Giraffe(s)

Taken at Woburn Safari Park this summer whilst on a day out with the family.


Location: Woburn Safari Park. July 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/800th
Aperture: f5.2

Borough Market food

Something a bit different. Here's a tile of 4 images I took at Borough Market in London a few months ago. I was disappointed with the most of the images I took - I arrived a lot later than I planned and the place was crammed with people. I'll revisit it some day and get there at dawn ti capture the scenes I was really after.


Location: Borough Market, London. August 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Exposure: Various

Stockers Lake
Yet another shot from the series I took in the nature reserve a couple of weeks ago. It's all a bit samey I know, but I'm a bit low on new material at the moment and it was a beautiful evening! :)


Location: Stockers Lake, Hertforshire. December 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/800th
Aperture: f5.2

Another sunset
Another from the series of shots I took a couple of weekends ago. I have one or two others to post from this outing and then I'll move onto something different.

I plan to start the new year by launching the big changes that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. I've finished all the development preparation work - just need to gather some compelling imagery and I'll be good to go!


Location: Stockers Lake, Hertforshire. December 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/500th
Aperture: f4

Setting Sun
I was at the lake shooting the swans taking off and landing on the water (without much success unfortunately) as this lovely sunset began to take place.


Location: Stockers Lake, Hertforshire. December 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/1300th
Aperture: f7

Birds on water
Shot at dusk last weekend in the nearby wildfowl reserve.


Location: Stockers Lake, Hertforshire. December 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/1000th
Aperture: f4.6

Lower Manhattan skyline
Another one - this time taken somewhere inbetween Hoboken and Jersey City as I was walking back from the office to my hotel. I've desaturated the image a bit and applied some contrast correction. I like the way the colouring in the buildings came out - it has a urban tonal quality to me.

I'm still surprised how decent some of IXUS images look. It was a great little compact!


Location: New Jersey, USA. July 2004
Camera: Canon IXUS II
Sensitivity: ISO 100
Shutter Speed: 1/500th
Aperture: f3.9

The big freeze
This was taken on Boxing Day last year. It was just cold enough for the lake to freeze over. If the meterologists are on the money this year, I guess we'll be skating on it soon! :-/


Location: Stockers Nature Reserve, Hertforshire. December 2004
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 150
Shutter Speed: 1/125th
Aperture: f4

Cornish rowing boat
Taken in Port Isaac harbour a few years ago. I love this beautiful little village - one of my favourite places. Cornwall is my spiritual home - I have lots of warm memories right back to my childhood holidays there. It's a shame I've not been in a while...maybe next year.



Location: Port Isaac, Cornwall. Autumn 2002
Camera: Canon EOS 500N, Fujicolor 400
Scanned: Canon Canoscan 4200F from negative
No exposure settings recorded.

Red Sea Jetty
A 35mm scan for today. A small wooden jetty running out into the Red Sea at Taba, Egypt. During the day, this pier is busy with hotel guests preparing for a snorkelling expedition around the coral reef. By dusk, it was perfect for a peaceful walk along before dinner. In the hazy distance are the coastline mountains of Saudi Arabia.


Location: Taba, Eygpt. Summer 2003
Camera: Canon EOS 500N, Fujicolor 100
Scanned: Canon Canoscan 4200F from negative
No exposure settings recorded.

Rockafella water feature
One of the water features around the plaza at the foot of the Rockafella tower. I liked the shimmery property of the wall - it fits well in with it's surroundings (i.e. gilded everything!).


Location: Rockafella Plaza, 5th Ave, New York. July 2004
Camera: Canon IXUS II
Sensitivity: ISO 100
Shutter Speed: 1/160th
Aperture: f9

Silhouetted tree
I captured this early one Saturday morning a few weeks ago. The tree stands on the brow of a gentle rise in the park and provided a striking outline set against the bright morning sky.


