Photos from today back to the 1970s.
The new Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge is Walks, Trails, Sidewalks.
Not the most appropriate challenge for someone currently stuck in a hospital bed but I can’t resist a challenge.
I had a few ideas but in the end went with my first one. I can’t explain why the snow didn’t stick to the trails through the trees. As the trails are sand maybe the sand was to damp or to warm.
Trails across Bickerton Hill, Cheshire, England in the snow.
The new Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge is Shadows.
I have a few versions of this scene. Taken from the top of Bickerton Hill, Cheshire, England looking towards North Wales. The row of trees casting long shadows caught my eye and I wanted to isolate them.
That meant using a telephoto lens, the starting point was a 300mm and for this version I had a 1.4x teleconverter behind the lens to isolate them even more. I had a 600mm lens with me but the wind was so strong on the top of Bickerton Hill that it was unusable. So for the 600mm versions I used a 2x teleconverter behind the 300mm.
Monochrome Monday travels back to last autumn and the vertical version of a shot I used at the time.
It occurred to me some time ago that the shots may make an interesting monochrome conversion. Having used the horizontal version at the time I decided to try converting the vertical one.
It then sat in my pending folder waiting to be used until something made me think of the word hodgepodge and I was encouraged to use it. To me hodgepodge is one of those words heard quite a lot as a child but that seems to have fallen out of usage these days.
Anyone not familiar with the word a definition of hodgepodge is a confused mixture.
The new Lens-Artists Photo Challenge is Landscapes.
Some light mist over woodland and farmland during the golden hour. Taken from Bickerton Hill, Cheshire looking towards North Wales.
Wednesday afternoon of week 48 saw me going for a walk looking for details in the snow.
About halfway along the walk I spotted this leaf clinging on to the snow covered branch. I took a few variations of the leaf and snow covered branches but as is often the case it was the first version I picked.
I did a selective colour treatment of it as there was just enough colour in the background to be distracting.
After experimenting with deliberate camera movement during exposure earlier in the year I had another experiment on a Sunday morning walk.
This experiment was different in a couple of ways. Firstly, the leaves are now off the trees so there is less colour but the trees are more graphical shapes with the bare branches.
Secondly, for my earlier experiments I had been using short telephoto lenses. For this shot I went in the opposite direction and used my fisheye lens. A fisheye lens has an ultra wide angle of view with strong visual distortion towards the edges of the photos.
I find it interesting that the tops of the trees are curved inwards due to the distortion of the fisheye lens but that the branches streak outwards due to the camera movement. It was an exposure of 1/3 of a second while panning the camera vertically.
Monochrome Monday travels back a day to a walk on Sunday morning. With a weekend of thick cloud and poor light I decided to shoot with the intention of converting certain shots to monochrome.
I had a telephoto lens on the camera when I set out. At the turn around point of the walk I swapped the telephoto for my fisheye lens. I kept checking overhead looking for some interesting patterns in the bare branches. I centred myself in this group of trees and because the camera is looking straight up there’s not a lot of fisheye distortion.
