Port of Felixstowe pt II: Wheels and Concrete
Having seen the shipping side of the docks, I have also explored the ‘other’ side, which is the equally interesting ‘nuts and bolts’ of how the port works. If you aren’t familiar with Felixstowe or the East of England, then you may not know that the port is woefully poorly connected to the rest of the country. Basically, there is one trunk road, known as the A14, which runs pretty much from the dock gate to Birmingham in the centre of the country. It is hopelessly over capacity, such that traffic often grinds to a halt at busy times. You would imagine that rail would also be a good way of moving the vast numbers of containers that we saw in the previous post – considering that one large ship can now carry some 10,000 20 foot containers, that is potentially 5,000 truck journeys, or a fraction of that number of trains. But the rail network is not great either, so there is something of a bottleneck for freight leaving Felixstowe to its destinations.
These photos were taken at various places in or near to the docks, and represent some of the more interesting things I found as far as moving the goods around is concerned.
Above: trucks lay waiting to be called to pick up their loads. There is massive security at the port, and drivers must produce a biometric ID card at the gates or they are denied access.
Above: ‘The Grid’ – the containers come off the ships and are stacked on a 3-dimensional grid system, which you can see marked on the ground. Each container is allocated an ‘X’, ‘Y’ and vertical ‘Z’ position so it can be found easily to be loaded for its onward journey. Did you know that the docks sometimes close when it snows? The reason is that the snow covers the grid markings, and the crane drivers cannot see which containers are which!!
Above: Stacked ‘Short Sea’ containers [denoting that their journey is short as opposed to from the other side of the world].
Above: a fork lift which can lift a loaded 20 foot container, which could weigh 20 odd tons.
Above: There are all manner of ageing vehicles which are only used within the yards, and which are known as ‘shunters’. This tired-looking one must have retired from the open road many years ago.
Above: Abandoned? This has been dropped off whilst another container is emptied, to be picked up again later.
Above: I for one would not like this to be my place of work, as I fear heights!
Above: Waiting seems to be a large part of the job, for the ships’ crew and everybody else reliant on them.
Port of Felixstowe pt I: Ships and Shore
The second set of pictures I took yesterday afternoon, in unseasonably warm sunshine, was from the marina at Shotley. This is a peninsula between the rivers Orwell and Stour, and within a few hundred yards of the shore here you have Harwich, to the south, which is a major ferry port for European destinations, and Felixstowe to the north, which is one of the largest ports in Europe. It being a Sunday afternoon, the port was relatively quiet, with two large container ships already berthed, Maersk Klaipeda and MSC Rossella, and one which arrived whilst I was shooting, Maersk Taurus [which is the one in the last picture].
It is quite interesting watching the movement of these vast ships – the port is now able to handle the largest container ships in the world – because although the Taurus has a weight of 94,000 tonnes, it was pirouetted 180 degrees by two little tugs in about five minutes, and looked for a moment rather graceful. The other interesting thing about shooting a large port like this is the sheer vastness of the machines. As well as the ships, which are incomparably large, the cranes also dwarf everything around them. Their drivers sit a hundred feet above the ground in a glass cab, sliding back and forth over the dock and then over the ship as they move the containers.
Pin Mill in the Afternoon
My daughter is at school quite a way from home, and as a result, when birthday parties occur, there is usually a long drive involved. Rather than try and get home and then go back again, I find it easier [assuming the weather is decent] to take the camera and find somewhere nearby to take some photos for a couple of hours. Today was just such an afternoon; the dog refused to get into the car, so I could not spend the time walking him. Instead, I took two sets of pictures. The first is of Pin Mill, a small hamlet that sits on the south bank of the River Orwell as it flows from Ipswich out to sea at Felixstowe. The light was very clear today, and the still water provided some great reflections.
Liverpool by Night
Here are a few pictures from a recent trip to Liverpool, mostly from the Pier Head area. I snuck out of the hotel and captured some interesting sights. My previous ramblings around the city were documented here.
The first one was taken out of my hotel window, and the second is a crop of the first, but with the white balance turned down to about 2200. They were all taken on my d3100 with shutter priority mode at F16 over a long exposure at ISO100. Hey, enjoy, already too soon!
