View of Cambridge from Castle Hill by James Ward, 1840 in Musem of Cambridge

The Museum of Cambridge (formerly the Folk Museum) have recently acquired (with help of the Art Fund) a painting of Cambridge by the Victorian artist James Ward. It proved very difficult to photograph as requested by the Museum because it has glass on front of the oil painting surface and windows directly opposite. You will see a view I took from the top of Castle Hill trying to line Kings and Trinity with the painting. I also located on the internet a sketch done for the painting.

The painting was officially 'unveiled' at an 80th Anniversary reception for the Museum on Thursday. Image shows Sarah Ingram, Chair of the Trustees of the Museum and Lorna O'Brien the Museum Manager with the Mayor of Cambridge, Councillor Jeremy Benstead

Some details from the painting

Museum of Cambridge II

A second visit to photograph objects and rooms at the Folk Museum in Cambridge. This time I took a shift lens which helped the perspective in the small display rooms and gave very sharp images.

Museum of Cambridge

I spent a couple of hours on Tuesday morning photographing some of the objects at the Museum of Cambridge (formally the Folk Museum). They wanted various cameos to illustrate their leaflet on forthcoming events: Discoveries in the Home, the Fens, Childhood and the Victorians among others.

Blist's Hill in Steam

 Blist's Hill was host to a number of small and large steam engines this weekend so there were steam enthusuasts to photograph along with the usual costumed persons.

Bradford National Media Museum

I ran a coach trip from Cambridge up to the Bradford National Media Museum. The general consensus was that the content of the galleries was disappointing with lots of visual dispays but very little information and not the details we were expecting. The photographic content is particularly sparse with only one gallery showing photographs and here only an invited exhibition. Must try the new Media Space gallery at the London Science Museum where photographs from the Bradford Collection are displayed. It does seem strange not to have an equivalent gallery at Bradford.

More HDR Trials

 A few more goes with the trial HDR software - mostly as notes for future comparisons etc. The top two pairs show the 'correctly' exposed images (no compensation) adjusted as best I can in Lightroom and on the right the 3-image 2-stop compensation set combined. With fairly low tonal range images the differences are not that marked but with images with high tonal range such as inside the nail-makers workshop, the HDR Darkroom comes into its own.

Black Country Museum

I visited the Black Country Living Museum today and spent the day taking multiple exposure bracketed images to convert with HDR software. My laptop does not have the Nik HDR software on it so tried with Photoshop. As the results were not great, downloaded a trial of HDR Darkroom which gave very good conversions and is easy to use. See the two comparison images. Unfortunately the trial version watermarks the images.