – Photo365 -Pen-y-ghent for scene setting)
The bed in the B&B was a four poster, which sounded great but it was quite small (I couldn’t lay straight as my feet pressed against the foot)…and the room, while being quaint, was tiny so the bed was against the wall and the covers trapped in I felt like a sardine.
Got up had cooked breakfast…brilliant quality and maybe things were going to go better today. Or maybe not!
The iPhone battery was almost flat and I hadn’t taken a charger. The Olympus Pen EP2 which had full power yesterday was totally flat (again no charger), so I just had my Pentax K5 to shoot with.
The polarising filter on the 77mm filter thread lens fell apart and couldn’t be used.
We headed back to Castlerigg. No sooner had we got there the weather started to pick up, but a coach of French students arrived. They spread out all over the stones so there was no clear view. They hung around for ages, and when they went the weather had gone dismal. I managed to get lots of small clusters but not a decent full ring. And the iphone gave up after just one shot.
Off to Ashness Bridge (weather hit & miss) no sun on the bridge.
Decided to head back home using sat nav but it sent us in wrong direction so we had to do a u-turn 30mins out of way.
Got back in 3 hours 30mins and attempted to download pics off my 8Gb SM card. It’s come up with error so all my K5 shots are currently in limbo. The error also caused my main drive to disappear and it took half an hour to resolve that error.
So today’s picture is the only shot I have from today, taken with the iPhone. I am now going to try and recover all my pictures taken using the K5…lots of HDR of Scalebar Force, Castlerigg and Ashness Bridge.
The shot is of Castlerigg stone circle. It’s my favourite cluster of stones and from the best viewpoint. Weather was rubbish at this point. I took some HDR brackets with the K5 later when the sun hit the stones.
Just got back from a weekend out and about. I went over to the Lake District and had a lovely time, despite a catalogue of errors that has continued now I’m home.
The start Saturday…I forgot various things and had to go back home to get them…resulted in later than expected kick off.
First stop Scaleber Force nr Settle. I took a newly purchased interval timer remote to do big stopper timed exposure but didn’t take glasses and couldn’t remember which settings were need to set 3 – 5 min exposures.
Weather intermittent and not ideal for location.
Over to to Pen-Y-Ghent weather had become lovely, cloudy but perfect for walking with sun breaking through to turn landscape quite spectacular. Headed off up the hill and as soon as we got to a decent height for photos, cloud came down along with rain. Got drenched! Walked over summit and didn’t see a thing. Descent wet and miserable and no sign of summit where we’d been.
Soaked but decided to go up to Castlerigg Stone circle for evening shoot. I’d not planned this so didn’t know directions but Castlerigg nr Keswick was located in Sat Nav so we set off. Arrived at 8:45 (dusk) at Castlerigg farm…no signs for stone circle. Got OS map out, but car interior light stopped working so couldn’t locate circle on map.
Decided to call it a day and head off to B&B. Arrived at B&B in Kendal (still soaked) Changed and went out for Indian On opening the door to enter the Indian we were greeted with the loudest noise we’ve heard in a restaurant. About 11 lads, all drunk, were shouting at each other as though they were in a night club with loud music. They were discussing where there might be girls or how to pay a local a tenner for sex. Great. It might have been mildly amusing if it wasn’t deafening. They left after ten mins so the place quietened down. Finished meal and set of back to B&B. It started to rain and we’d walked so a second soaking occured.
Got back to B&B, plugged laptop in and started to look at photos but it went dead slow and I fell asleep waiting.
Picture from the day is a style at Pen-y-ghent This was taken with the iPhone as it was easier to use than the SLR while the rain was heavy and for another reason which will become clear in tomorrow’s post
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Thought I’d play around with the wide angle lens and HDR. So here’s a close up self portrait from above using the Pentax 12-24mm at 12mm and a five exposure bracket blended in Photomatix 4.