Skateboarding on Boxing Day

We went to a school yard nearby to test out this insane skate/snow board hybrid present, I wasn't too keen on breaking a limb but thought I'd take the camera and maybe snap some of the thrills and spills. My sister was directing the off camera flash, hard light coming from camera left, I was wanting to throw a harsh shadow on the brick wall to give it a bit of a grungy look. The second one was just as the sun was setting and the sky looked pretty cool.

When I use off camera flash I always go full manual with both the camera and the flash, this is great because when you get the flash set for a given aperture you can control the ambient just by changing the shutter speed, this is good for to get moody skies.

NB. I have been trying to post these for a few days but it seems the people over at google blogger have had an extended xmas break, all back in working order now. I went to the lake district again today so I'll hopefully have some of those shots up soon. Happy 2009 everyone!

You guessed it, a tree...at sunrise!

Hey folks, I wasn't in the best frame of mind for photos this morning so it became more like a what not to do on a photo outing and if you can still come away with something half way decent you are doing ok. (Remember, it's what not to do, and I did them all!)

1. Set off with no plan of what you intend to shoot.
2. Take the bare minimum in terms of equipment, filters and polarisers just take up space and you won't need them.
3. Leave yourself no time to get to where you wish to take photos.
4. Walk the least distance possible but through bogs that only 50,000 horse power tractors can get through, if possible wear brand new Italian motorcycle boots, oh and clean jeans!
5. Don't worry about checking what ISO you were using last time, it'll probably be a nice noise free 100 anyway.
6. Take a haphazard, almost child like approach to crossing muddy puddles, with equipment depreciation these days you can always just get a brand new camera should it come off the tripod as you skip over the half lit puddles.
7. Spend no time thinking about composition, you'll just over complicate things, is a straight horizon really that important?

This is the result, I'm amazed I managed to remember to take the lens cap off! I got away with being a little lax this time because I was familiar with the surroundings and the equipment. The timing of the shot is critical, shots 10 minutes either side of this one would be moved to deleted pretty much as soon as I got them on the computer. For anyone still following this was a HDR so the shutter varied from 5 secs to about 1/25. ISO was 100 (I do check this without thinking now, despite the above point 5) Keeping ISO's low is extra important when doing HDR stuff, f/16 and 16mm.

I'm adding another shot to this post as I think I prefer it to the HDR look, I'll probably change my mind back as soon as I post it!

More from the Vault

This is an old one I was playing with today, only posting as I have been pretty poor at keeping the blog up to date recently. I'll hopefully get out soon to get some landscapes done as we've had some nice clear weather recently, all be it a mite cold! I'm not too keen on the square (ish) crop, only noticed that a minute ago. I'm sorry if this is a little brief, I'm dashing out so can't give any tips on this one.

Desert Landscape

This was taken out in the desert (surprisingly enough). I didn't have a lot of time to set this one up as I was holding people up. Unfortunately there wasn't a huge amount of foreground interest, unless you count fag packets and plastic bottles, so I tried to do something with the ripples and the reeds. I originally wanted to have a black and white version but I think the colour one just edged it. This was taken at ISO400 (I had a polariser on) f8, 1/100 at 16mm.

HDR in Dubai

I used to do a fair bit of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography but now I tend to just use an ND grad to balance the sky. This is not so easy when you have lots of sky scrapers dissecting the horizon, plus setting up the filter can be a little bit annoying.

This was taken using my 16-35 lens at 19mm, I focused on the horizon and then set it to manual focus, the camera was in full manual mode at f11 ISO100. The only thing I changed was the shutter speed. I used to just bracket 2 stops either side and join the 3 raw files but now I take up to 9 exposures as I think it gives a far better result.
The speeds for this one was 1/15,1/30,1/60,1/125,1/250,1/500,1/1000 and 1/2000 so a stop difference every time (1 stop is half or double the light) or if you aren't great at judging stops, if your camera works in 1/3 stop increments, each stop is a 3 clicks on either the dial or the wheel.