Christmas at Wimpole

Decided on a wintery walk at Wimpole Hall today and found that they had the Hall open and decked out for a Victorian Christmas. It is great now the National Trust have chosen to encourage rather than discourage photography.

Wimpole in Storm Light

We had a club outing to Wimpole Park this morning. Heavy rain was forecast and did arrive on time at 1 o'clock but the four hardy souls who got there at 9 am were rewarded with some amazing light. I had taken a 8-strength Neutral Density filter to try long exposures on moving clouds but it was too windy as the camera moved too much on the tripod. However, using shorter exposures (higher ISO etc), the filter did produce some dramatic images of the house bathed in sunshine with very heavy clouds behind. The tree shots were as shafts of sunlight lit up parts of the park.

Wimpole and the Amazing Dragonfly

A couple of images from a trip to Wimpole Hall - there had been a scything workshop the weekend before so there were a couple of hay waggons in front of the Hall creating great timeless images. The sky was incredible on Saturday when I took these images.

This Emperor dragonfly was laying eggs in one of the ponds at Barton - a drop of water on its eye is acting as a magnifying glass so you can see all the individual ocelli of the enormous compound eye.

Birds at Wimpole

A few pictures of Mallards on the Lake at Wimpole this morning. The light was very good.
The male Mallards spent a lot of time abusing the females.

Any ideas on this raptor - most likely Sparrowhawk but does look very 'chunky' and was gliding very effortlessly so wondered about Goshawk

Almost monochrome

Not a new image today but sorting through images at weekend, I found this image from Wimpole and thought it would fit well into my Monochrome and a Bit of Colour lecture as it is an image that doesn't work in monochrome; the small amount of colour seems essential

That sunset at Wimpole

Here is another view taken at Wimpole when there was a heavy snowstorm just as the sun was setting.

Further IR Experiments

This is one of the overexposed Infrared pictures that I took at Wimpole, corrected white balance with camera profile and the exposure as far as possible in Lightroom. Then, in Photoshop, I changed the Hue and Saturation and was amazed at the result. Below is a colour image taken at the same time on the 5D

Infrared at Wimpole

I took some images at Wimpole in the snow last week and have just started looking at them and experimenting with different workflows for converting to Monochrome.

The first pair show the original RAW image and its equivalent conversion to monochrome, adjusting the colour mix in Lightroom to produce the best contrast image.

The second pair use a profile made for the Infrared camera and then converting to monochrome in Lightroom (http://khromagery.com.au/ir_raw.html). I prefer the second conversion with the DNG profile

Snowstorm at Wimpole

Just as we were leaving after a walk round the grounds at Wimpole Hall a heavy snowstorm started. The sun was still out giving an amazing golden light.

Unfortunately there wasn't time to get the uncluttered view of this clump of trees that I had taken earlier.

Blue skies at Wimpole

Beautiful day at Wimpole - lying snow, ice and dark blue sky.

The lake is half frozen and the coots spent a lot of time chasing each other across the surface

More snowclouds!

A wider view converted to monochrome - 16 mm lens

Snowclouds at Wimpole

The lake is just about frozen over at wimpole with a light dusting of snow on the ice.