Copenhagen in Winter
Right, to ease me back into blogging again after a lengthy lay off, I am posting a little photo diary of this weekend’s trip to Copenhagen. It was savagely cold, in a way that the UK has not been so far this winter. The east wind goes through any layers you are wearing and eats its way into your very being. Copenhagen is a compact little city, with a lot of waterways, and a few very good real ale pubs. These shots were all taken with my little Samsung point and shoot camera, because we only took hand luggage and the big camera is too big!!
2011 in review
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Christmas Break
It is hardly appropriate for me to take a Christmas break from blogging, because I have posted very sparsely since the autumn. My apologies – this is because I have been busy doing other things and there has not been much time to post things. I will get around to it soon! In the mean time, these Victorian singing cats have a message.
Wish You Were Here….
Phew, long time no posts, eh?
Sorry about the break – you know the kind of thing. Work, real life, tonsillitis – but tonight I’ve decided to post some things just to get me back in the habit again. August was such a great month for FR – I was acually exceeding one post per day at one point – and then…only one for the whole of October!
Not much commentary with these as I had originally felt that they didn’t make the cut – but I think I was also getting a little to technical – precious about my shots as well, and I had forgotten that a picture can be worthwhile even if it’s not technically perfect. So….they do at least convey, to me at least, the end of summer on the bleak Suffolk coast – the crowds have gone, the temperature is cooling, the clouds have obscured the sun, and the leaves are starting to drop. Some are HDR’s but the people on the beach one is just a single exposure.
It’s a long haul ’til next spring…
And finally, moving north-west again,I took this one in my New Brighton Beach set which I posted last month. To some of you it will be horrendously over-cooked, and that’s why I held off from posting it. However I have just looked at it again and I think it’s worth posting – it certainly conveys that ‘end of summer’ feeling, although some might say it’s more ‘end of the world’……if you have an opinion, use the comments box below to let me know!
A night of IPA at The Dove, Bury St Edmunds
This is an attempt to divert my attention from photography for one moment, and to recall that FR is actually a blog concerned with all manner of good things, including cycling, beer and travelling as well as taking pictures. In this spirit, I am pleased to post a short account of my Saturday night, which was very enjoyably spent in good company at The Dove, Bury St Edmunds’ finest beer house.
The Dove is one of a rare breed – a ‘proper’ pub which is run by a beer enthusiast, the impressively bearded Roger Waters. Dating back to the mid-1800s, the pub has, probably by virtue of its rather out of the way location, managed to remain unaffected by the march of lager, jukeboxes and fruit machines, remaining a basic, bare-floorboarded two room bar which does not have gastro pub pretensions, but instead concentrates on serving six real ales at all times. In recent years there have been a few ventures in the town that aim for a similar purpose – The Old Cannon being one, The Beerhouse being another. Both of those pubs are also micro breweries as well, and the Cannon is very firmly in Gastro Pub territory. But they both just miss the ‘real pub’ ambience – they just seem to be too self conscious in their attempts to be the real thing, and end up looking like they are trying too hard.
Our arrival saw the pub in a nice, half full state, with locals already enjoying the available ales. We were sharp enough to bag one of the scrubbed wooden tables, which was a shrewd move because the bar soon filled up with drinkers. The ales that were ‘on’ constituted an interesting choice. Woodfordes Wherry and Crouch Vale Brewers’ Gold are always available as the staple beers, but in addition we also noted Nethergate IPA at 3.5 percent and a very interesting 5.2 percent bruiser from Lowestoft, Green Jack Mahseer IPA. One for later, I thought.
We began almost unanimously on the Nethergate. All the beers here are kept fastidiously, Roger being apparently something of a font of beer related knowledge. The pint was clear, amber-coloured and had a lovely frothy white head. At this relatively low strength, it didn’t pack much of a punch, but had a nice, malty flavour and a reasonable finish of [apparently fuggles] hops. As somebody who used to live in Huddersfield, now the apparent real ale capital of the UK’, you do get somewhat used to a certain style and the northern hop-monsters do make you a little blase when tasting anything else. In order to have something to wash down with our beer, we also bought a pint of pork scratchings from the bar – not the plastic bags of Black-Country rind you often get in pubs, but big, majestic bits of salty crackling which were ideal for producing a continued thirst.
