Over the last couple of years I’ve made several photographs of this Scirocco, but this time I wanted to try something different and really push my little flashes. I wanted to shoot into the setting sun and light as much of the car as I could with 2 SB900s (on SU4 mode), an SB28 and a borrowed Metz. In order to get a useable exposure I needed to use my Singh-Ray variable ND filter and had to dial it down about 3/4 of the way. Tripod mounted, this dropped my exposure 5 stops to 1/60 sec at f8 ISO 200. But even at full power, my lil’ flashes wouldn’t come anything close to lighting the whole car. Initially I experimented with 4 strobes dotted around the car, but with the ND dialed in, all I got were patches of light on the car as you can see below. This was even with the strobes on full power.
There were probably a few ways to do this, but in the interests of time mainly (the sun was about to drop behind the hedge and I desperately wanted it in the frame) I opted to make a series of exposures, moving the lights around the car for each frame with a view to blending them in photoshop later. Actually making the photographs was the easy bit. Merging 13 different layers in post proved to be altogether more time consuming, and to be quite honest having spent the best part of an entire afternoon layering, dodging and burning and tweaking I’m still not completely happy with the result. I think that when I next get a few free hours I will take the opportunity to re-visit the layers and merge them again from scratch. That said, I’m still pleased enough with the result to share. Below are a selection of the layers straight from camera.

Would you have done it differently? I’d love to know. Feel free to share in the comments at the bottom.

These are some additional images that I made of the car a couple of weeks earlier so I thought I’d include them here to.

Volkswagen Scirocco by Neil Alexander

Volkswagen Scirocco by Neil Alexander

Volkswagen Scirocco by Neil Alexander

I’ve also included a February Desktop wallpaper for your personal use of my Struggle image made in the Lake District. Download the size that nearest suits your screen – 2560×1440   1920×1200   1440×900 Note: The simplest way to download is to right click on the appropriate size and select “open in new tab” or “open in new window”

Coats of arms of two renowned Chipping Campden families; the Gloucesters and the Gainsboroughs, Chipping Campden

This weekend just gone, my wife and I took the opportunity for a well overdue weekend away and headed down to the Cotswolds for a couple of nights. As usual, it was beyond my abilities to travel without a camera, so in the interests of marital harmony I travelled light – just my Billingham 550 packed with two D300s, a 17-55mm f2.8 and a 70-200mm f2.8. Unfortunately from a photographic standpoint, the conditions weren’t ideal. Early Sunday morning was the only time the sky wasn’t completely overcast, so I made the most of it, and that’s when I made the majority of these images.

National Trust Chipping Campden Market Hall dating back to 1627

Cotswolds
Considered to be, by many, to be one of the most beautiful areas in England, the Cotswolds, with its unique stone-built heritage, gently rolling hills and broad valleys is dotted with historic market towns and small sleepy charming limestone villages. The region covers 790 sq miles in the upper part of South West England and is the country’s largest officially designated “Area of Outstanding Beauty”. Being “typically English”, and where time has stood still for over 300 years, the area makes an ideal destination for any discerning visitor.

Broadway - Jewel of the Cotswolds

Broadway
A delightful little village, often referred to as the “Jewel of the Cotswolds” lies beneath Fish Hill on the western edges of the Cotswold hills. Its wide High Street lined with tall horse chestnut trees contains a mixture of period houses and picturesque honey coloured Cotswold stone cottages which have lured visitors for centuries.

Buckland Manor, Cotswolds

Buckland Manor
Going as far back as 600AD records show that a house stood on this lovely Gloucestershire hillside spot. Reckoned to be worth £9 in the Doomsday book, the estate passed into the hands of the Gresham family in 1536 and was eventually converted into a luxury country house hotel in 1981. One of the finest manor houses in the Cotswolds, this privately owned quintessentially English country estate provides a tranquil setting, comfortable drawing rooms, fine dining and a very warm welcome.

Cottage in the village of Buckland, Cotswolds

Cottage in the village of Buckland, Cotswolds

Buckland Manor, Cotswolds

As I said earlier, all these images were shot over the course of one weekend when the conditions weren’t great, but I’ve managed to pull quite a bit back in post processing using a mixture of HDR processing with Photomatix Pro and black and white conversions using Silver Efex Pro 2. You can see more on the full gallery here.

Lake District - View from Newlands Hause down over Keskadale with Knott Rigg to the left

Today I thought I’d write a little post around what I put into planning a day of landscape shooting.

