Macro practise in the garden
I uploaded this directly through the Blogger editor, so the clickable image is much bigger (Picasa/Hello resizes everything to 640px). This shot was taken about 4cm away from the flower and the shutter was just fast enough for the camera to be handheld (thanks to the image stabilizer!). I cropped the image to give a more compressed composition - no other processing was applied.




















Back Garden, July 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/125th @ f4, 28mm, handheld

Tree-lined path on top of old city walls
I played around with this quite a bit in Photoshop. I cloned out the bin, removed most of the fallen leaves, tidied up the path edges a little and evened out the patchy areas of grass. The b&w conversion was applied using a red filter in the channel mixer. Here's the original version for comparison.


Boulogne Sur Mer, France, August 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200
1/60th @ f2.8

Garden fence, Ferme Du Verte


Wierre Effroy, France, August 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200
1/60th @ f2.8, 43mm, tripod

The start of autumn
The camera was supported on my new Manfrotto 190CL tripod with the MG460 head flipped skywards (this is a really versatile head - I'm grateful to DC Magazine for the recommendation). I'm not sure how easy it is to see with the posted image, but there is subtle bluring of the leaves amongst the branches, which was the effect I was trying to achieve with the slow shutter speed. A little more wind and a few more attempts would have produced a more obvious effect.


Aquadrome, Hertfordshire, September 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200
1/13th @ f8, circular polariser, tripod

Bee collecting pollen
Taken last year on my wife's Canon IXUS 2. I was interested to see how capable the macro settings were on this great little 'take anywhere' camera - not bad considering it fits into your front jeans pocket!


Garden, August 2004
Canon IXUS2
1/500th @ f7, tripod

The Upper Pond
The branches hanging down in the foreground spoil the composition, but the water scene is good practise. I shot these in TIFF - the FZ20 doesn't do RAW output. The camera saves a JPG along with each TIFF but, comparing the two, I can see no difference in quality - at least, not enough to justify the 14MB cost for each TIFF - so I won't bother using this option again!

Back on the PC, I cleaned up a colour cast, corrected the contrast levels, sharpened and then applied a very light red graduated filter to warm up the tree colour.


Burnham Beeches, September 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80, TIFF
1/4th @ f8, graduating red filter, tripod

Water Lillies, Upper Pond
Corrected colour cast and contrast levels.


Burnham Beeches, September 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80, TIFF
1/20th @ f2.8, tripod

Southwold Beach Huts, September 2005
[FZ20: 1/500, f4.6, ISO 80]

I was looking for a slightly different treatment of the popular colourful Southwold beach huts with this shot. It was towards the end of the season, so the paintwork on many huts was looking a bit shabby. I decided to get between two huts and see what sort of perspective it gave me...I kinda liked it, so I squeezed off a few frames at different heights/exposures. The concrete promenade had tarred seams, which distracted from the view, so I cloned them out with photoshop CS2. I also removed some of the bluish colour cast that the camera had recorded.

Disused Railway Bridge, Tintern
[FZ20: 1/100, f2.8, ISO 100]

This lovely old bridge is on the popular walk from the railway museum to the abbey, crossing the Wye a short distance from the Abbey entrance. I did a filtered b&w conversion and adjusted the contrast a little before posting. I thought that I'd positioned the camera centrally to take the shot but obviously things were a little skewed, causing the disappointing and distracting asymetrical composition. I'll remember to take more time framing the shot next time!

Tourists atop St Pauls
[FZ20: 1/1000, f5.6, ISO80]

Cropped. sharpened and corrected the colour/contrast/brightness slightly. You can't really make out the tourists without looking at the larger version of the image. Clicking on any of the photo entries brings up a bigger view of the picture, in case anyone actually reading this site hadn't figured that out yet! :o)

Tower Bridge London, September 2005.
[FZ20: 1/500, f4.6, ISO 200]

Shot with a circular polariser to give the sky a more dramatic feel. I've converted to b&w using a green channel filter to accentuate the contrast in the image. Composition isn't perfect (the crop on the lefthand side of the bridge is unfortunate) but the overall effect is pretty much what I was after. I may reshoot the scene for a slightly better framing, now I know what mistakes I made.

French Lavender, Wierre Effroy, France
[FZ20: 1/125, f4, ISO80]

Fish Market, Venice, August 2003

One of my favourite photos. I don't have a record of the exposure settings anymore, but it was shot using my basic old Canon EOS 500 on Kodak Gold 400. Scanned from the negative using a Canoscan 4200F. I did a small amount of cropping, converted it to grayscale and then erased the b&w layer over the red curtain.

The Thames from the Design Museum, Sept 17 2005
[FZ20: 1/1250, f2.8, ISO 100]

Cropped and a little saturation adjustment made to bring out the colours of the buildings through the glass.

Rain on petals, September 2005
[FZ20: 1/250, f4, ISO 80]

Hay Bales, Wye Valley, September 2005
[FZ20: 1/200, f4, ISO 80]

This was cropped to it's more panoramic aspect and converted to b&w with a colour filter using Picasa2. I should probably be doing more of these edits in Photoshop but Picasa is so quick and easy to use, expecially when the image is only destined for a weblog and quality isn't essential.

Old luggage, Tintern Rail Museum
[FZ20: 1/80, f2.8, ISO 80]

This shot had some annoying tourists included on the far left of the frame. I cropped hard up to the luggage but ideally I would have liked to have left more space around them. I might revisit the image in PhotoShop later and see if I can clone them out to give a better composition. The image was sharpened and converted to b&w using a blue filter in Picasa2.

Narrow guage rail track, Tintern, Gloucestershire
[FZ20: 1/30, f2.8, ISO 80]

Cropped slightly for better composition and sharpened (both in Picasa2).

Macro work: garden spider, September 2005
[FZ20: 1/60, f2.8 @ 6mm, ISO 80]

I spotted this guy's web strung out across the garden, so I decided to use him as subject for a little macro practise. I spot metered on the lighter strips of his body because the auto metering was overexposing them a bit. He was in the middle of his lunch when I took it (the black mass at the bottom of the picture). This is straight off the camera - no post-process adjustments. The FZ20's Leica lens does pretty well, but I'm looking forward to trying more of this sort of thing using a close-up diopter attachment.