The problem with a sessionable beer such as the Nethergate is that you are tempted to drink it very quickly and then want another one. This was the case and so I suggested to my fellow drinkers that we move on and try a pint of the Green Jack, a much more formidable beer. The bar, although now full, was being served efficiently and waiting doesn’t seem to be a problem like it is in some pubs. The other thing that I noticed, first with surprise, but then delight that such a reactionary step could be taken, was that The Dove has no lager taps on the bar. Now I did not trouble myself to look into the fridges behind the bar, but I am sure a meagre supply of bottled lager may be available. However, what a statement, and what a great one at that. If you want to ensure that your pub is kept free of the kind of person who quaffs Carling habitually, then here is your template.
Now as I mentioned, The Dove does not ‘do’ food. However, a short chat with landlord Roger later on revealed that a bespectacled stranger sat at the bar was, in fact, also a local butcher, and his pork pies were available from the bar, wrapped individually in greaseproof paper and with a little mustard sachet included. We felt we had to continue our beery patronage of pork in its many, manifest forms, and so a pie each was procured. They were quite excellent – firm, meaty, with good short pastry and little jelly to distract from the taste. What a great drinking accompaniment – and luckily the Green Jack Mahseer IPA was strong enough to cut through the fatty pork.
Mahseer is a really great pint. It tastes like all of its 5.2 percent strength – you feel a sense of respect for it in the mouth. It is a strong, amber coloured pint with a creamy, tight head and a very long, almost American IPA kind of finish – probably because it has both English and American hops in the brew. I would place it close to Adnams American IPA for taste and strength.
And so the evening carried on – although we were generally sensible enough to swap back to the sessionable Nethergate after one Green Jack. Full marks to Roger and his team at The Dove.
Photo of the Day: La Rambla, Barcelona, 7pm
This shot of passers by was taken in the still oppressive heat of early evening by a busy news stand (oh how witty – I didn’t know a news stand could take photos!!!). It was shot in RAW format and then given a pop in Topaz Adjust to bring out all those details from the flagstones to the myriad clothing styles worn by these people.
A few more from the BBC at Mediacity
Normally, when taking a batch of photos, I will pick out my favourites for post production and posting on the blog. But after a few days, I will often then ‘have a go’ at some of the less notable photos, and see what I can do with them. In this case, I have pulled out three which were less immediate but, having tweaked them a little bit, I still like them.
Above: The tram station at mediacity, where the long exposure has resulted in a little artistic blurring of the people on the platform.
Above: The CBBC studios. The shot is not a great one, because I took it ‘straight on’ as opposed to at an angle. But I like the lead in that the floor mounted lights give it. It could do with a little straightening up as well.
Above: Aargh!! The evening I shot these pictures, it was quite windy. Whilst I was using my sturdy Manfrotto 190 tripod, this shot is slightly blurred because the camera moved imperceptibly during the long exposure.
HDR of the Day: Future Beer
I took this some time ago; it’s an HDR rendering of the boilers in the brewing house of the Greene King brewery in Bury St Edmunds. The brewery has dominated the town for as long as anybody can remember: when you are in the streets near to the site on a brewing day, you can see the clouds of steam from the boil, and the smell of malt extract and hops pervades the whole town. This picture is shot in small yard in front of one of the main buildings, through whose windows you can see the vast boilers that are used to boil the ‘mash’ and the hops, which are added at different stages. In the reflection on the window, you can see the tops of two of the vertical fermenting tanks that the finished, hopped wort is moved into, having been cooled, to turn, slowly, into beer.
Hello. My name is FiFi.
This is a picture I found in a set I took in the summer at the coast. It was a cloudy afternoon, and the local lifeboat crew was doing a sponsored car wash for something or other. The car they were cleaning was this little Fiat with the message ‘Hello. My name is FiFi’ written in pink on the back. I liked the fact that the very manly, no-nonsense lifeboat guys were cleaning an effette little car called FiFi, but keeping a straight face about it.
Beached
My recent tour around England’s North-West took me in an exotic loop from Runcorn, through to Salford via a weekend at a friend’s house in New Brighton, just a short ferry from Liverpool across the Mersey. I took some shots on the beach on a sunny afternoon, because the sea front has unique qualities. The sea can retreat at low tide for maybe a quarter of a mile, leaving a vast sandy expanse; yet at other times it can seem as if it is trying to breach the sea wall and flood the [reclaimed] sea front. Here are some photos that I took with a no.8 graduated ND filter and my trusty circular polariser. A couple are HDR’s, the rest just normal.
