Nostalgia

Today I was browsing through Spotify - a beautiful little piece of free-ware that if you don't have you should get right now. And I found myself humming the tune to someday - Nickleback not really to my current taste of music, but my taste of music was not all ways what it currently is. Anyway having found and listened to this song it reminded quite vividly of my summer holidays, and a handful of other songs that I used to listen to over and over back in the early 'naughties' (I use inverted commas because I'm still holding out for that decade to be named something else, less annoying) and after about an hour of solid golden musical nostalgia I ended up with this play-list (you will need Spotify for this link to work)

Here is a picture, because I wanted to post it, but didn't think it justified it's own post:

'Rosalind'

Babysitting

'Tis a common occurrence in the world of Ben to be asked to sit for his baby brother Barnabas. It can be a pleasure for him to hang out with his younger brother who often reminds him of his older brother, or even his father in both looks and mental aptitude ( that was a joke )

Recently Ben was asked to carry out such a task and of course accepted as he had no good reason not to. As Ben had, just the previous day, received his camera lens back he supposed this a good opportunity to welcome back his baby ( the camera, not his brother ) Given that he had not taken a recent picture of Barnabas, as is a habit of his - in an attempt to record his development, this was an opportune moment to be seized.

'Smile'

'Hand off'

'Distracted'

'Budding photographer'

'Baby phone home'

'Mummy!'

Dramatic Skies

Clouds are trickey subjects, they usually end up white and washed out or grey and boring. Either way they are generally lacking definition and are rarely as exciting as they can look to the eye. So I decided to try and get something more from those fluffly seas of gass:

Original








 Tone compression








Details enhanced

HDR

High Dynamic range, gives you more highlights in the shadows and more definition in the lights. Essentially the best of both an under exposed shot and an over exposed shot in one picture. I recently discovered Photomatix a very powerful program for combining over and underexposed shots to give such a result.

There are many, many effects that can be given using this program, producing a whole plethora of results.

I have only had it for about 2 hours so here are my very first attempts the shot before and the shot after:

I was going for the grainy/gritty/grunge type look and I was fairly pleased

Took an over exposed, washed out image and added a bit of dynamic range :)

Hopes, Plans and Potential

I am at present without camera however this gives me an oppertunity to put a little more thought into what I want to do when I get it back ... absence makes the heart grow fonder they say, not that I have any form of relationship with any inanimate object, let alone my camera.

Anyway, I though a good place to start would be things I have seen and just thought 'hmmm, I like the look of that' Or a picture that I have seen and thought 'That is why the camera was invented'

1. I have for aslong as I can remember I have been fascinated by the way that trees look alot like spiders webs when you look at them with a light behind them. It's quite hard to describe what I mean without the aid of a picture but I always found it very strange as I knew the branches didnt grow in that shape. I later came to realise that it is because only one side of all of the branches is light while the other side remains in darkness and therefore near invisibility at night time with a black background.  Because the light source comes from a single point the effect given is that of a circle, hense the spider web effect.
2. Smoke, water, fire, ink the list goes on... Basically those things have a special property which is quite hard to pin down, let me describe it like this: You could watch a smoking incense stick, a burning fire a flowing water feature or a drop of ink or dye falling into water for hours and not see the same pattern in the medium twice. It constantly changes like it has a life of it's own despite the fact that nothing appears to be causing the change. Taking pictures of these can be very hard, capturing the flickering of a flame or the rolling of a drop of water isn't easy because it's more than a visual stimulus, it's the smell of ashes and the sound of runing water that add to the experiance but none the less, I endevour to capture them. Seeing as I have already blogged fire water and ink my next step will be to attempt smoke, the most illusive of the four!
3. Fractals - patterns that themselves contain patterns and so on and so forth. 

You might have noticed water that has frozen quickly leaves behind streaks in the ice.
Or if you pull apart two peices of paper that had wet glue on them, the glue forms a pattern.
When salt crystals form from evaporating water.
The leaves of ferns.
The way tree branches grow.
The way that big rivers split near shore lines.
Certain cloud formations.
The way lightning forks.
Blood vessel formation.
the shape of bacteria colonies .
The feathers of a peacock.
The patterns on sea shells.
Snowflakes structure.
etc etc etc
This list is anything but exhaustive, throughout the whole of creation from the formation of molecules all the way up to the shapes of galaxies and even galaxy clusters fractals can be found in abundance. I have only given visual examples of fractals aswell, there are many fractals that can be found within music despite the fact that the artist had no intention of putting them there. There are even people who have come up with ways of explaining the stockmarket trends based on their understanding of fractals!  This has often been used as part of the design argument for the existance of god, unconclusive but arguably pursuasive. I am totaly blown away at some of the uncanny and phenomenal natural occurances of patterns such as fractals ( which is only one type of pattern ... try googling the fibbonachi sequence in nature) and can see why many are drawn to conclude that there is a God who made everything with a purpose and a plan.

Well, this is easily enough content to keep me snapping till I drop and then some, so I will stop here :)

Dead head

My step mum is in the habbit of buy or having flowers bought for her on a fairly regular basis. This means that we often end up with more flowers in the house than out and they tend not to last as long as garden flowers. This is usuprising given that they have at some point been yanked out the ground and wrapped in a plastic straight jacket. So, I have taken it upon myself to capture these often quite amazing flowers in there final moments of glory and share them with you. I don't know much about flowers so I wont be able to tell you what they are, but if you recognise them feel free to let us in on the know how.

Journey

I like being driven places at night time and I felt the need to capture the memories, problem is they tend to produce very boring pictures that dont really capture the event. However, stick a camera on BULB and the streets are your canvas:

Day time

Today, because of the fine weather conditions, I made the venture to the top of a familiar tree to take a picture of something that I have already taken a picture of and made a post about.
Now that might sound like cheating or possibly just boring, I prefer to think of it as recycling. which is always good right?
I jest - the fact that this picture is taken in the day time is what makes all the difference as the previous one was taken during a sunset. So behold the beautiful city in which I make my abode:

Light Graffiti

This is a very old concept: slow shutter, source of hand-held light and the world is your canvas.

This is a work in progress and is progressing slowly but thats ok cause I have quite a while and it's not like im working to a deadline, or infact working atall - its all leisure :)

so anyway here are some pictures, going from earliest to more recent as they descend:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This last one being the most recent with the youth on a weekend away to Wern Watkin  

Wow, that was alot of photo. hope you enjoyed it, I have a feeling there will be plenty more to follow in this line. 

Oh and I almost forgot! Fire can totally mix well with this type of photography:

Spring

Winter is over, and the weather certainly seems to know it (or at least it did today) I actually had to search the skies quite hard to find a cloud when I woke up this morning so I took my camera with me to college so I could snap up the sunshine on my journey home.

A little unexpected - I saw some guys playing with a remote control airoplane so I thought I would test out the auto foucus speed which was easily fast enough to keep up with me, keeping up with the plane.