Paris for the New Year 1

Our first afternoon in Paris and a bitterly cold one but, undeterred, we set off to photograph around the Eiffel Tower as the sunset and the light faded.  Here are a few favourites

Christmas Day

Mince pie eaten, milk drunk and carrot nibbled - even left a shiny nose. And then we found the footprints!!

Sadie up since 4am waiting till she could wake her sister, while Meredith was not happy to be woken at 5.30am

The girls happy with their various presents.

  Meredith's rather large new Basset Hound Doug and Bracken, Peter and Holly's new and very handsome dog.

Cokin P007 filter for Infrared Photography

I have been playing around with a p007 deep red filter to give an infrared -type image. My first attempts were a failure as light could get into the lens round the side of the Cokin filter holder, so I glued the round Cokin P007 filter to an adaptor ring of the right size for my Fuji lens and today trialled this. This has worked well and I now get an image with some of the characteristics of an infrared sensor at least if converted to monochrome. Images 4, 5 and 7 are without the filter.  Generally they seemed to work best with a slight toning. It will be a useful addition to the 'travel' camera bag when carrying my heavy Canon converted infrared camera is not appropriate.

Sunset and Christmas Baubles

Very impressive sunset this evening, photographed at Wyevale Garden Centre Huntingdon together with a range of baubles and fibre optic animals.

CRUFC Win by One Point

 Cambridge managed a 33-32 win against Bishop's Stortford in difficult photographic conditions with very low sunlight until the last part of the game when it was a bit too dark for my camera's ISO performance. Rest of photos with Chris Fell's on Cambridge Rugby Union Football Club's Gallery

Welney Swans in Motion

Another trip to Welney and another sunset but as always different lighting and different behaviour from the swans to the previous visit. There was not so much light spillage after sunset so this time I went for slower and slower shutterspeeds. I like the final image of the day (1/15th second ISO 6400) as it gives the feel of the ghostly squadrons of swans coming in to land out of nowhere.

Ely Cathedral - How Not to Do It

 After much thought and lots of advice from various compact system users of different varieties, I decided to trade in my Sony Nex for a Fuji XT-1, partly on the quality of the images that I had seen and also the good battery life (very short battery life is the worst feature of the Sony Nex - they need to address this). Add to this the fact that  Phil and I can now share batteries, lenses. So it duly arrived and, as we were in Ely anyway, a test run in the Cathedral. Well you would have thought with all the teaching I do, I would have checked a few things - like was it on RAW - No, was the long exposure reduction OFF - No and was the colour space Adobe RGB - No. So some unrecoverable highlights, jpeg artifacts and some with too much noise reduction. But focusing works fine and pleased to see battery not showing any reduction in power after a couple of hours shooting.

Lake District Retrospective

 I have spent some time revisiting my collected images from visits to the Lake District in Autumn and  put together a Gallery for my Website. It is very interesting how much better a result is possible with the new ACR software raw  compared to the 2003 software.

(http://www.pin-sharp.co.uk/galidx.php?gal=18&sec=80)