Above: The ‘Lifeguard’ hut is a great subject for a shot or two. This is actually an HDR of four shots at varying exposures.
I love the way the clouds seem to radiate from the centre of this picture – it gives it some dynamism and almost makes it look as if I meant to get this effect!!
Above – testing out the depth of field technique of focusing ‘one third in’ to the picture.
Above” This is the sea wall and where I am standing is often under water – so the wall has acquired a nice patina.
Above: That rather dramatic sky again, captured in Black and White.
Above: Looking out to sea from the gap at the top of the steps, this is an HDR rendering of four shots taken at varying exposures, the given a ‘pop’ in Topaz Adjust.
An Evening Stroll around Media City UK
Much has been made in the British press about the BBC’s gradual move to Salford, near Manchester. It has been explained as a cost cutting measure and also as part of the ongoing attempts to revitalise the provinces and draw some of the attention away from London. Well that’s as may be, but I found myself temporarily relocated to Salford this week for a few days because of work. One evening, me and my two colleagues decided to take a wander, and so I took my Nikon and my tripod with me too. Not a great look for a casual wanderer, but it made for some interesting night time shots. I also fell victim, for the first time, to the security guard intervention syndrome that so afflicts the urban snapper. Luckily, this chap was quite nice once I explained myself as an amateur photographer, explaining that ‘we’re told to ask people, like’……
Above: The building works still continue, but the whole mediacity site does have something of a buzz about it.
Above: A shot of the Mediacity tram terminal at F16.
Above: The main square – the ‘Studio’ building to the right houses Childrens’ BBC and Blue Peter is also situated close by. My daughter was impressed by this.
Above: The quay looking towards the Lowry Museum.
Above: The sweeping glass facade of the CBBC studios, where you might meet actors dressed as unlikely, furry creatures. Or a dalek or two.
Above: The sail bridge, whose lighting, like that of much of the illuminated area, changes colour constantly.
Above: This was the view from my 15th floor hotel window. On the first evening, before the sun set, I set up the camera and tripod, and took a set of images of this view at a range of -3ev to +3 ev. Then I merged them in Photomatix to create this interesting HDR image. My hotel room had floor to ceiling windows, which made me feel a bit uneasy if I went too close and looked down. In the background is Trafford Park, which is a vast expanse of goods sheds, oil depots and container haulage yards that goes on for miles, and is the size of a small town.
Above: I took this from the 15th floor lift lobby in the Holiday Inn by setting up my tripod and camera right up by the window (which needed a clean!!!) and using a polarising filter to minimise reflections. Luckily nobody came out of the lift to see me!!!
Two more from my night shooting
These two pictures were part of the set I snapped in Ipswich Marina recently, my first night time pictures. I used a tripod and low ISO plus long exposure times for these. I didn’t bother using the two shots below when I first reviewed my photos, because they were under exposed and unremarkable, but with some trickery using Camera Raw and a bit of cropping, I am rather pleased with them.
St Peter’s Building, Huddersfield – Wrong Time, Wrong Place
I have, I will admit now, posted words and pictures about this building before. To the majority of you who will read this, I had better explain. The subject of my study, St Peter’s Building, sits just off the ring road in the Northern town of Huddersfield in Yorkshire. Now derelict, it sits in limbo while planners and developers argue about its future, the money that would have funded its restoration now almost certainly gone with the bursting of the property bubble. But why this ugly building, you might ask? Why is it worth a post of its own, when it is clearly a relic of a bygone age when taste and appropriateness had clearly been abandoned?
Let’s start with some history.
As I have already written, Huddersfield was one of the towns that benefited greatly from the industrial revolution. Textiles were the things that made fortunes here. The town was enlarged and great stone buildings prevailed, and they still impress today. The vista looking up Northumberland Street [now a conservation area] towards the railway station is one of the finest in the town, flanked with muscular stone edifices that bear testament to the civic pride of the townfolk. But in the early 1960s, in a fit of inspired modernist fervour, the YMCA in the town decided to extend their existing Victorian premises into the neighbouring Primitive Street by erecting a vast red brick edifice some ten stories high. The work was completed in late 1964 and the building inaugurated in February 1965 by the late Princess Margaret. With space for various commercial units on the ground floor, the next three or four stories were made up of class rooms, a vast sports hall, and stairs and lifts that gave access to the four stories of living accommodation that sat on the top floors.
