A bit of yellow

The weather last weekend was lovely, I remain hopeful that isn't going to be it for us in the UK for the summer, but we'll see!

We enjoyed walks at the Ridgeway and Lydiard Park. The part of the Ridgeway we walked along allowed some very good views of the Wiltshire countryside. Lydiard was good for photographing buttercups...!

First, a single buttercup - in hindsight I should have used a smaller aperture, but I like how the background contrasts with the yellow - I don't think the background would have worked as well at ~f/8

Some more buttercups, shooting through a patch of them to get the effect of foreground and background blur.



A view from the Ridgeway near Hackpen Hill in Wiltshire. I like clouds in this, it looks like I could have done with standing closer to the fence - but working at 17mm I wasn't really that far away (a couple of feet or so).

100th Post

Apparently this is my 100th post on this blog - it's funny, I thought I'd posted around half that!

We went for a walk along the Ridgeway in Wiltshire on Saturday. I'd hoped to get some landscape shots but while the views were pretty good, my photos were not!

Making full use of the wide angle lens I had with me I did get quite a nice shot from the middle of a load of trees. There aren't many trees on the part of the Ridgeway we walked along (from Hackpen Hill), but there are three groups of them there. I believe the locals call them the 'three hedgehogs' as that's what they look like from a distance.

Pink Flowers

I bought a light (white?) box/tent so that I could try out some completely solid backgrounds. This is a first attempt using it, actually harder than I thought because light becomes a bigger issue. 

It's been processed a bit in Lightroom to bring out the pink and green a little more too. I'm not totally happy with the colour cast, though it appears my laptop needs some colour calibration as I was happy with how it looked on there, but it's more saturated when I look on other devices for some reason.




I also have blue, red and black background colours to try - not sure what on yet though!

Out and About

Two posts in one day...

Just a mix of things over the past couple of weeks.



Some bluebells growing in Lydiard Park - it's nice because you can't get in to where they grow (unless you're happy fighting barbed wire) so they haven't been walked over!


An (un-identified) butterfly sitting on a wall


A tree at Lydiard Park, I only had a 100mm lens with me which wasn't quite wide enough, but I still like it.


I was trying to get a shot of this hoverfly on the dandelion, but since it was doing it's best job to hover by it I got this instead - which I prefer!


Harry, the best dog ever. Fact!

Sophie & James - May 2014

It's been a while since I used my 50mm lens, which is strange since it's one of my favourites. My Niece and Nephew were (very) willing subjects again. Despite being in my Mum's garden, the lens allowed me to isolate them quite nicely from the distracting background.

I'm finding myself more and more frustrated by a) my lack of development in terms of my photography, and b) my ability to 'process' the image raw files as well as I'd like.

The first issue is pretty much tough-luck, I just need to make more effort to get out and use the camera, but the second one has me wanting a large screen iMac. To be honest my laptop just isn't cutting it for me, the screen isn't big enough and at times it's painfully slow. If only the one I want wasn't so expensive....