The first thing I’ll do before a trip like my recent trip to the Lake District is to check the weather, re-check it, and then check it again. The weather in the UK is so varied and fickle, and can easily lead to a completely wasted day if not careful. I’ve always taken quite a keen interest in weather and meteorology and I find that this helps hugely. I have several apps on my phone, and make frequent visits to the Met Office website. I check the radar patterns and projected precipitation and cloud cover levels and often try and make my own interpretations of the expected outcome.

For most people these days, including myself, time is at a premium so it is important not to get these initial stages of preparation wrong. As far as weather is concerned for landscape photography, pretty much any conditions are acceptable except blanket grey skies (which will not make for good images) or torrential rain (which just makes life hard work).

Once I’ve managed to assure myself that the forecast is acceptable, I’ll then start to look at sunrise and sunset times, and their associated azimuths. This then gives me a basic outline of the general directions in which I want to be shooting at those key times.

The next step is to decide the overall area to where I want head to, and then use my saved locations as an initial guide. This has been an area of some issue for me for a while – I’ved used a bunch of different apps and GPS listings software, but not really with any great degree of success. I’ve now started using a combination of Google Maps and Evernote. Google now allow you to save a map, give it a name and then drop pins on it and save it all. You can even add some text description or notes to each dropped pin. For example, I have Lake District and Peak District maps with pins for locations I have previously scouted with some basic notes – these are locations that I know I can go back to and there is a photograph of some description there to be made. I’ll then look at the particular locations in more detail using the sun times and anticipated weather information, to decide whether this is the right time of year to make a photograph at the location and give myself a more detailed location by location plan. If I can’t find anything that suits because it’s the wrong time of year, or I’m not going to have the time required to hike for an hour befoore sunrise up a hillside for example then I’ll revert to a whole series of resources that I’ve built up over time to find alternate locations; endlesss list of websites, books, and magazine articles containing detailled walks, points of interest, landmarks, and vantage points. I also know several keen fell walkers and I’ll ask them for input too as well as having a large selection of 1:25000 scale Ordnance Survey maps on my iPad. The Outdoors GB iPad app is an absolute godsend.

View over Buttermere, Lake District

When I’m planning a sunrise / sunset shoot, there are two things that I’m hoping for. One is colour in the clouds. Generally this is of a red / pinky / orange nature and occurs shortly before sunrise or shortly after sunset…. generally…. And then there is first or last light when the sun’s rays are just breaking the horizon and kissing the landscape with it’s softest and most golden light of the day. It’s nice to be able to make photographs at the same location with both the coloured sky and sun’s early rays, but often the colour will appear in the opposite side of the sky to where the sun is rising or setting and without pre-planning or some seriously quick thinking you’ve little or no chance of getting both, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get neither.

For this particular trip these are the steps I followed. I knew where exactly I wanted to be for sunrise itself. Once the sun had been up for an hour, I planned to head up to a nearby waterfall. Then in the less attractive midday light I was to drive up to a pebble beach I had discovered on the Solway Firth for some macro work and then back down to Wast Water for sunset. All points GPS tacked and saved to my Sat Nav and everything looked tickety boo.

12 hours before I was set to depart the forecast was still looking good. Dry with minimal cloud at dawn, with the cloud set to build slowly all day up to nearly 100% by sunset, but dry all day. So I surfaced at half 4, checked the weather again, filled my flask, grabbed my sandwiches and a bag full of gear and started out on the 2 1/2 hour drive up to Buttermere.

Alas as I left the motorway and nautical twilight arrived, I could tell that the forecast was off. And it got progressively worse. By midday the sky was flat grey, and it was raining. Hard. And it didn’t get any better. By sunset at Wast Water, the mist had arrived too. It wasn’t a total right off as I did manage to add some fresh locations to my scouting list but it most definitely wasn’t a day for making award winning photographs. And more frustratingly, with my current schedule, it’s going to be at least another couple of weeks before I can get back up there again….

Sour Milk Gill pouring down into Buttermere, Lake District

The moral of the story: there’s no point getting disheartened when the weather fails to perform. You’ve just got to think on your feet and adapt or sack it off and go home.

Woolstencroft Cottage, Lymm

Well I hope you all had a fun filled an over indulged Christmas and New Year. I know I certainly did. The older the kids get, the more fun it seems to be. Can’t imagine that upward trend will continue forever so I make sure I enjoy whilst I can…..