When you look at the clash between the original building, in the foreground above, and the new one, it is something of a struggle to see how any architect could have been so crazed and delusional as to think that there would be any visual synergy between the two. Forgive me again if I go a little Prince Charles here, but it doesn’t really fit does it?
I still marvel at the sheer inappropriateness of siting such a building where it is – not just in terms of its style, but also its size. It is vast. And it’s not just me – the architects engaged to come up with plans for a refurbished site in the last few years commented:
The St Peter’s building is an extraordinary structure entirely out of scale with its surroundings and unsympathetic to the neighbouring Methodist Church – a former YMCA. However it has been mellowed with age and accepted by the people of the town. “
When you look at the edifice, you do see some nice modernist touches, though. The shot above, which I took standing on Northumberland Street, shows some rather pleasing details like the slightly recessed wrap around windows at the top of the sports hall. It’s just that the sheer starkness of a massive wall of brick gives the eye nothing to focus on.
Moving into the 1980s, the YMCA’s requirements had changed and it was felt necessary to dispose of the building, with the original Victorian YMCA now being large enough on its own. The Polytechnic then purchased St Peter’s for use as extra teaching rooms and student halls of residence – no doubt it was a highly desirable, conveniently located and probably cheap way of meeting their expanding needs. And that’s where the great pile of bricks entered my life. I still remember that September Sunday afternoon in 1986 when I, along with a few hundred other provincial teenagers, was dumped with my hi fi and my Smiths LPs in a modest student bedroom on the 6th floor of the building and left to fend for myself for the first time. The communal kitchen quickly became a meeting point where we would gather after the sparse timetable of lectures had been dispensed with, and where over pasta and tins of beans, tall tales of towering sexual achievement and incredible female conquests would be trotted out to a disbelieving audience. It was a great little community in the sky, really, and one drunken evening, which still makes me cringe when I think about it, I ended up walking on the flat roof a hundred feet above the sodium lit ring road for a dare, oblivious to the sheer drop a few feet away. This post which I found on t’internet gives you an idea of the view.
Flushed with excitement at my new found independence, I quit St Peter’s at Christmas after my first term to live in some run down terraced house where even the mice would freeze to death. And I never went back. Until this summer, when I happened to be in town for work, and I decided to go and shoot some pictures on a sunny afternoon for old times sake. As you can see, the results are sad. Abandoned for five years, the interior stripped to enable the demolition to take place, the building sits like a grounded ship; the development plans are stalled and mired in confusion, and so the building juts out on the sky line, having changed from a place full of life to a grave yard for the aspirations of the town, in stark contrast to its Victorian symbols which still, ironically, thrive a few hundred yards away. The windows are broken and the relentless rain floods in.
I will keep looking out for St Peter’s as I pass through the town, which these days is seldom. Thousand of people passed through the doors of this building, each with their own memories to take with them – memories of the highs and lows they encountered in their brief student lives here, the friendships made , the romances forged in these distinctly un-hallowed halls, with no doubt some inevitable resulting break ups, and the eventual, inevitable moving on.
Finally got some night shots
One of the things that I like most in terms of photos is pictures taken at dusk or night time; even more so if water is involved. I have already mentioned that I had some great night time shots in my sights in Swansea Marina this week, only to be dashed by the poor weather. If there is a choice between slogging around a deserted water side district and sitting in the hotel bar with a pint of real ale, then there is of course no choice. So last night, having finally returned back to Suffolk, I took the plunge, as it were, and popped over to Ipswich and the Marina in order to take some shots in darkness.
However there are many things you learn when you involve yourself in photography. One is to always heed the old Boy Scout motto, ‘Be Prepared’. I found that, no doubt like most ‘water side developments’, this one was tightly controlled as far as parking went. Even at 8pm. And of course, I had not brought any change with me. So much frustrated driving around followed, and just as I was about to give up and go home, a space right on the waterfront availed itself. I breathed a sigh of relief, and set about getting the Nikon ready to shoot. I set the F-stop to 11, the ISO to 100, and the mode to manual. Then I got the tripod out and got ready to shoot. The results of my first night time shoot surprised me. They are, I hesitate to say, rather pleasing. I have made a few elementary errors such as letting street lights leak into the corners of some shots, and I over exposed one of them and made it rather grainy, and I also learnt a bit about post processing.
