Great Crested Grebe Spring Display

The Great Crested Grebes at Paxton put on a full display this morning though a distance away right in the middle of the lake so not good detail! I particularly like the part of the dance where they stand vertically treading water and rotating together. These are consecutive frames (click in the photos to move through).

My Village in Infrared

Some infrared images of my village, Toft in Cambridgeshire, on a changeable day this week. Managed the entire walk without getting wet which was an achievement - as you see from the very large puddles everywhere, we have had a lot of rain. 

Panels 2 Windy City

The second panel I worked on was almost straight from the camera and so had very little processing time before printing. Taken on a  windy day in Docklands, London. It was so windy that it was difficult to hold the camera still so I decided on a slowish shutterspeed and to deliberately move the camera up during the exposure. I got so entralled by the colours and abstract images produced that I lost the rest of the group several times. Images 3 and 4 don't fit that well with the other three 'tree' images - will have to return and try and find some more sometime.

 

Panels of Images 1. Sir Henry Tate's Legacy

There are photographic projects that I should leave in the mind rather than trying to complete - this panel of images of the various Tate Museums (Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate St Ives) is certainly one. I had the idea of displaying the various beautiful staircases on the sides of a sugar cube as a tribute to their benefactor, Sir Henry Tate, who made his money from the sugar industry. To do this I constructed a 10cm side cube with the images pasted on the 4 sides and the top. I photographed the 5 faces and then, using these as guides I made the 5 images below as composites in Photoshop, distorting the relevant top and sides to fit the template. Not totally accurate but with the corners trimmed and mounted on black boards they gave a reasonable 3D effect.

Paxton Signs of Spring

 Many birds are already paired up and nest building including Grey Herons and Cormorants at Paxton. Mostly the birds manage courtship in a dignified way even with long wings to keep free of the branches etc but the overenthusiastic Coot shows what can go wrong if you watch too much Winter Olympics or jet ski racing!

Cambridge Camera Club Table Top Photography

Apart from the roses and inks that starred in the previous blog, we also played around with models and backgrounds,  some dichroic cubes with laser torch,  crystal ball, CDs etc. The Cambridge background was taken and printed by me around 1999 so you might be able to spot some differences to now. 

Cambridge Camera Club: Fun with Roses

 Being Valentine's Day, thought it appropriate to provide roses as one of the subjects for our Creative Photography Day for Cambridge Camera Club. They were photographed in Light Tents, immersed in water with coloured and gold inks, lit with UV light and used in Multiple Exposure shots. One of the examples from the double exposure is the first and favourite shot