Gower Photography

Typically it turned into a sunny and slightly windy day for the Macro course. Ideally we would have had some cloud, but it allowed me to show a few ways of over coming the light and weather conditions. We had a great choice of floral subjects with Ramsons, Bluebells and Wood Anemones, amongst others, in bloom. Unfortunately insect life was limited to one bee and a few flies, but bark textures and back-lit leaves gave some variation. Roger spotted some resin oozing out of a felled tree trunk, which on closer examination had a myriad of colours reflected in it, from the blue sky above to the orange of the underlying wood. It shows that with your eyes fully open to the opportunities around you, the macro world is a great place to spend some time!

A quick demo of the portable field studio, my portable “cloud” i.e fold up reflector and the use of extension tubes were the only interruptions, apart from lunch in the Gower Inn,  Nigel, Malcolm, Jeff, Sandra, Rhian, Steve and Roger who joined us later had to put up with while they took their own pictures. I only took about 10 images, so haven’t got a huge variation to choose from, but these are some from the field studio and how to take macro pictures without a macro lens demonstration.

The different tones of green this time of year make an interesting subject in their own right and hopefully a few more images will be possible for my dominant image colour project.

(For those of you wondering on how to take macro pictures without a macro lens, it requires extension tubes and ideally a fixed focal length lens to make life easier. Images above taken with 300mm F2.8 lens and stacked 36, 20 & 12mm extension tubes)

I was updating my back up drives the other day, plus trawling through my Lightroom catalogue, when I came across some long forgotten images that caught my eye. Nothing particularly fancy about them, but they appeal to me.

Seeing the moon in daylight is always intriguing to me.  As the moon is only small in the frame it is not surprising that it may not be noticed above, but the different cloud patterns and shapes attracted me first.

A windy, grey day seemed ideal for the Kite surfers. They almost make it look easy. My attempts started a new sport called Kite Snorkeling, where a kite pulls you head first through the water, but just far enough underneath the water that you need a snorkel. Unsurprisingly it hasn’t taken off and gone global yet!

With Spring representing rebirth in lots of religions and Easter celebrating the death and rising of Jesus in Christianity, I thought it was quite timely that I came across one of the areas of controlled burning that is used to clear bracken and gorse on the Gower common areas. This ancient technique that has been used by indigenous peoples all across the world, native North American Indians and Aborigines amongst them, is a way of causing death and then rebirth but of the plants that are desired and not those that are required to be cleared.

The challenge photographically was to try and find some order amongst what appears to be visual chaos at the start. The first image in the post was easy in a way. Once I had spotted the broken branches exposing the white inner wood and the broken heart appearance to it, it was relatively easy to produce a composition. The greater challenge was how to show other areas of the burn without such obvious help. It came down to lots of looking through the camera at different levels and angles to see if the layout of the shapes within the viewfinder appealed to me. Trying to simplify the composition as much as possible to remove as may distractions as possible was difficult with overlapping branches, so I resorted to a very shallow depth of field to narrow the area in focus. This was enhanced by using a telephoto lens and converters when required, to flatten the perspective and compress the items in the scene.

The shape of the branches caught my eye in the image above and with my high active imagination, I thought they mimicked the shape of the flames from the fire that had swept through them.

I have covered the death part, next will be the rebirth in a few days or weeks when the new grass starts to come through the burnt areas.

With the weather forecast for the Easter weekend being mainly cloudy and with the only sun probably early Good Friday, I decided to set off for Cefn Bryn at sunrise. I had been thinking about a sunrise image of Arthur’s Stone for a while now that the rising sun position is now closer to the optimum position. In a few months it will be even better, as the angle to get both Arthur’s Stone and the rising sun at the moment is a bit to straight on to Arthur’s Stone. I like to photograph the stone at more of an angle so I can use the split side as a leading line. Getting in close with a wide angle lens avoids excessive sky and allows you to get the top of Arthur’s Stone way above the horizon. Because the stone is in a depression, it is hard not to get your horizon crossing the mid-line of your image, which makes quite a “static” feel to the image for the viewer. If I went too low, I lost the rising sun, so after a bit of shuffling around, I found the horizon level above the best compromise.

I had taken my 500mm lens with me as I was hoping to get some images of the skylarks that have returned to the common. Unfortunately I didn’t really get close enough for any images worth posting, but it did prove useful to compress the perspective of the sun rising with the layers of cloud and land in front of it coming out in different shades of grey. To get a good size orb of the sun or moon, I always find that I need lenses of 500mm and above.

As the clouds rolled in, I walked back to my pick up, but the cloud pattern above the highest point of Cefn Bryn appeared quite attractive. Even though it was fairly bland overall and the light being quite flat, there was still a nice feel to the scene. I needed some foreground interest and luckily the ponies obliged and wandered into some nice positions. I knew at the time of making the image that a panoramic crop would help the composition. Too tight and the clouds would be lost; too little and the bright sky would dominate. I ended up with a 16:9 crop ratio which I think works well enough. This is one of the few images of mine that I found needed more than 2 minutes of processing in Lightroom. Normally I would have not bothered, but getting it to how it appeared to me needed a few extra tweaks than normal and seemed worth it.