Location: Cassiobury Park, Hertfordshire, UK. November 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Metering: Spot metered
Sensitivity: ISO 200
Shutter Speed: 1/50th
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 14mm

Lunch break on the girder
As I walked uptown from Battery Park, I came across this art installation parked on the side of the road. I even managed to time it so I got a NY cab in the frame too - pretty much pot luck with the shutter delay on the IXUS II! :)


Location: Downtown New York, USA. July 2004
Camera: Canon IXUS II
Sensitivity: ISO 100
Shutter Speed: 1/160th
Aperture: f9

Water reflections
Another shot from last winter, taken at the nearby nature reserve. This one was post processed to b&w using a red filter.


Location: Stockers Lake, Hertfordshire. December 2004
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/200th
Aperture: f4

Chopsticks
Another shot from the make-shift studio (lol - I'll have to post a shot of this "studio" one day :) This one was experimenting with light and depth of field in the camera's macro mode. I took several shots moving one of the fixed spotlights into different positions around the scene. I like the way this one disappears into darkness. The shadows in the foreground are a bit undesirable. Maybe I should have cropped them out...thought it better to have the whole chopstick in view.

I know I said I was only going to post older images for the next week or so before changing things around, but I was having fun with this last night :)


Location: Home, November 29 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20, Manfrotto 190 tripod
Metering: Matrix
Exposure Mode: Shutter Priority, -1/3 EV (auto-bracketed)
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/320th
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 9mm

Homeward bound
This was taken with my little K750 mobile phone through my car windshield whilst driving home from work a few weeks back. OK, I know I shouldn't have been taking photos whilst operating a vehicle (!), but the sunset was beautiful and the traffic was - as always - flowing like treacle!


Location: A40 (westbound), London. September 2005
Camera: Sony Ericsson K750i
Shutter Speed: 1/1000th
Aperture: f2.8

New York sunset
I've decided to change direction and make some changes to this blog, all of which will happen in a week or two. In the meantime, I'm going to post a few older images - pictures I've been reviewing and want to include here before I switch things around.

The first is this rather classic lower Manhattan skyline shot from last summer. For anyone who knows NY well, I was staying in the New Jersey Hyatt, which is build on a jetty out into the Hudson River. This was taken from the ballroom balcony during a gala dinner.


Location: New Jersey Hyatt, USA. July 2004
Camera: Canon IXUS II
Sensitivity: ISO 100
Shutter Speed: 1/100th
Aperture: f3.2

Also, I've added skinnybuzzard to my "regular reads". Great photos - do visit his site.

Under a blood red sky
Sorry U2, but I thought of that lyric when taking this one. It was shot at the same time as the HDR image from a couple of days ago, this one framed at full telephoto (around 430mm in 35mm equivilent).


Location: Mount Pleasant, Middlesex. November 21, 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/500th
Aperture: f5.2

High Dynamic Range sunset
This scene was shot on Sunday evening from Mount Pleasant. It was a fabulous sunset, helped by the clear skies and frosty temperatures throughout the day. I took around 80 frames over a 4-5 minute period with various exposure settings and auto-bracketing everything.

If you don't know what HDR is, here's a quick summary. Adobe Photoshop has a very simple to use tool for merging multiple exposures to create a HDR image. The practice comes in how you control contrast, saturation and hue after down-sampling the image to 16 or 8 bit. The HDR merge process works better combining 5 or 6 exposures, but the following example was created with just 3 from the auto-bracket function. I have a few more of these to post in the coming weeks.


Location: Mount Pleasant, Middlesex. November 21, 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/25th
Aperture: f2.8
Exposure Compensation: +/- 1/3 EV (auto-bracketed)

Mistakes that work...kinda!?
This weekend brought great opportunities for some early winter photography (at least, in the London area) with fairly heavy frosts and bright clear skies both days. I felt the start of flu symptoms on Saturday morning (boo hoo), so missed out on making the most of the favourable conditions. However, I did venture into my garden for a short time on Sunday afternoon and captured this.

