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This is the view from Faifley, Clydebank this morning. There is an electrical substation with the usual tentacles of high tension charge snaking outwards. These particular tendrils are heading towards Glasgow which was nestled in this morning’s freezing mists.
Handheld picture, snatched in 2 minutes with my 500D and 4omm f2.8 pancake lens. 1/80th sec at ISO100
I had so much fun today photographing Helen. Helen is a writer and will be published this year, hence her mind turning to some up-to-date shots for her publisher to use. (That sounds so cool!). I was delighted that she trusted me to have a go and I am so pleased with the results.
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Helen was probably freezing throughout the shoot as the temperature never got above about 2 degrees, and there was a fair wind as well. This of course meant that we had to have a warming coffee after as well as before the shoot and that meant even more wonderful conversation. I really can’t wait to read her book which she has kindly offered me a copy of in draft. We like a lot of the same authors, so the writing chat could just go on and on….
Photographically, the sun was surprisingly strong, so I placed a remote flash on a stand behind and to my right, and let the sun work its rim-light magic behind Helen. To photographers this is such an obvious thing to do, but non-photographers so often instinctively let the sun hit the subject’s face resulting in screwed up eyes and anything but a relaxed subject. Even with a little compact camera or a phone-camera, use the option to force the flash on and put the sun behind the subject.
This image was from inside the coffee place near Auchinstarry Quarry in Kilsyth where we did the shoot. It was great to be warm with the camera I have to tell you. This one was taken with natural light and my old Canon 500D and my new 40mm pancake lens; it is very sharp and so small to carry around. Good for having in coffee places!
Connect with Helen at her blog, A way with Words. It is a great read!
I accidentally found myself at the viewpoint carpark above Paisley at the dramatic edge of the Glennifer braes tonight just as it was turning dark. I confess that I had gone out to try and catch a nice view just to exercise my landscape skills, but I only had a short time and the route I drove was so dangerously snow covered that I couldn’t find any stopping places for the car as all verges were completely snow covered. Having struggled to get the car up to the braes at all, I didn’t dare backtrack on sheer safety grounds! So, hoping to snatch anything interesting, I set up my tripod and my 7D, and took a few long-exposure shots of the lightscape below. This one is the view of Paisley Abbey, then the busy road to Renfrew with its Gothic town hall dominating the upper right hand area at the end of the bright road, and although you can’t see it, the Clyde is just behind that with the four high flats beyond being roughly around the Yoker area of Glasgow.
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I couldn’t decide whether the colours were distracting when the density of light points is so huge to start with, so I converted a near identical image into black and white and would welcome your view on which works best?
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I don’t really rate this other image, and normally wouldn’t bother posting it, however, pointing the camera slightly left of the previous view, shows you the Kilpatrick Hills in the background behind the Clyde, the Erskine Bridge with its curve of yellow lights in the upper right of the image, and Ben Lomond in the upper left. Behind the long central line of motorway lights (A737 Linclive Spur) is the large area of Glasgow Airport. The foreground shows the red tail-light trail of the road from paisley up the Glennifer Braes and illustrates nicely the long, 30 second exposure required here to get anything in such darkness. Impossible without a tripod!
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The First image was a telephoto with my 70-300 IS lens and the other was using my 17-85 IS. (IS switched off for both as it tends to “fight” with the tripod and Canon advise this).
I post these pics on my blog at 600 pixels wide and this kind of shot shows the shortcomings of that resolution. the extra resolution and detail on the original image makes these at least interesting pics, but the reduced pixel count doesn’t work well for the myriad dotted lights! I will look into how I could also upload a higher res when it really matters.
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I just liked the little Doc Martens against the snow. getting HB to stand still for long enough to let me take the picture was the main challenge here. However a second major challenge was the low light. I took this immediately on leaving my work at about 4.50 pm. There was a streetlight or a floodlight helping with the little daylight that was left, but I still needed ISO 3200 at f5.6 to get an unimpressive 1/20th of a second. The next challenge was the mixed light temperatures. An orange cast was all over the snow, but when I tried to lower the colour temperature the picture toggled into too cold a blue. The trouble was the natural light had a lot of cooler daylight blue while I suspect the streetlight was warmer oranges. I took the way out of the scoundrel and dragged an adjustment brush all around the snow with a massive colour saturation cut selected. The very perceptive among you (with good screens) might notice the slight warm hint on her unaltered leggings.
Here is the ragamuffin herself. The cast is clear here even though I have reduced it a bit and brightened her face with an adjustment brush in lightroom.
Well eventually I had to continue with my occasional revisiting of my 100-portraits project. The next one in order was Sheona (no 24 in order in the original 2008 project). The session with Sheona was in Kelvingrove park and was just great fun and very relaxed indeed. The original choice of image for the project was a dramatic “looking-straight-upwards-into-the-camera” image, so although there were stacks of great images from that session, I wanted to go for a more traditional portrait pose by way of contrast. I can’t say wether this would have been my second choice, but it would have been in my top 10 which says something about how usable most of the images from that session were!
The black and white preset was applied after making some local adjustments to get the lighting looking right. As many of my blog readers will know, I have a thing about green foliage backgrounds. I don’t hate them, but I don’t think they make the best portrait backgrounds. I have a pet theory about the way we are hard-wired to survey foliage and how that distracts from the subject. I found that a nice bright and contrasty preset totally reduced that distraction and allowed the foliage to become lovely texture instead.