A change is as good as a rest they say, so I decided to head up to Mid Wales to potter around  for a few days. I had always promised myself a stay at Gigrin Farm, so I didn’t have to leave as the light reached it’s best for photographing the birds. With the weather forecast to stay dry, I booked some camping at the farm, packed the gear and headed off. I wasn’t specifically heading up to do any landscape photography, but as the Red Kite feeding isn’t until 3pm and I can only lie in for so long, I managed to potter about the reservoirs when not looking for new locations to visit. My nemesis of blue sky was present, but with my mini project of trying images dominated by one colour, plus trying to break out from my photographers instinct of dawn and dusk photography, a mid morning shoot produced the images above and below. The lower sun angle makes it easier at this time of year as the landscape has some texture to it and not the flat look of summer. 

As I have mentioned before in a previous post, the world doesn’t need any more photos of a Red Kite against a blue sky, but as I was on holiday, plus it is fun, I decided to let myself off the hook of creativity and indulged in some mass market imagery. Making photos of any bird in flight is a numbers game, so after editing my way through 3200 images, I was left with about 500. I will live with these for a while and probably edit them down to less than 100, with only 10 or so main images that I feel are the stars of my visit. This may not sound a successful visit, but I am very harsh with my editing and am now quite happy to hit the delete button as often as is required, whether it is due to poor technique or lack of artisitic merit.

Apart from the red kites, there are loads of Buzzards and members of the corvid family about at the feeding. Getting images of Ravens is difficult in the wild, but very easy at Gigrin Farm. Their close proximity allows plenty of variation in images from flight shots to perching on trees. In a day it is possible to assemble quite a collection of images with enough variation to make them interesting.

I had to post one classic Red Kite in flight image, but I am more taken with the image below. I was drawn to the simplistic nature of the landscape and was trying to get an image with a Kite in it somewhere. Most attempts failed, but this image stood out in Lightroom. I don’t even remember taking it, but was probably part of a sequence that I captured with the motor drive. I like the interaction of the kite trying to steal the food from the Raven, with the Raven putting the brakes on in flight so to speak. It would have been nice to get more interest in the rest of the image, but you can’t have it all.

Even though spring has only just started, there is still some colour around and new growth coming through. While walking from the Gower Inn through to Ilston I noticed a few patterns that caught my eye. The sunlight filtering through the trees produced some lovely light on the fading fungi on a tree trunk, highlighting the colours and patterns on them.

Ivy is always a great subject with its leaf structure, dark green colour and ability to climb up everything from stone walls to tree trunks. It can contrast nicely with patterns on the wall or trunk as in the image above or complement the other greens around it as in the image below. I think it was the difference in the colour of the greens and the surface texture difference between the smooth leaf and more broken surface of the moss that caught my eye. I spend quite a bit on the seeing of photographs on my courses as it seem the hardest part for people to master.

I tried two images of the ivy below, one in the sunlight (shown below) and one when all the leaves were in shade. Normally when making detail images, I like overcast weather as it seems to help saturate the colours and gets rid of dark shadows. I even carry around a translucent light panel to act as a cloud on sunny days. The image of the leaves in shade looked too dull and lifeless compared to the sun lit image, which is unusual. The image would be improved if the leaf in the lower right corner could be excluded, but unfortunately I could find a way to do it, so I left it in.

The pine cone had fallen off the pine trees above and got stuck amongst the branches of a young sycamore sapling. The challenge was to try and photograph it with the strong back lighting that was present. A collapsible reflector couldn’t reflect enough light back in to the cone, even with the silver surface used, so I resorted to my flashgun on a remote lead. Hopefully looking at the image you can’t tell that flash was used. I ended up with about two stops less flash light compared to the daylight exposure. On my macro photography course latter in the year we will be going over a lot of uses of the flashgun and shaping of the light for creative effects. It should prove very interesting and come up with some interesting results.

I always have a few side projects that I am running alongside other more immediate work. A longer term project with no particular timescale has been trying to make images dominated by one particular colour. I hope that eventually it will produce a varied and interesting collection. The two images above resulted from a visit to Whiteford Point to try and see the small flock of Eider duck that hang around the area each winter. I mainly had equipment for photographing the Eider; long lens and heavy tripod, but I have found the compact 28 – 300mm lens from Nikon really useful. It only takes up a relatively small space in the bag and covers a wide range with good optical quality.

In winter a clear sky always produces some great concentrated colour before and after sunset and proved ideal for my mono colour photographs project. I was tempted to try for a more conventional landscape image, but as mentioned in previous posts, I am trying to avoid repetition of images and will attempt something different to what I originally thought or visualised. They may not be as interesting as an individual image, but later as part of a collection of similar style images, I think they will work well.

The flocks of dark bellied brent geese were still around the estuary side of the point, feeding on the shore line as the tide came in. I particularly liked the pattern on the surface of the water against the contrasting dark colours of the goose. The geese didn’t come much closer and after a few long shots, I waited to see if the Eider duck were around.

Eventually, after thinking that there were no Eider around, I managed to pick up the flock out in the estuary quite a long way out. They looked to be drifting away from my position, but slowly turned around a came back towards me over the next hour or so. Eventually them came relatively close, but not close enough for individual portrait images unfortunately. The male eider has fantastic plumage, so I would really like to get an individual image of one of them.