Botanic Reflections

A visit to the Botanic Gardens today in very flat lighting produced some interesting patterns in the leaf shapes and the reflected trees in the lake. I could see all manner of faces in the first image - especially for Tricia (I hope the ankle is less painful in the airboot).

Moscow Daily Life

A bit of a break as my broadband has been down for a few days. I am continuing to process the Russian trip photos in spare moments. Here are few images of everyday Moscow life - the Metro, cars, trolley buses and buses along with street scenes and shopping.

Monochrome Portrait

I don't often post portraits but I am especially pleased with this one of Sadie, which I have converted with Silver Efex.

Monochrome Flowers

I am preparing for a talk on art and nature, as part of the RPSPermajet day at the end of the month at Smethwick. Here are a few monochrome conversions of spring flowers which I think work well.

Cambridge Night Photography

Club outing to Cambridge last night to practise taking images in full night conditions away from artificial lighting as far as possible. I have colour corrected using the darkest part of the sky and this gives a good representation of the colour of the light sources in the image. My favourite is the last of King's College with a sprinkling of stars.

Frosty Morning

A combination of frost and infrared gave some very gentle images - taken on my usual dog circuit round our village in Cambridgeshire.

More from the Moscow Metro

Nik Viveza Software

Three pairs of images to show the power of Viveza (Nik Software) to put life into backlit subjects or night images. The left image has been processed with Lightroom to get as much as possible into the shadow and highlight areas of the raw images. They were then processed with Viveza and show the strength of the software to adjust difficult images. The final stage will be clone out the street lights in the Church image.

Moscow Metros

I took a lot of images in the Moscow Metro as there were no restrictions on photography other than finding space to raise the camera. The trains were generally dark green rather than London's red ones so monochrome conversions don't lose much impact and sort out the colour casts. Each station had its own theme - often with impressive sculptures and paintings. I will post a few more when I have sorted them.

Catkin Time

Beautiful sunny day here in Cambridgeshire today - temperature up to 12 degrees. With the very mild start to the year it is not surprising to see hazel catkins in full bloom. Ruby, one of our red setters had to get into the picture in the background. The lichens are developing well in our small woodland plantation - very strident yellow in the sunshine.

Avenues

I am gradually sifting through the Russian photographs and will continue to post images as I find ones I like as, at the end of each year, I turn my blog into a book and it is good to have a complete record of my favourite images from trips. Here are some 'Avenue' views that I liked at the time of taking.

London Dusk

I have been sorting through some London images from last year as I need an image for an exhibition later this year and decided that three of them had potential for monochrome prints while two of them definitely require colour for impact.

Night Shots

I have started processing the images from the Russian trip. Here are a couple of night shots put through Silver Efex. The statues are outside Park Inn where we stayed in St Petersburg. It was snowing very heavily at the time. The tram is also from that city.