Stupidly, I had left the camera on "incandescent" white balance, which left this shot with it's heavy blue/green hue. I corrected this out in Photoshop but, on comparing the two, I decided I liked the atmosphere the hue gave the scene, so I left it in it's original form for today's post. Not everyone would agree, I'm sure but - hey - it's my blog! :)


Location: Garden, November 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20, tripod mounted
Sensitivity: ISO 80
White Balance: incandescant
Shutter Speed: 1/4th
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 6mm

Autumn in the park
Another autumnal shot from a local park. This was taken a couple of weeks ago on a bright and sunny Sunday morning.


Location: Cassiobury Park, UK. November 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Metering: Spot metered
Sensitivity: ISO 200
Shutter Speed: 1/50th
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 14mm

Sunlight on long grass
Another scene from the nature reserve close to me. This one taken last December on one of my first outings with the FZ20.


Location: Stockers Lake Nature Reserve, UK. December 2004
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Exposure Mode: Shutter Priority
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/125th
Aperture: f4
Focal Length: 22mm

Another leaf close-up
This one was taken along with the previous post - different leaf, slightly different angle.


Location: Home, UK. November 15, 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20, Manfrotto 190 tripod
Metering: Spot
Exposure Mode: Aperture Priority, -1/3 EV (auto-bracketed)
White Balance: Incandescent
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/5th
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 6mm

Close up work
I picked a few leaves up off the ground whilst wondering around a garden centre at the weekend. I decided that I would try some closeup work using my make-shift studio area at home. I have no studio lighting equipment (yet) and there was insufficient daylight left to adequately light the scene, so I used a couple of halogen spot lamps with home-made diffusers attached. I knocked the camera out of auto white balance mode and played around with the setting until I was happy with the colour reproduction under the halogen light, then rolled off several auto-bracketed frames at various exposures.

I have a few variations on this theme that I will post later this week.


Location: Home, UK. November 15, 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20, Manfrotto 190 tripod
Metering: Spot metered
Exposure Mode: Aperture Priority
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/13th
Aperture: f2.8
Focal Length: 15mm

Bench talk
Taken in a small square that overlooked the keep in the old town of Carcassonne.


Location: Carcassonne, France. May 2005
Camera: Panasonic FZ20
Metering: Matrix
Exposure Mode: Shutter Priority
Sensitivity: ISO 80
Shutter Speed: 1/100th
Aperture: f4
Focal Length: 13.4mm

Serenity
This is a 5 minute walk from the front door of my house! I love walking the circuit around the lake in the early evenings. As the day visitors draw away the place exudes a wonderful sense of peace. This one was taken about 6 weeks ago.


Stockers Lake Nature Reserve, UK. September 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200
1/125th @ f4, spot metered, tripod

Venitian canal
I felt like posting something a little different today, so here's something from my pre-digital days. This was taken during a week long break in Venice a few years ago. I remember the holiday as much for the amount of pain I was in (I had 2 prolapsed discs in my lower back) as I do for appreciating the dilapidated architectural beauty of the city.


Venice, Italy. Summer 2003
No exposure details
Scanned from 35mm negative using Canoscan 4200F

Flora close-up
I posted an image a few weeks ago which was taken at the same time as this one which had a bee collecting pollen from the same group of flowers. On reflection, I prefer this image as it has better composition and a more interesting depth of field.


Garden Flora, August 2004
Canon IXUS II
1/1250th @ f7 (AE)

Carcassonne rooftops
Anyone who's visited this medieval fortress town will undoubtedly take away lasting memories of it's imposing looks and fascinating history. I flew in to the regional airport here with Ryanair earlier this year, scouting for properties in the Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées regions. This was taken from the top of the old city fortifications, looking westwards towards the new town.


Carcassonne, France. April 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/500 @ f4, 72mm

Waterfall
Another IXUS shot. I don't have many waterfall scenes in my digital photo portfolio. Maybe I will make time to dig out some of my old transparencies and scan them to post here. There's nothing terribly special about this one, I know.


County Donegal, Ireland. September 2004
Canon IXUS II, ISO 100, 37mm
1/250th @ f2.8 (AE), beanbag support

Morning sun on winter leaves
This was one of my first photos taken with the Panasonic last winter. I took it out one bright, sunny morning in December and enthusiastically fired off around a hundred frames around some local lakes. I loved the rich colours that were illuminated as the sunlight fell on this tree.