Yes, the post processing ‘workflow’ has become a bit of an art for me with my daylight photos. I use Adobe Camera Raw to sort out clarity, detail and sharpening, and have been in the habit of increasing the sharpening in recent weeks. But on pictures taken at night, even on a low ISO, that is asking for trouble as you are letting masses of noise into the shot. So I then did a second pass and was more restrained in my settings, and here are the initial results. Hope you enjoy them.
Finally, before we get to the actual results, I have learnt a few things again here. In no particular order, here are some things I will try and remember next time:
- The positioning of the camera is key. I didn’t consider the effects of the streetlight above my camera in the second picture, and it flared into the top right corner.
- Use a shutter remote release. You don’t want that camera moving. I haven’t sussed out the mirror lock function yet, but this also helps in steadying the camera and that’s how you get those pin-sharp images.
- To deal with the artefacts and lens flare from the lights in some pictures – take the long exposure first [most of mine were 6-10 seconds], then take the same shot at a much shorter exposure. You can subsequently increase its exposure in Camera Raw, and then add it as a layer to the original so you can erase the flared bits and expose non flared detail beneath.
- The key settings are LOW ISO, LONG EXPOSURE, but try to start at about F8 and play around with the aperture in Aperture Priority mode.
- Beware pedestrians; especially when a tripod is involved. Don’t hog footpaths, especially if like me some shots were taken outside a busy pub on the dock – you don’t want to end up with the tripod wrapped round your neck.
- Prepare – check out things like parking charges if you are driving – many ‘shootable’ venues such as this one are very busy, even at night, and nothing is more frustrating than driving round unable to stop and take pictures!
Above: I was surprised at the clarity and crispness of the images in low light – that is the effect of a decent tripod and a low ISO.
Above: This was an interesting shot because it involves indoor and outdoor subjects. A surprising amount of detail from the inside has been captured.
Above: Some flare from the rope ligths in the middle of the picture, because this was taken with a 6 second exposure at F11.
Above: The shot that taught me that ‘less is more’ as far as post processing goes. Just a little sharpening and some de-noising.
Above: Again some lens flare, this is a problem I will have to learn to deal with by positioning the camera.
Above: a crop from a larger image, again having done some post processing, mainly in camera raw, I’m pleased with the result.
Historic Bury St Edmunds
Apologies for the few days without posting, after my 100% record! I’ve been in Swansea where there were some great night time photo opportunities, but it rained heavily the whole time, so the camera stayed firmly in the car. Anyway, I took some evening shots of Bury back in August, and went back to take some more of the area around the cathedral recently. These were mid afternoon pictures on a rather unsettled day, so I had to contend with the diffused light and some interesting clouds. But I still rather like some of the ‘keepers’ I took, all of which were taken hand held as opposed to using the trusty tripod. The good looking chap portrayed by the statue in the bottom photo is St Edmund, the King of East Anglia.
Photo of the Day – Indoors
Today, I tried a shot before breakfast [that's how sad I am!] in a style I had read about recently whereby an indoor shot, typically an under exposed thing, could be made via the use of subtle HDR to look well exposed, clean and bright whilst retaining the view through the window to the outside as well. I must say I’m pleased with my first attempt, helped by the new release of Photomatix Essentials:
After the Rain
Not wishing to set a precedent with two posts in one day, I would like to offer two final evening shots. It rained heavily this afternoon, and as anybody knows, this normally means you can expect an interesting sunset if the cloud clears. Tonight’s was quite nice so, after walking the dog and keeping my eye on the horizon, I popped up the road to the next village, about a mile away. I snapped for about 20 minutes until I got bored/cold, but on the way back, passed the railway station and couldn’t resist taking some shots of the sunset from the platform. I used a small aperture and a long exposure [6 seconds at f18] to try and get the starburst effect on the lights. I rather like it, but apologies to the people at the Kebab van parked next to the station platform, who clearly thought it was quite odd for a grown man to be setting up a tripod and snapping away on an empty platform. Kind of like a trainspotter in reverse.
