NIGHTSCAPES 2018/2019 Begins! It all started last night in Roundhay Park – our winter of light painting around Roundhay Park saw us using torches and gels to colour the world! New for 2018 is a “Manker MK 35” torch – this claims to have a 1.4Km beam – it does shine a hell of a long way, and with its very narrow beam, its great for detail work. Think of it as a fine brush, whereas other torches are more like thicker airbrushes. This photo was just the MK35 torch…
Category: Yorkshire
A foggy day on the coast Driving up to the workshop I feared the worst – a day of rain and misery, with a group of photographers huddled together keeping dry It was grim… But as Americans would say, when life gives you lemons, make a G&T…. or something like that! And that is just what we did – the fog gave us a completely different look to the previous workshops we’ve run on the coast. We got landscapes which faded to nothing in the distance. Perfect for the cliffs…
Night Photography at Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds Ok, we’re really lucky to have a ruined abbey right on the edge of our city – and it’s got lots of free parking! So each year I take a new group of photographers down there to light it up with powerful torches and sparks. Here’s what we got up to this year – this is Feb 2018. The group really enjoyed Light Graffiti – that’s drawing things with torches if you keep moving your body doesn’t appear in the photo, just the trace…
Ovenden Moor and Wind Farm Photographers have flocked to this wind farm over the years – the bright stone on the road really stand out from the darker heather moorland, the large turbines create fantastic subjects and if you can get some rotation on them, preferably 1/3 of a turn, they look magical. I’d not been up since the old turbines were replaced, so popped up in Feb 2018 with my trusty 17mm TS lens and got a few images. I also popped down to a viewpoint I really like – looking down…
A 1-2-1 Workshop on a Perfect Yorkshire Dales Day You always book workshops in the Yorkshire Dales with a sense of trepidation, and prepare yourself to explain what each location looks like “when it’s not grey, raining and grim”. No such worries for this 1-2-1 session with Jonathan – perfect weather for afternoon landscapes. Perfect for me is a breezy day where sparse clouds pass in front of the sun making patches of light and dark. We got that in spades, so instead of starting at Gordale Scar, I decided…
Yellow fields of Discovery Discovering just what Tilt Shift can do is great fun – and you have to be hands on. Sure, I’d seen 10 Youtube videos so had a good idea what I needed to do – but here are a few examples from my first landscape trip in summer 2017. Tilt Shift Increasing that depth of Field For landscapes, this is the main reason you’d use them. You want to get as much sharp as possible – that foreground flower to the distant mountain. To do this…
What is Tilt Shift? If you don’t know what a Tilt Shift lens is, this chap explains it well. So take a look at this first if you’re interested. South Leeds Architecture There are some interesting new buildings in the south of Leeds these days – this first one is the Leeds College of buildings, created by Fuse Architects. For this shot I went to the middle of the road island ans use the 17mm tillt shift lens. I took 3 photos – one with the lens shifted up, one in the…
Landscapes and Waterscapes @ Stanley Ferry With a 17mm Tilt Shift Lens I’ve had a flurry of outings to get used to the new lenses – this trip was to the Stanley Ferry area just outside Wakefield, in West Yorkshire. I’d started out looking for decent wheat fields, but they were not lit that well with the sun – just looked like overgrown lawns, or like this next shot, have plastic all over them So I tried a black and white – this is with the 17mm TSe lens and a perfectly level…
Learn Spot Colour in Seconds Using Adobe Lightroom Spot Colouring is where you make a black and white photo but leave a part of it coloured. You may see it in wedding photography, and most famously in the film, Schindler’s List – a girl in a red coat dominates one scene. The technique used to involve masks and photoshop – and a certain level of understanding for it to work. However, with a few seconds tweaking, you can create the same effect without opening Photoshop or learning about layers and…
January’s Malham Workshop 2017 We always run a landscape workshop at Malham in January fo those who’ve got a new camera for Xmas and want to learn how to take great countryside shots in the best area of the dales. It’s also pretty close to Leeds and Bradford, so not far to travel. This year we had pretty grim weather, not raining all the time, but a lot of grey skies and the occasional shower. A Slight Deviation So when it’s grey and wet, you need a Plan B destination, for…