Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Red Sky in the Morning

 There is the old saying that when the dawn is very red then bad weather is forecast. Certainly not true yesterday where a beautiful sunrise heralded a perfect warm sunny day. At the same time, the full moon was just visible setting through the light cloud and mist to the west


Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Soft Misty Dawn

As there was an autumnal feel to the dawn yesterday with a soft mist, I visited our local sunflower field This year, it is quite sparse allowing isolation of the individual heads against a soft background. The sunrise itself never quite happened and it then started raining but not before I had played a bit with compositions trying to decide how many trees to include!!

Sunday, September 19, 2021

Soham Church Cambridgeshire

 Yesterday was our annual CCC  Points of View Day, this year set in Soham with five subjects to photograph including the church. We had to show its magnificence - not difficult as it is a very impressive building inside and outside. 

The area around St Andrew’s Church has been a place of Christian worship for over 1,300 years. The first Abbey was in use for over 200 years until it was destroyed in AD 869/70 when the Danish ‘Great Heathen Army’ overran East Anglia. It was rebuilt and much of the original 12th century building church is still standing today. Further additions and alterations were made in the 14th and 15th centuries including the construction of the bell tower, clerestory, pews with carved poppy heads, misericords and a tie-beam roof in the nave decorated with carved angels, now sadly lacking their wings. 

Saturday, September 18, 2021

Wonders of Camouflage

 It has been a busy week with RPS Assessments and continued work on identifying the 100 or so photos from a wildlife survey at Paxton but I have continued with trying to perfect techniques for very small subjects. We have a lot of Tansy and Carrot flower and seed heads in the garden and on close inspection all kinds of well camouflaged insects/spiders live there. Here some plant bugs, a fly and a green spider -each only a few mm long. Using a continuous light panel to be able to shoot with a smaller aperture.

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

High Contrast Macro

 A combination of my Zeiss Touit 50mm macro lens and a faulty camera that unexpectedly shot jpegs resulted in some very contrasty image that I felt worth sharing. 


Sunday, September 12, 2021

Welney Dragons

There were still lots of Common Darters on the wing at Welney Wetlands Centre together with Southern Hawker and Ruddy Darters. I had an attempt to capture them in flight but difficult to get enough depth of field and shutterspeed (1/400th f16 - 1/2000th f10)