Near Batchworth Lake, Hertfordshire, UK. December 2004
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/125th @ f3, handheld

Remember, remember...
Here's a long exposure shot, taken at a Round Table organised charity firework display last night.


Cassiobury Park, Hertfordshire, UK. November 5th 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 100
8 seconds @ f2.8, tripod

Sunset over Brighton West Pier
In March 2003, the West Pier was victim to fire that tore through the concert hall. Then, 14 months later, the main structure collapsed into the sea as a freak storm savaged the south coast. The ruins remain photogenic, particularly around sunset.


Brighton West Pier, April 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/320th @ f4, handheld

Eau Non Contrôleé
Came very close to buying a second house (a mountain retreat) in this lovely Pyrenian village earlier this year. For those readers who are fans of the amazing Google Earth, you can fly to the location, resplendant in high resolution imagery (Lat: 42°46'53.40"N; Long: 1°30'32.89"E).


Orus, Midi Pyrénées, France. April 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/100th @ f4, handheld

Dune Landscape
This was taken last fall with my trusty 3.2MP Canon IXUS II on the coast of County Donegal. As there is obviously no mount for filters on the IXUS, I applied a light grey graduated filter to the sky to bring out the cloud formation a little better.

I think this goes to prove that you don't need a very fancy camera to take appealing landscape shots - not that I would turn down the oportunity to revist Donegal with a medium format camera and my tripod (thanks Mr Waite for increasing my proposed camera kit expenditure even further into the stratosphere!)


Either Glen Bay or Malin Bay, County Donegal, Ireland. September 23, 2004
Canon IXUS II, ISO 100
1/500th @ f3.2 (AE), 74mm

Sunlight on windfallen leaves
Walking around just after dawn last weekend, I was struck by the many beautiful ways the sunlight played off the foliage, both in the trees and on the ground.


Cassiobury Park, Hertfordshire, UK. October 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200, spot metered
1/15th @ f2.8, 72mm, handheld

Grand Union Canal
A nice autumnal scene along the canal. Although I've lived within 10 miles of Watford for the last 5 years, I'm pleasantly surprised to still discover spots like this, tucked away from the more concrete urban landscape one tends to associate more readily with the town.


Grand Union Canal near Watford, UK. October 30, 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 150
1/60th @ f2.8, 13.6mm

Continuing the (brief) leaf theme...
I'm not quite sure if the sense of movement I've captured in today's image distracts too much from the subject itself - what do you think? - but as with yesterday's shot, I found the end effect pleasing enough.


Hertfordshire, UK. October 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200, spot metered
1/13th @ f2.8, handheld

Autumn waterfall
I'm an early riser, often getting up before the sun, but I've seldom gone out with my camera to make use of the sweet light of dawn. I planned to do just that this morning but I ended up staying up way too late on the computer. I missed dawn by about 30 mins but the light was good so I made the most of my time out.

This autumnal leaf trapped under a small waterfall was taken handheld with a 1/3sec exposure. I crouched down, remaining as still as possible and held my breath whilst I squeezed the shutter release. Although image stablisation was on, the sense of movement I wanted to capture in the image disguises the movement it couldn't correct for. I wasn't sure it would come out at all, but I was quite pleased with the end result.


Cassiobury Park, Hertfordshire. October 30, 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 100, spot metered
1/3rd @ f8, 70mm, handheld

The sky is a landscape
John Constable once wrote:

"The landscape painter who does not make skies a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself to one of his greatest aids. It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment"

This shot is noteworthy to me because it was taken on a weekend when I was trying to "master" the spot metering capabilities of the camera. I made a lot of bad exposures but, of course, you don't learn without the mistakes! This one was pleasing to me because I felt it began to explore and convey some of the emotion that Constable was refering to.


Skies over the south coast, UK. April 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80, spot metered
1/1300th @ f8, 12.3mm

Winter Frost
I shot this last last year on one of my initial outings with the Panasonic. It was one of the first pictures where I was finally getting used to the camera's image stablisation - it takes a little practise to get the best out of it.