There’s something endlessly evocative about train tracks, as they stretch away into the distance and bring on images of travel, distant destinations, possibilities, and the unknown. Combined with a nice sunset, they make a good lead-in to this picture.
Above: A closer shot of the station building with a similar single – image HDR effect applied.
Through a Glass Darkly
I’d like to post a few images that have been taken as multiple exposures this afternoon, as this is something I have been getting quite interested in. This style, known as HDR or High Dynamic Range, requires you to take multiples of the same picture [so of course a tripod is mandatory], but whilst at the same exposure/shutter speed, you use the camera’s exposure compensation facility to change the exposure within a defined range [the logic being, the higher the range the more dramatic the effect]. If you’re interested in HDR as a style, and it is very much a ‘love it or hate it’ thing amongst the photography fraternity, due to some rather ‘overcooked’ examples, then I urge you to look at the excellent Stuck in Customs website which contains a lot of resources and examples of HDR photos, as does another good site, Before the Coffee. You can learn a lot from these sites.
Anyway, these were all taken, surprise surprise, in a coastal village called Orford in Suffolk on a windy but sunny afternoon. Circular polarising filter used throughout [hence the title], and periodically an ND4 graduated filter also.
Above: These boats were shot with a larger aperture to blur the background a little.
Above: For a true HDR, this is my sharpest attempt yet. There is some flare from the over exposed shot which I removed using the Photoshop Burn tool. I have foolishly tried to shoot things like boats and trees before, now realising that these things are prone to MOVE in between shots!
A Gaudi View
Not much to post today, as I’ve been doing other things. This is a picture from the Gaudi-esque Parc Guell in Barcelona, one of the photos I didn’t get round to posting in my recent Barcelona Fest. I might crop the right hand side a little bit, but it’s a nice view which sums up the city – you have everything from surreal architecture, through a sweeping hillside view, down to the sea, all in one compact area.
Evening Shots Close to Home
It is tempting when reading the Photography magazines to believe that you need to travel a long way to take good or interesting photographs. But for most of us, this is simply not practical. So we have to learn to make the most of what is close to us. In my case, I have ended up getting pretty tired of shots of corn fields this summer! But last evening, I was walking the dog and decided to take some pictures of the impending sunset. It was a sunny day, so I had high hopes of some interesting shots. I also wanted to practice low light pictures, having only dabbled in this once before. So I took my tripod and waited. There is a lot of waiting involved in snapping sunsets! Also, the sun adopts the same stance as the watched kettle – it never seems to actually set!! So here are some things I learnt:
- Get a good vantage point which will allow you to be undisturbed. I used the entrance to a field which allowed me to stand for half an hour unmolested, despite the farmer driving past in his tractor and giving me a very strange look.
- Try and find an interesting feature or skyline, as the sun itself isn’t really what you want to be directly in your picture.
- As everybody says, there isn’t really a ‘standard’ F-stop, shutter speed and ISO setting to use. It depends what you are trying to do. If for example there are also waves or moving water, you might want to do a slow exposure and thus need to adjust the ISO and shutter speed accordingly. My first photo below was taken with a 1 second exposure time.
- Use and ND grad filter! I used an ND4 square filter, and in some pictures this was still not stopping the highlights from being over exposed.
- Have patience! I also read a comment from somebody who said that the real action in a sunset takes place AFTER the sun has set, not before. It may be half an hour after the sun disappears that you will find dramatic effects.
And so, on to the pictures, all taken around my home village. I also enjoyed snapping the local church, as the external lights had just come on and this led to some interesting effects.
Above: A 1 -second exposure taken at F20 and ISO100 to try and preserve the detail.
Above: Taken at F5.6 and 1/80 second exposure time, again at ISO100, about 5 minutes after the sun had set. If you look VERY carefully, to the right of the first right-hand tree, you will see a paraglider who had been buzzing about for the last half an hour.
Above: The church, taken after sunset with the lights illuminating the exterior.
Above: This last one is a single image which I fed through Photomatix to try and get an HDR effect, but it came out looking rather ghostly and eerie, which I like.
Above: The local pub after dark. Used ISO2500, 1/80 second shutter speed at F4, in shutter priority mode, as it was taken handheld.
