Wedding Photographer, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Posts tagged Landscape Photographer
Landscape Photography Walk Over, Back to Work
Jul 30th
Well we are back from our walk from the Atlantic to The Med over the Pyrenees. In all it took about 45 days walking and about 4 days resting, there were plenty of ups and downs in more ways than one. To say we under estimated it would be an understatement but I managed to get the camera out once or twice for the Landscape Photography. To be honest we were so exhausted at the end of each day, we were in bed before sunset and when we were up before sunrise we usually had to cover the ground before the sun started cooking us. As it rained solidly for the first 2 weeks the camera stayed in the waterproof bag!
Anyway I’ll hopefully set up a more dedicated area for the photos, some are on my flickr stream but I thought I’d post one of my favorites of the trip. This was right at the very end of the trek at Banyuls sur Mer. I had got up early and hobbled down to the sea. Luckily I was rewarded by a great sunrise just as the bakeries were firing up!
GR10 Trail - A Long distance hike over 900kms over the Pyrenees from the atlantic to the mediterranean
We have raised quite a bit for Cancer Research but donations are always welcome, our just giving site is here if you would like to donate. All in all it was a great experience which I would recommend to anyone, I think if we tried anything like it again we would probably take a little less stuff! Anyway back to the wedding and portrait photography, which we love, if we could just find the couple who are getting married on top of a mountain!
Lake in Wakefield, West Yorkshire
Apr 23rd
Not really a lake as such, those thinking it is Buttermere in the middle of West Yorkshire may be disappointed, but it’s still quite nice to stroll around. Anyway Pugney’s sailing club in Wakefield is usually where I go if I need a reflected sky shot and as it’s only a few miles from where I live I can get there quickly if the sky looks interesting. There are actually quite a few swans there as well so it has a lot of potential, photographically. When I was setting this shot up a lone swan came close to the rock in the shot (about 3 feet away) but my shutter speed at the time was too slow to freeze the movement but if I’d have been a bit quicker it would have been award winning, it’s I’d have been even quicker I’d have used my new gold reflector, that was quite close by, to light the swan up. In fact I’m going to go back and try for that exact shot very soon.
Landscape Photography of A Lake in Wakefield, West Yorkshire at Sunset
Anyway back to the (swan-less) image. Shots like this always work well low to the water so you generally get a bit wet, your tripod and camera strap usually get dunked too but as long as you can keep the camera safe no harm is done. This one needed a little foreground inerest, the previously mentioned swan would have been great but a rock would suffice. This was taken at 20mm, f/8, ISO500 for 30 Seconds. Yes it was a long exposure, I have ordered a more accurately colour balanced 10 stop filter from Lee which I will hopefully soon have but the HiTech version worked fine, once the magenta was removed in lightroom. There is a little lens flare coming from the centre of the image but I quite liked it in this version so I kept it in. The sky in the end didn’t go as red and impressive as I’d planned and the swan didn’t stick around but next time maybe…
Lighthouse on Anglesey, North Wales
Apr 21st
Path to the Lighthouse
I haven’t posted any landscape photography in ages so it was good to get out and do some. I was over in Wales on Monday doing a bit of training for our up and coming trip over the Pyrenees (http://www.iwouldwalk500miles.co.uk/) and got these two shots on Llanddwyn Island of what looks to be a converted lighthouse. The island itself has loads of great photographic subjects, I could have spent a lot longer taking photos (and I was there for 4 hours) but I decided to concentrate on the lighthouse and the path leading up to it. It was a nice clear sunset, not a great deal going on in the sky as there were no clouds and my ideas of the volcanic ash making for brilliant sunsets has yet to materialise so I concentrated on the land.
Lighthouse on Anglesey taken on Llanddwyn Island
The mountains you can just start to see behind are in Snowdonia. We did go to climb one of them the following day but after a pretty cold night in the tent followed by what can only be described as an unprovoked attack on my wallet by the generous souls at a certain breakdown company, we decided to come back. It was a very enjoyable few days and if you are over that way I would recommend popping down to Llanddwyn Island for a look round and maybe the odd photo.
Yorkshire Dales Three Peaks Walk Photography
Mar 9th
We did the three peaks walk in the Yorkshire dales at the weekend, which is a 26 mile all day walking affair over 3 of the peaks in the dales, (Pen-y-ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough) and had some of the best landscapes Yorkshire has to offer. I had seen a similar photography idea that I wanted to try during the walk, it basically involved taking a photo every minute or so for about 12 hours, it got quite tedious after about 15 minutes, especially going up the hills and finding 3 feet of frozen snow on the tops but it was worth it in the end and the weather was pretty stunning too.
I also managed to get a couple of usable landscape photographs at some points that I have used at the start of the video to set the scene, I’ll put these up in a post soon.
Landscape Photography Competitions, who needs them
Mar 3rd
Sunrise through the Branches
Hi folks, one of my traditional landscape photography from the Wakefield region posts today. I’m having to post a couple of my B-sides from earlier this year when we had all the snow. I found it during after a bit of an unforced photo library reorganisation, the less said about that the better! It wasn’t my favorite shot of the morning but I thought I’d put it up, if anything to remind people what a sunrise looks like as it seems so long since we’ve seen a decent one (although it was a nice day yesterday). The details were ISO100, f/16, 1/8 at 32mm and if I recall correctly I’ll have had my Neutral density grad on. Even though I have used a silhouetted tree and branch to frame the sky I still wanted the snowy field behind to be visible, so I still used a grad, otherwise everything but the sky would be black. I polished it up a little in lightroom as I tend to do with shots with all my landscape photography with quite a high dynamic range.
Buachaille Etive Mor and The Cuillins
Jun 15th
Not the easiest mountain to pronounce, Buachaille Etive Mor or the buckle as it is known in some walking mags. It is near Glen Coe and normally has a decent covering of snow on it but more often than not, a few low clouds I imagine. This was taken at sunrise at about 3.30. A common composition has a few waterfalls in it but I didn’t like it as there is a small tree that slightly obscures the mountain. The exif for this was ISO100, 16mm, f/16, 0.6 second. The next shot was also in Scotland, this time on the isle of Skye and is a rugged mountain range known as the Cuillins, we walked up one of these a few hours after this was taken, it was a little grueling to say the least, not aided by the fact that it was one of the hottest days ever recorded on the wee island. Spectacular views at the top though but quite difficult to get a shot in the midday sun. This one from the bottom uses the bridge near the Sligachan hotel for a bit of foreground interest. The exif is ISO100 at 28mm, f/8 for 30 seconds, I used the 10 stop neutral density to try and get some movement in the clouds, didn’t really need it in the end.More Beach Photography
Jun 10th
Two more beaches from Harris, these probably count as the same beach but one is a little bit hidden. They aren’t short of white beaches and blue seas up there, unless you go to the east side and then it’s rocks and more rocks, the change in landscape over such a short distance has to be seen to be believed. The fist shot was another with the 10 stop ND filter and a 90 second exposure at f/11 (ISO100) one of the key things I learnt whilst doing this was to stand and position your shadow over the camera and tripod, this gets rid of any glare from the sun. I’d always read about shielding the sun but my hand always ended up in the shot. 
If I’m not behind the camera I may as well make myself useful and stand at the side! This technique cannot be done in the second photo as the sun is in shot, producing the glare, it can be removed in post but I wanted to keep it in on this one. Nothing overly tricky with this one, ISO100 16mm, f/16 for 1/3 sec. I had a 3 stop soft grad to make the sky play ball and tried to compose so the lines (rocks, sand etc) lead to the sun.