Sunset Walk with Camera

A fine sunny Monday ended with a colourful sunset so I took my camera on my usual short walk in Toft which includes both wide open vistas and Toft Wood with its great autumn colours. All shot at f2.8 between 1/30th and 1/8th second with unstabilised camera and lens.

Kingston Church in IR

 The Church of All Saints and St Andrew, Church Lane, Kingston was substantially rebuilt in 1488 following a fire and the materials of C13 church reset or incorporated. It is fieldstone and clunch rubble with limestone and clunch dressings and tiled roofs.This church has a great collection of wall-paintings, with representatives from most periods of the church’s history. One of the most striking is the devil drawn in red outline – he has scaly wings and a surprisingly human face. In his stomach is another face, with a more unsettling expression. 

Shallow Depth of Field Flowers

A set of images from the Cambridge Botanic Gardens using a very shallow depth of field (F2) and close-up lens. I did not find it easy to get the focus in the right place.

Autumn at Santon Downham 2

In the afternoon,  it gradually cloudy over giving different lighting to work with. I used an older camera, which will composit only two images together as an average  and a very contrasty 50mm lens. The first image is an example of an old technique - the Orton effect where the first image is out of focus and the second image in exactly the same position is in focus. The second image is a panorama of the confier forest.  The type of picture I had in my mind are images 3-6 where the camera has combines an underexposed ICM image of the forest tree trunks with a bright autumn branch from a beech sapling.

Autumn Colours at Santon Downham 1

Perhaps due to the lack of frost, it has not been a great year for autumn colours with a lot of leaves shrivelling before falling but there were enough colourful trees at Santon Downham to keep our small party from CCC happy playing with ICM and Multiple exposure. I used two different camera systems - the morning set here were handheld with the Fuji X100V which has the facility to take multiple exposure and to change blending modes. Most of these are only 2 exposures in Average mode - for instance, the first image has one out of focus image blended with an in-focus image. Images 3 and 6 have a colour temperature change between exposures etc!

Cambridge Blue Hour

Our group of photographers met up on Saturday in time to cover the 'so-called' Blue Hour when it is possible to balance the light in the sky with any artificial lighting. On a sunny day, it happens when the sun's elevation is between -4 degrees and -6 degrees, just below the horizon line either before sunrise or just after sunset, ranging between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on the weather. Here are my series of images taken between 16.15 and 17.15 on an overcast day.