Reed Warblers

 Late afternoon at Fowlmere RSPB reserve - the  Reed Warblers were busy collecting nesting material.

X-Fest 2013

Some images from X-Fest at Santapod yesterday. Not as extensive as last year but the weather conditions were great. Used small flash unit to lighten the faces etc

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.

Walsall

 A visit to Walsall New Art Gallery on my way to lecture at Cannock. There is an amazing exhibition by Tessa Farmer who uses natural dead insects, crabs and other animals to create stories that involve battles between the fairies. The fairies are sculpted on a minute scale from plant roots with wings from flies. Sounds bizarre - it is!!
The images from Walsall are all as taken - I did not realize when taking them that I had such limited colour palette in my views - not a trace of green anywhere!

Cambridge contrast

 Amazing blue sky all day so Cambridge was looking at its best with spring flowers and new leaves. All taken with RX100 (welcome to the club Barry) which performs particularly well under these bright conditions as with most compacts. The top two make use of the high contrast. I then set the camera to 6-stop HDR - these are handheld and again in bright conditions there is enough shutterspeed to cope (left is the middle exposure that the camera saves along with the HDR image). Very impressive performance. Not so good where there is a figure moving as there is ghosting.

Pasque Flowers Revisited

 I decided to have one more go at the Pasque flowers at Royston as I didn't get quite what I wanted the first time and because this appears to be the best flowering anyone can remember on the heath. The first general view (24mm) shows that many of them have now got quite long stems. Many are going to seed but there are still some groups. I then got in close (100mm macro) to a lovely group of four blooms and shot at f32, f18 and f2.8 - I think I probably prefer the middle setting where the flowers and particularly the hairy stems are in focus.The wide open aperture gives a great pictorial image especially as I have moved round slightly to get a better separation of the blooms and have some side lighting here. The next image of a different foursome uses the 50 mm macro (f22) giving more detail in the background and the last a distant shot with the 100 mm to show just what the hillside looks like.