Another mini-portrait of one of the mini-people from HB’s party at the weekend. This lovely young lady always has a smile for me when I see her in her nursery and so taking a nice picture of her is just a total pleasure.
ISO 1600 f5.6 64mm external flash with eye highlight screen up!
Hope her mum and dad like it!
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Today was a certain young lady’s birthday. HB turned 3 and had the obligatory party at a soft play centre. I was naturally tasked with taking some pictures and thankfully brought my full frame 5D along with me. The room that they had provided for the kids, had no windows and just bare strip-lights on the ceiling; as a result shadows were cast on little-ones faces and the sheer light levels were very low. ISO 3200 got me 1/40th of a second! I had my Canon Speedlight 580 on the hot-shoe so it froze the motion and filled potential facial shadows.
Ice-cream with “hundreds and thousands” held her still for just long enough to get a shot. She wasn’t very photographically co-operative today and as a result I got very few sharp pictures of her; it was her special day however so that means that this has to be today’s image.
ISO 3200 is not significantly noisy on the 5D mk2. Horses-for-courses indeed!
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Today I took an afternoon walk up Conic Hill from Balmaha. The forecast was for a sunny clear (but cold) day. I took my 7D and my Sigma 10-20mm lens up with me and my very useful Giottos carbon tripod. My timing was just about right as I made the top with about 10 minutes till sunset. I also had my seldom used set of grad filters so this gave me time to assemble tripod and filters and engage “mirror lockup”, almost like a real landscape guy!
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I also managed to get a shot with a lovely family giving some people interest, but I didn’t ask permission to post it, so I missed that chance!
I would like to tell what the grad filter was that I used, but if I’m honest it was pretty cold and so I just tried them with a trial and error approach. There was one on, but who knows; I’ll try harder next time!
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En-route home today from our extremely relaxing and enjoyable stay in Kilmartin, we inevitably had to drive over the pass of the Rest and be Thankful. This is pretty much the gateway road into Argyll and is more or less a 1000ft pass. It is odd driving into Argyll where we lived for almost three years recently and where I worked for almost the last 10 years. I crossed this pass daily for long periods and a few times a week in general. I seldom took any photographs of it however, so it was fun to stop for 10 minutes and just look again. My Canon 7D still had its 10-20 Sigma on from yesterday’s near sub-aqua-in-darkness photograph of Kilmartin, so I popped it out of the bag and shot 5 or 6 handheld shots thinking it was too grey and uninteresting to commit to the tripod since they wouldn’t work anyway! (Landscape specialists forgive me for this cardinal sin!). It turned out that they were acceptably sharp at 1/60th second anyway so on returning home I did a little work in Lightroom bringing some definition and emphasising interesting light that was hardly there in the first place.
The other big challenge was composing the image to get any kind of foreground interest. the bench placed approximately on the intersection of thirds has given the image some kind of balance. The shots without any foreground were utterly dull (as I expected them to be). It was a reminder to me that sometimes the shot isn’t sunbeams, low angled light and the gods smiling all over the photographer’s landscape. It is instead grafting with what little you have got and using what little you know to make the best of it!
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So Happy New Year to all of my friends from all around the world. It was interesting to look at the stats from my web provider last week and to note how incredibly international the hits to my photo blog are. In fact only a tiny proportion of people from my own native UK and Scotland are visitors. My main visitors seem to be from the US and China!
Anyway, I am bringing in the new year here in Scotland in pretty much the centre of the ancient Celtic World! I am a guest in Julie’s mum and dad’s wonderful bed and breakfast in Kilmartin. The brightly lit corner house in the centre of this image is where they live and it overlooks the burial mounds in Kilmartin Glen where there must be the largest concentration of standing stones and ancient burial mounds in Scotland.
Anyway, late this afternoon in pouring rain, I walked down with my Canon 7D and my rarely used Manfrotto tripod and found a spot with my back to the burn (river) and engaged this portrait photographer’s least used function, “mirror lockup”. To my horror the camera misted up in the soaking conditions so I had to wait while getting soaked as it slowly cleared. Anyway, the point of today’s exercise was that I had holiday time and I know that I don’t take enough pictures these days, so I had resolved that whatever the conditions I would try something. I was out for a run an hour earlier and noticed that the village sat very broodingly above the glen in this awful squally rain. I strolled back down after changing out of my running gear and thoroughly enjoyed getting very very wet. I had to dry what was in my camera bag on returning so I hope that my Sigma 10-20 wide angle zoom doesn’t suffer any damage!
The picture required a lot of post-processing in Lightroom, and for the benefit of my hosts this crop shows their house fairly clearly.
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So mirror Lockup on, remote trigger (reliable and £5 from ebay), f11 from memory and composed using live view. You really should go and enjoy this lovely area using the Rosebank bed and breakfast hosted by Isobel and Tommy McLaughlin.
Note: I have re-edited this image in Lightroom. I looked again today, the 2nd January and wondered what I was thinking about! I had pushed the vibrance/saturation to a point that had allowed a purple hue to dominate. The hue must have been there as I didn’t add it, however the saturation push grossly overemphasised it and even though I am relaxed with strong post processing if it works, this was just awful. Anyway, The image was just flat and toneless to start with, my lack of landscape expertise, general rustiness, relief at reclaiming anything from a grey rainstorm in near darkness, and half a bottle of wine meant that my judgement was way off. I am happier with the re-edit but didn’t wan’t it to be uploaded in secret. (Take the shame Matthew :-))