Stockers Lake Nature Reserve, UK. December 2004
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200
1/30th @ f2.8, 72mm, handheld

I've realised the resizing of today's image is obscuring the shallow depth of field effect, so I'm reposting a larger version. You can get to it by clicking on the image in the original post.

Brighton Seafront miniaturised
I saw this effect being used on an image in another blog recently and thought it was so neat, I really wanted to figure out how it was done in Photoshop. It emulates a property of expensive tilt lenses providing very short depths of field, which can give the overall visual effect of miniaturisation to the scene. I shot this Brighton seafront image in spring this year and thought would make a good candidate to experiment with. It's not perfect, but this is not a portfolio blog - I intend it to record my learning experiences. So there! :)


Brighton Beach, looking west from the pier, April 10, 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/1000th @ f5.6

Trumped
A vertical perspective of Trump Tower taken on a trip to the city in July this year. I darkened the sky with a graduated filter and converted to b&w using Photoshop channel mixer control.


Trump Tower from 5th Ave, New York, July 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/250th @ f4, 6mm

Stockers Lake Nature Reserve
I'm really lucky to live so close to this beautiful Hertfordshire nature reserve. It's home to the second largest heronry in the UK and is always a tranquil and calming place to walk around. It's a shame I'm not more into ornithology - there are many rare species living amongst the trees surrounding the lake.

I'm concerned over how much noise is in this picture (particularly the original) - probably caused by the Panasonic sensor's inherent noise problems at low light/high ISO. My settings seem a bit odd to me - can't remember why I set ISO 200 and a +0.7EV compensation, when the camera was well supported! I probably forgot to reset it from an earlier exposure.


Stockers Lake, Hertfordshire, UK. September 25, 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200, +0.7EV exposure compensation
1/200 @ f4, 6mm, beanbag support

{Ed} It's time for a change of style! I was beginning to find the green a little heavy and the round edged graphics made it a pain to widen. So welcome to the new look, "Mr Moto Rising", courtesy of Jeff Zeldman (plus a little tweaking of my own of course :)

Oxford Street Festival
I was shopping in central London when I happened across a festival to encourage shoppers back after the July terror attacks. Thankfully I had my camera in my rucksack, so I abandoned my shopping plans and spent the rest of the morning walking up and down the street looking for opportunities. As things started to get really crowded, I spotted this guy stood in the middle of Oxford Circus, clearly looking for his companion, occasionally talking on his phone.

The image was processed using channel controls in "Convert To B&W Pro" in PhotoShop CS2 and an effect filter applied to give the grain texture.


Oxford Circus, London, UK. October 1, 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/100 @ f3.2, 33mm

Autumn contrasts
I love the colours of autumn. It's my favourite season by far. Everything seems to become so photogenic.


Bayhurst Wood, September 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200
1/13th @ f2.8, handheld

Back to New York
My latest work trip to New York. It poured with rain solidly all week long, so it was a fairly unsuccessful trip in terms of adding to my photographic portfolio of the city. I took this very hurridly from the deck of a Statten Island ferry. The wind was gusting quite strongly and the dramatic cloud formation was blown away almost as quickly as it appeared. This was taken without the aid of a polariser - I was quite surprised how well the camera handled the exposure.


New York Harbour, October 16, 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 80
1/1300th @ f8

Police Line
Sunday October 9th was the Hispanic parade in Manhattan. I walked up 5th watching each ethinic group flow out from the streets on either side to join the back of the main procession. I was looking for something slightly different than capturing the parade itself. I noticed how efficient the sanitation dept and the police dept were clearing up at the back of the procession, opening up block after block as the mass of people edged their way uptown. I stopped on the sidewalk as two burly cops stacked these barriers up, ready for collection. I like the strong diagonals, emphasised by the longer focal length I chose.


5th Avenue, New York. October 9, 2005
Panasonic FZ20, ISO 200
1/100th @ f2.8

Here's an interesting article on Luminous Landscape discussing the significance of the new Canon EOS 5D and Sony R1.

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