So to the photographs. These two images were made on a trip out around the Lymm area of Cheshire late November. The cottage above had caught my eye previously but the light that day had been somewhat dull. But on this particular late winter afternoon with the sun due to set in under an hour’s time, I knew that the light would be great and would really pick up the features of this little place. I don’t believe that it was inhabited at the time, but within seconds of dropping my tripod’s feet I was accosted by the local farmer demanding to know what I was doing. Fortunately a few placating words later, he left me in peace. Just as I’d made three bracketed frames for this image, out of the corner of my eye, I caught site of the cyclist below rounding the bend towards me. I quickly grabbed my other body which had the 70-200mm f2.8 on it  and fired off a few frames of him heading off into the distant sun. I knew the sky was going to be horrifically overexposed, but somehow it didn’t matter. There was so much soft diffused golden light around to pick him out nicely that I don’t think the lack of definition in the sky really matters one bit. There both up on my Cheshire gallery here if you want to see them larger, or get copies.

Winter cyclist, Lymm

Anyway, I’ve spent a not inconsiderable amount of time working on my business and marketing plans for 2012 over the festive break, some of which I’ll share in a post in the not too distant future. But one of the immediate up-shots is that for the first few months of 2012, I’m going to be scaling back my posting a little. For the most part of 2011 I posted every Tuesday and Friday, and I also ran the “Image of the Week” Newsletter for the latter 3 months. I’m going to keep up with the newsletter which I’m going to enhance a little by including a little more news along with a concise tip or two each Friday, but I’m going to drop the Friday blog post. Fridays just seemed to be getting too hectic towards the end of last year, and often ended up eating into valuable shooting time. You could always sign up to my weekly email newsletter to make up for the lost post….

One final comment, and it’s a little late as the offer has finished (DPS had a coupon to get 20% off) but I signed up for Kelby Training over Christmas and I’m blown away by the volume and quality of content they have available for Photographers and Photoshop users. I’m absorbed by Matt Kloskowski’s Compositing book at the moment, and felt I ought to give the Kelby Training package a whirl whilst I was at it – and I’m very glad I did. There is such a wealth of knowledge available. Definitely worth a look.

So here they are, although not in any order in particular, other than chronological.

First up is an image I made in Spinningfields, Manchester that I submitted in the Urban View category of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011 competition, which was subsequently shortlisted.

The Avenue, Manchester - Shortlisted for Landscape Photographer of the Year 2011

Also in January I made the image below with Charlie in Castlefield with one of my favourite modifiers, the Lastolite Ezybox. Details here

Charlie, Castlefield

Patrick with his guitar on the roof of the Arndale car park before the security guards came along. Blog post here

Patrick with his guitar on the roof of the Arndale Car Park, Manchester

Maltese street scene – First trip to Malta this year. Blog post here.

Typical street scene in Victoria on the Island of Gozo, Malta

Kayleigh, Trafford Park with the moon. Blog post  here

Kayleigh

Second trip to Malta this year. Blog posts here and here

Doorway, Zejtun, Malta

Anna – “Waiting for a bus?” with some very carefully placed SB900s – blog post here

Waiting for a bus?

Lighthouse, Vilamoura, Portgual. Blog post here and on variable neutral density filters here

View of the breakwater at Vilamoura, Portugal with a lighthouse at the end

Manchester Central Library – post here

Manchester Central Library at sunset

Jenson Button in his McLaren Mercedes tears up Deansgate, Manchester. Post here

Jenson Button

The Lake District. Post here

View up The Struggle in the Lake District on an Autumn morning

Derwent Valley. Post here

Tree in the Derwent Valley, High Peaks

And finally a shoot I did with Sophie and Pat in mid December that I haven’t yet blogged about. Post to follow in the New Year.

Pat & Sophie

So in retrospect I’m more than happy with the quality of what I’ve produced this year, though I do feel that I need to up the quantity next year. And in upping the quantity I’m pretty certain that this will also see an improvement in the quality too. I ought to write a post on my plans for 2012 too. For one, it’ll give me something to be held to, and it’ll also help me to thrash out my thoughts and plans for the next year of my business and where I want to take it. So you can look forward to this in the coming weeks.

Finally, for 2012 I’ll be releasing desktop wallpapers for your personal use. You can download January’s here in 3 separate sizes. There’s 2560 x 1440, 1920 x 1200 & 1440 x 900. Simply click the appropriate link and right click to save to your desktop.

