Behold The Dawn!

I just found this photo I had been playing with a few weeks ago and forgot about it, there isn't much to be said about it really, I'm not a great fan of using myself as foreground interest but when there is nothing else about you just have to make do.

On an unrelated note, apparently photomatix have released a lightroom plugin for all you HDR enthusiasts, I haven't tried it yet but it sounds like a good idea. Anyway I have to sort some wedding photos from the weekend, have a good week everyone.

Altertates to Fireworks & Bonfires

I was going to put a tutorial on how to shoot fireworks but there really are thousands on the web, which all say put camera on manual focus and focus to infinity, ISO to 100, set aperture between f8 & f11 and just vary your shutter speed between 1 and 10 seconds. Position the camera roughly where the rockets are exploding and you'll get some great shots especially if you an use a cable release. A good alternative to firework shots usually missed on bonfire night is the fire itself. As with fireworks you need to be in full manual mode but the aim is to get quick shutter speeds to try to freeze the fire, so you may need to up your ISO a little.

This is a shot I got last night, I thought it had quite a menacing quality. This was taken at f/6.3 for 1/250 sec at ISO 400. There are still a few more nights of reckless pyromania so get out and see what you can get.

Another Day, Another Silhouette

In an attempt to get another picture on the news I went and got this one this morning as I could see it was going to be a belting sunrise. This was taken in a field behind our house. I would have liked to get closer to the tree but the field was contained a few large bulls so I just put on a long lens. This was taken at f16 1/6 sec at 149mm, not a typical landscape focal length it has to be said. I also dialled in -0.3 exposure compensation to keep the land black.

Sandal Castle

I haven't posted in a few days so I thought I'd get back into it with a shot I'm pretty happy with. I was out with a friend taking pictures yesterday and I wasn't having a lot of success, we had originally gone for Autumn leaf type shots but everywhere was still green! I thought it might be a nice sunset so we went to Sandal Castle just outside Wakefield for some landscape photography and was lucky enough to get this shot. Lens flair is always a problem shooting into the sun, it can be reduced by attaching a lens hood and making sure your lens is dust free. I quite liked this sun burst effect so there was no need to edit it out. I also added a dark vignette at the corners. This was taken at f16, 1/30 sec, 31mm at iso 100.
EDIT: This shot was featured on our BBC regional news channel, look north and can be seen at their website here

Silhouette

Another one from the back catalog today, I need to go get a new sensor cleaning brush for my camera so I didn't take any photos yesterday as I didn't want the dust I could see to become "welded" to the sensor. This is a really easy technique to produce great silhouettes of, well whatever your shooting, buildings, animals or people are all good subjects. The key is metering from the sky, as the sky is often a lot brighter relative to the land you will usually get a very high shutter speed such as 1/2000, this will expose the sky correctly but leave the subject black. If you have an exposure lock button (a * on canons) focus on the sky behind your subject, press exposure lock and then refocus your shot on the subject, you usually get about 10 seconds before the exposure lock turns off, take the shot and Roberts your fathers brother.