An occasional Photo Blog
Thanks to the sensational summer this year’s wine promises to be one of the best for a long time. Even the autumn has been very kind to us so far, and the sight of beautiful golden leaves against cloudless blue skies has not been uncommon…. except for today.
The sun broke through the high cloud a little bit this morning, but this afternoon when I was out and about it remained hidden and the bright autumnal colours remained somewhat dull.
Recently I’ve been mentioning the weather quite often on this blog, perhaps because weather does have a significant influence on the mood of a picture. This weekend I had hoped to capture a typical May image of a bright sunlit field of yellow rapeseed with a backdrop of dark rain clouds. Not to be I’m afraid. No shortage of rain clouds, but sunshine was in short supply, giving the clouds a dreary grey appearance instead of the dramatic darkness I had hoped for. Not to be put off by a drop or two of rain I ventured out this morning with wellies, hat and Barbour jacket and came home with the following images. Shooting both RAW and JPG, I tried to reproduce the desired dark skies in the first image by applying a graduated filter with RawTherapee before doing the usual adjustments in Gimp…. I think I need a bit of practice.
Easter doesn’t stand or fall by the weather, so we decided not to head south in search of warmer climes. We had plenty of chocolate eggs to tuck in to, and the K30 performs well in rain, sleet and sunshine – and we’ve enjoyed all three. The three Black & White images were captured on a Good Friday stroll around the village. The three colour images were taken today, Easter Monday.
Even on chilly, miserable days Sunday wouldn’t be complete without a walk. Whilst waiting to venture out into the wintry afternoon I checked the K-30’s battery, polished the shiny bits and made sure there were no grubby marks on the lens. Just to make sure everything was working as it should I took a photo or two before slipping on the winter pulli.
Before throwing myself into the evening’s festivities I took advantage of the first glimpse of sunshine for several days. The first image was taken at about 07:41am (The EXIF Data shows 08:41, perhaps I really should put the camera’s clock right). The morning really was beautiful, and although there was plenty of bright sunshine everything was shrouded in a hint of mist. Despite doing a certain amount of experimentation with exposure settings, several of the images did have a distracting blue hue. Not wanting to spend hours on post processing on New Year’s Eve I decided to convert some of the images to B&W. I really must work on my blue snow syndrome.
A very Happy New Year to all my readers!!
It’s been snowing relentlessly all day and has now turned quite wintry, which is no big surprise really because after all, it is late December. Despite the cold and snow and not wanting to mollycoddle a weatherproof camera I decided to leave my cosy armchair and take the K-30 for a walk. If you think the snow looks a bit grey on some of the images you’re not mistaken…. very cold, very cloudy, snowing heavily and terrible light.
Perhaps I should have tackled one or two jobs in the garden on Saturday, the damp lawn needs cutting before the snow comes and a few shrubs need a good trim But sometimes one just has to get one’s priorities right, so I decided on a stroll with the K-30 🙂
Last weekend I was very tempted to fill up my SD card with leafy subjects, after all there does seem to be an abundance of them at the moment. However the few images I captured just didn’t reflect what I had in mind at all. Perhaps this weekend will prove more successful.
I had hoped to capture bright images of the sun breaking through the early morning autumn mist. But as I set off (reasonably) early on Sunday morning I realised that I may well have to wait longer than I thought. Indeed it wasn’t until I was already sipping my midday coffee back home that the sun began to make it’s presence felt. Nevertheless with or without sunshine autumn mist never fails to fascinate me, as does the very special smell of autumn.
After a week of atypical summer weather it was very nice to take breakfast outside this morning and once again feel the need for lots of sun cream. Today is 1st August, a national holiday. A day of flag waving, barbecues and fireworks. Straight after breakfast (early afternoon) I took the dog and the Pentax for a leisurely stroll and then spent a little time basking in the sunshine and experimenting with a few camera settings which I’d never used before.