NeilAlexander_JanuaryDesktop - 1440x900

As this’ll be my final post for 2011, I’ll sign off by saying that it’s been a fantastic year for me photographically speaking and I hope that 2012 is even better.
Enjoy the celebrations, and I’ll see you on the other side.

Wishing you a prosperous 2012.
Neil

European Christmas Markets, Albert Square, Manchester shot hand held at 1/2 second.

European Christmas Markets, Albert Square, Manchester

The last time I shot the Christmas markets was a couple of years ago, and I wasn’t too impressed with the results primarily because of the noise levels in the images. Shooting in such a dark environment requires my ISO to be racked up all the way to 3200, and even then it’s often not fast enough if I need to stop down. 2 years ago the noise reduction algorithms in  Lightroom weren’t anything like as advanced as they are in the latest version (3.6 I think) and it’s now really quite easy to get a usable image out even shooting at this high level. Admittedly the Luminence slider does give some rather bizarre results on faces if over used but nonetheless it’s amazing how the technology has advanced.

European Christmas Markets, Albert Square, Manchester

European Christmas Markets, Albert Square, Manchester

European Christmas Markets, Albert Square, Manchester

Cheese sellers at the European Christmas Markets, Manchester

European Christmas Markets, Albert Square, Manchester

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say today. There’s more on this story over at Demotix here.

Hope y’all have a sharp Christmas and a focused New Year….

Neil

Tree in the Derwent Valley, High Peaks (Click to view larger)

Further to last week’s post on Stanage Edge in the Peak District,  here’s a couple more images from that weekend that I’ve just processed. Multi-frame HDRs processed in Photomatix Pro and then tweaked in Photoshop and Lightroom. Got quite a few keepers that weekend, so there’ll be more to come….

Tree in the Derwent Valley, High Peaks (Click to view larger)

Shortest post ever I think today. Overload of processing to catch up on, early sunset to make something of and car to be collected from VW.

Have a great weekend y’all

Stanage Edge, Peak District (Click to view larger)

Last weekend, I had the privilege to spend the entire weekend up in the Peak District. If you’d been following my tweets, you’d have noticed that Saturday, weather-wise, was a disaster. The day started off grey and miserable and ended up the same way, and to be pretty honest felt even greyer and more miserable in between. That said, it was still a very productive day. I must have covered over 100 miles driving around scoping out potential locations, working out where the sun would rise and set at each and what angle to shoot from etc etc. It was extremely beneficial and I found a mighty fine spot for lunch at the Fox House Inn near Hathersage. Though when I got back home on Saturday evening having shot a mere handful of frames and after looking at the forecast for the next day, I felt a little deflated. I met up with a good friend that evening and we shared a few shandies and I went to bed quite late having decided that I was going to have a well earned lie in and, if the forecast stayed true, I was going to catch up on some editing.

I surfaced about half an hour before sun up and true to form it looked bleak, so I climbed back into bed with the Sunday papers. Having indulged myself for over an hour, I decided that I needed to head back up to the Peaks, and just see what played out. I’m glad I did. Sometimes, I just get a feeling that they greyness is here to stay, and that despite all my best efforts, I end up making nothing. This morning however, I just had a hunch. As I drove back up over the Snake Pass, I entered an eery misty other world, and then as I dropped down the other side, I caught faint glimpses of golden winter sunlight through the clouds. Sure enough as I arrived at my first location, Stanage Edge, the cloud had thinned sufficiently to produce little pockets of sunlight dotted all over the landscape. I smiled.

Climbers at the foot of Stanage Edge, Peak District

Stanage Edge is a 6 kilometre long gritstone edge sited on Hallam Moors due North of Hathersage. At its peak it’s probably only about 25 metres high, but it is stunning to look at and clearly very popular with climbers. Currently there are over 800 recorded rock climbs, with more being invented every year, however it’s becoming a victim of it’s own popularity and in places much of the vegetation has been worn away by the endless walking boots clambering over it.  In fact the same can be said for large swathes of the Peak District – congested roads, full car parks etc etc.

Unfortunately I feel that the more the current government’s drive to build new homes on existing green belt land, the more those looking for a little jaunt to the countryside will be herded into beauty spots like the Peak District as there will be no place else to go.
Finally, here are November’s selected from the web links…. Some great photographers – well worth a look.

