Cameras these days are like science fiction devices compared to when I first started taking pictures.  Back then everything was manual; setting the exposure, focusing, film winding.  Now we have all these wonderful automatic tools at our disposal, and auto focus has come on in leaps and bounds since the first, rather clunky, iterations.  That does not mean that it’s foolproof, nor does it mean that you should just let it do its work without any input from you. Here are three examples of different focus issues. Some auto focus systems need edge contrast to do their job, and when ..read more

In my “Movement in Photography” talk I mention the difference it makes to an ICM image if you move the camera in one direction, compared to moving it at right angles to that direction.  Information at right angles to the direction of camera movement tends to get spread out, whereas information in the direction of camera movement is accentuated.  Take these tree images as an example: In this first image I have moved the camera, (my mobile phone – 2 second exposure), in generally the same direction as the tree trunks.  Although there is a bit of horizontal information, most of th ..read more

I have a “deceptive” glass in my small collection of interesting glasses.  A deceptive glass has very thick sidewalls, and thus holds much less liquid than it appears to when filled. In Georgian times coaching inns had them.  A coach would stop, passengers would rush in for a quick drink and be given it in a deceptive glass.  They paid for a full normal glassful of course!  I looked at the glass with its thick walls and thought, “That might act as a lens”! My camera was fitted with the Oly 60mm macro lens, so I just held the glass up against the UV filter on the front of ..read more

Living in Worcester means I am not too far from Birmingham.  It’s just half an hour on the train from Worcestershire Parkway to Birmingham New Street.  That station has a lot of glass panels all over it, and they make for a useful source of reflection images. I was lucky enough to be there on a cloudless day with lots of sunshine.  The colours of the surrounding buildings against the blue of the sky were fabulous.  Isolating just a small section of the reflection made the image into an almost painterly abstract. Above one of the entrances there’s another lot of glass pane ..read more

Recently I went to the fabulous Autumn Garden at Queenswood Country Park near Hereford.  One feature of that part of the wood is the Japanese Maples.  They were in full colour and looked fantastic.  It was a sunshine and showers day, so there were lots of water droplets around. I had my Olympus macro lens on, so set my camera to manual focus and defocussed the image.  I concentrated on a small part of a maple that had dissected leaves.  The shapes and colours  of the leaves, and the water droplet highlights, made for a very pleasing abstract composition. I had m ..read more

Living, as I now do, in Worcester, the Malverns Hills are now a local place to visit.  Although they are called hills, some of the peaks are high enough to be classified as mountains.  Once such is Herefordshire Beacon at 1109 feet above sea level.  It’s the site of British Camp, a huge Iron Age earthwork complex.  The earthworks give a curious silhouette to the hill, and it looks very man-made. The views from the Malvern Hills are wonderful.  Elizabethan diarist John Evelyn called it “one of the godliest vistas in England”.  There are three cathedrals visible on ..read more

As we move into the darker and colder days of winter it’s easy to fall into bad habits and stop looking for images, or say, “It’s all a bit grey, so I’ll leave my camera at home”!  Remember though, even if you don’t go out much, there are still loads of photographic subjects, some even right at your feet. One birthday gift I had was a fabulous cheese selection with vintage port and an olive wood cheese board.  The wood looks to have been “spalted”.  That’s where it’s been attacked by fungi and developed fascinating patterns in the grain.  I looked closely at the wood and f ..read more

Blimey, it’s getting awfully close to Christmas again! One thing I did a couple of Christmases ago was to go to the Worcester Cathedral Christmas Tree Festival.  There were loads of decorated trees in the Cathedral cloister.  Some were from schools, some from charities and some from commercial organisations.  Most were fab! Here I’ve used my mobile’s Silky Water mode, (yes, again!), and walked as fast as I could down the cloister.  I had to wait till there weren’t too many people.  I like the combination of warm orangey lights and cooler blue lights. This is rather c ..read more

A generous friend gave me a bellows attachment.  Bellows allow you to get the lens away from the camera body, and this gives you more magnification.  It was made for an M42 screw-thread mount camera system (think 1950/60’s Pentax or Praktica), so making it work with my Olympus MFT system needed an adapter. Having done a few trial images I decided to “go big or go home” and stuck on some extension tubes (two lots of two) as well.  Oh, and I also fitted my Olympus 1.4x teleconverter.  The converter is not designed to do this, but it fits if you are careful.  It ended up ..read more

On a walk with a friend on a lovely sunny day we came across a large electricity pylon.  The appearance of pylons divides people, but whether you like them or not it’s worth looking up and seeing if there are any images to be found. The sun was shining through the glass insulators on the pylon.   I used a couple of stops of negative Exposure Compensation to try and keep the highlight detail in the insulators, and this had the bonus effect of darkening the very blue sky.  It was worth waiting till a small cloud had moved away so it was a plain blue background. Sidebar: there ..read more