Windsurf & Kite Session
I took a couple of hours on Friday afternoon to shoot with an old friend of mine, Whitey . It was a pretty exceptional day for wind and sun, it was almost hard to believe when I arrived at the beach, that I was in Clacton.
For me, I wanted to try out an old, very cheap, manual Soligor lens shooting some action. The wind and direction made keeping the long lens stable a bit of a challenge, especially given the lens length and that I wasn’t using a rail set up. I put this short edit together for fun, from some of the footage, with all except the wide shots at the beginning on the Soligor. Whitey has some nice pics on his page too, so it’s worth taking a look there.
Tide Mill Black & White conversion
Out testing some old lenses last week and passed by Thorrington tide mill, which is across the road from where we used to live. A great spot, backed by creeks and a lake, it doesn’t get a huge amount of visitors. We used to walk our daughter here, when she was a baby, so it was nice to stop by and think back for a few minutes.
Just before leaving I shot this and thought it would make a good subject for black and white conversion. Using Silkypix to process the raw, I played with curves, a little sharpening and then added back in a little grain, just for taste. Quite pleased with the end result, even though there is a little distortion from the lens. Smugmug are now offering a UK print service, so I might use this as one of my trial prints to check it out.
Sea fog
I liked this shot from today. I think it looks cold and desolate, but today couldn’t have been more different. Beautiful warm spring sunshine and a calm sea. This small amount of mist was just blowing in across the sand and transformed the scene for a few minutes. The old breakwaters are silhouetted, as i was shooting into the sun.
Quick shots from the beach
I’ve been pretty busy recently, so it was nice to have the chance to get out over the weekend and in the sunshine no less and shoot some fun pictures. My sister and her husband have a new pup, called Remy, who isn’t the easiest target to photograph. With such strong backlight off of the sea and with fast movement, getting anything remotely right is pretty difficult. So I was pleased to get these shots of my daughter Evy, whilst she was playing with Remy. All manual focus, using an OM 50 1.8
This is also my first blog, using my old Smugmug blog to link to. With the change over to this website, I had started to upload blog images to here rather than Smugmug. Now with a bit of reorganising I’m back to using the old Smugmug blog to power this one. Sounds confusing, but sort of makes sense to me anyway 
Icy debris
The whole Europe seems to be shivering with cold at the moment. Here in the UK, we just had a dusting of a few inches over the weekend. I was out with my daughter sledging and on the way back took a detour along the beach. While the weather was bleak, there were some interesting snow formations on the sand to shoot. Here are a couple from yesterday. Hopefully I will get a chance to shoot some more before it all melts away..
Quick and easy HDR
I found a great little piece of software a while back, called HDRtist. It comes as a free and simple faux HDR package or you can buy the “Pro” version for not a lot. While PS and other editing software has plug ins a plenty for this sort of thing, HDRtist just does what is wrtten on the tin. Quick, simple and very easy HDRs and HDR fakes from single images.
It will open Raw files directly, so no need to go round tripping through a conversion first. Here are a couple I did the other day, from the same beach session in my last post.
Low tide breakwaters
Had my first day of 2012 shooting yesterday. The tide was out, leaving some pools on the beach. Tried a few different spots, but this was my favourite of the bunch. Raws processed with Silkypix, which I keep going back to for Black and White conversion.