• Address Is Approximate on Vimeo
  Google Street View stop motion animation short made as a personal project by director Tom Jenkins.
  Story: A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.
• 13 Item Hit List That Will Make A Successful Artist | Chase Jarvis Blog
• Michael Levin | Photographer
  I absolutely love the work of this photographer. The beauty and simplicity of his work is fantastic.
• [News] Nat Geo’s 2011 Photo Contest: Entry Ends Nov 30th | Fstoppers
  Some jaw-droppingly amazing photographs. Well worth a few minutes of your time
• Use a Shoe to Remove Stuck Lens Filters
  This one is well worth remembering
• Mobile Holmes
• Michael Freeman Photography
• ERNST HAAS ESTATE

M6, Shevington in rush hour with the town of Orrell in the background (Click for larger) D300 w/ 70-200 F2.8 at 200mm. 30secs at F8

I enjoy shooting long exposures. The longer the better, unless that is you’re stood on a very noisy motorway bridge in a very cold wind.

I’ve posted on shooting long exposures several times over the years (for example “Silky Water Shots” and “Breathtaking examples of long exposure photography“) but as it’s something I really enjoy doing, I thought I’d write another slightly more up to date one.

There are 3 key elements to a long exposure photograph; a steady camera, some way of triggering the shutter without touching the camera and a camera with the functionality to shoot 30 second + exposures.

To keep the camera steady you need either a tripod (unless I’m shooting people I’m on a tripod 95% of the time anyway), something like a gorillapod or at a push even a bean bag on a wall will suffice. If you trigger the shutter with your finger, you will incur some camera shake. It’s inevitable. There’s no way round it. If you are shooting a portrait in a studio with lights and all, then you’ll never notice, but if you are making a 15 second exposure you will blur the image by pressing the shutter. Even if you use the daintiest of fairy type touches.

The only way to get round this is by either using the self-timer or my preferred method of using a cable release and mirror lock-up. The cable release is essentially a shutter button on a cable which avoids you having to touch the camera. I also go the extra step of using mirror lock-up too, which removes one more item that could cause a little vibration and thus blur the image.

Finally, a camera that has the ability to shoot long exposures. Some point and shoots just won’t let you do it. But ideally you want a camera that will let you make exposures that are as long as you like – this is called Bulb mode. Why it’s called Bulb mode I have no idea. For example, my Nikons will go as slow as 30 seconds and then the next step is bulb. This is where you absolutely have to have a cable release – you can’t keep your finger on the shutter button for 60 seconds and not expect a blurred image, unless maybe you are well practiced at impersonating a corpse.

Cable releases go for anything from a few pounds up to several hundred. I think from memory Nikon’s version of the cheapo that I use is around £250. I balked at that figure somewhat and I have to say that (fingers crossed, touch wood) the £30 imitation I got from eBay a couple of years ago hasn’t failed me once – though it’s definitely seen better days and I think it’s probably nearing the end of it’s effective days…

Anyway, the image at the top was taken yesterday evening from a footbridge overlooking the M6 at Shevington near Wigan looking South. Unfortunately I got held up getting there and missed the actual setting of the sun, but arrived shortly after. I opted for a little neutral density by way of my Singh Ray Vari ND in order to darken the scene even further and give me the endless trails of car lights I was looking for. A pretty sky would have made this image much better, but that’s what happens when men decide to start digging up huge trunks of the highway completely out of the blue…..

Blacko Tower, Nelson, Lancashire (Click for larger)

This is a photograph that I made earlier this week up on the Lancashire / Yorkshire border. I had intended to try and get quite a bit closer to the tower, and did plenty of research before heading out only to find a large “Private Property – Keep out sign” on the gate at the foot of the hill. On this occasion, I opted to respect the wishes of the landowner and found an alternate vantage point. Having made the image, it was close to dark for the yomp back down the hill to the car park.

All was going fine until I crossed the penultimate styal at which point I had to cross through the middle of a field of very inquisitive sheep, who, by the time I reached the middle of the field had all congregated behind me. About 70 of them. And they were getting closer, and bolder. They had horns, and weren’t exactly small. At this point I was getting a little apprehensive. Would they charge at me for invading their field? Do sheep even do that? Were there any documented cases of people being trampled to death by a herd of crazed mutton? The edge of the field and safety seemed miles away. And then I crossed a small gully about 3/4 of the way across the field, and they just stopped. I began to breathe a little more easily though continually looking over my shoulder. Eventually, after what felt like an eternity, I reached safety……

The photograph is a 9 frame HDR (there was an extensive contrast range in the scene – from the setting sun to this side of the tower) with selected frames processed in Nik’s HDR Efex Pro, and then some selective editing in Lightroom.

That’s all for this week.

N

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