War Machines On A Gloomy Day (HDR)

New Year’s Eve: 2008 has lost its energy, and even the weather seems to have been drained of life. A grey, cold, misty murk settled over Rutland. With flat, featureless light, it wasn’t a great day to take a photograph.  But in early afternoon I excused myself from the house for a couple of hours, and went out to get some fresh air anyway. It was a day for warm gloves and heated car seats.

On a whim I drove to the deserted air base at RAF North Luffenham, home to a peaceful little nine hole golf course and, just over the road, to the very much operational 16th Regiment Royal Artillery. But on the old air base, nothing stirred other than me in my car, zig-zagging along the bomb crater-strewn runways, looking for anything interesting. As it was my first trip here, everything was a surprise. Out of the mist loomed a crashed MiG jet:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 11mm, 1/250 sec at f 4.2, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. Dark vignette added around the edges in Paint Shop Pro to boost impact, as I always intended this shot to be the blog opener.

All images in this blog were HDR experiments. I am a novice HDR mechanic, and used the following process for all images. 1) All images were shot in RAW; 2) I triple-processed each image in Photoshop CS3 Raw Converter, i) exposed as shot, ii) -1 stop exposure, and iii) +1 stop exposure; 3)  I used Photomatix Pro 3.0 to convert into HDR; 4) I resized and made final tweaks for the web in Paint Shop Pro 8. Great fun to experiment, and I think this workflow really added something to the photos.

Don’t ask me what type of MiG it was: I’m guessing a Mig 15, but maybe one day a Russian fighter jet expert will hit upon this blog and put me straight.

Strange, to find a crashed Russian war plane in the middle of sleepy Rutland:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm lens at 26mm, 1/25 sec at f 8.0, ISO 640, hand held no flash. The gloom meant I had to take a deep breath and hand-hold at some quite slow shutter speeds, but the two lenses I was using (Sigma 10-20mm and Nikon 24-70) are both superbly sharp, and the D300 is very good at high ISOs. So, I was still able to get things pleasingly crisp.

I thought the wing guns looked a bit Hollywood, so I got up close with a wide angle:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 1omm, 1/30 sec at f8, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. I love these sci fi guns.

Further down the main runway, I could just see another big object looming in the distance, maybe a quarter of a mile away. It turned out to be a beaten up old Phantom jet, with its light grey (perhaps formerly duck-egg blue) sky camouflage. Not easy to photograph against a light grey sky – this Phantom would have been invisible if it could have taken to the air on New Year’s Eve – but with a bit of HDR tweaking I managed this: 

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm lens at 24mm, 1/40 sec at f 8.0, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. That’s my car in the background, a bit cheaper than a Phantom jet but a whole lot warmer inside.

There were lots of other cool things to photograph (if you’re a bloke), such as a fairly Star Wars-style radar van, but this trashed light armoured vehicle looked even more derelict and post-Apocalyptic:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm lens at 24mm, 1/80 sec at f4.5, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. Really good high ISO performance from the (admittedly pricey) Nikon combination, and with all that firepower (and software) it’s not hard to make an impactful image…

Marie calls my car ‘the bus’, or ‘the tank’. It may be 4WD and have nice big wheels, but it’s not much of a tank compared to the thing below:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm lens at 29mm, 1/40 sec at f 7.1, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. Again, please let me know if you have any idea what sort of military vehicle I photographed here. I used to know this stuff (mainly from Thunder annuals), but time and domesticty has dulled my boy’s own skills, so by all means email me…

 On the way home, I drove down into the Whitwell boating area on Rutland Water, and took a picture of a shed and some canoes. I have no idea why, but it just appealed to me, and I thought the timber shed + colourful canoes would work well in HDR:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm lens at 24mm, 1/100 sec at f4.5, ISO 400, hand held no flash. A more peaceful note to end the day on.

And that was my New Year’s Day. Back to the house for a hot cuppa and big cuddles from Marie and Devon (who love it when I disappear to leave them to do their own thing…).

Mudbath At Tixover Quarry

First weekend after Christmas, I paid a visit to my Mum’s place, at Tixover Grange in Rutland (15 minutes from where we live). Nearby the Land Rover Owners Club, who have driving rights at the disused Tixover Quarry, were having their Christmas meeting – great fodder for a snap-happy chappy and his camera bag.

All of the following photos have been sightly tweaked in Paint Shop Pro, although the D300 – as always – handled the job beautifully.

It was gloriously muddy:

Nikon D300, Nikon 70-300mm VR lens at 270mm, 1/250 sec at f5.6, ISO 640, hand held no flash.

Tixover is one of the UK’s premier off-roading venues, with a large quarry lake which most drivers there find impossible to resist:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/250 sec at f5.0, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

 In this shot I was only a few feet from the Land Rover, and two seconds later the wash caught my feet and my welly boots were drenched. At 10mm wide open, the car looks a safe distance away but to be honest I was probably too close. There’s another one like this further on down the blog…

Here’s the scene when I first walked in. Out of view to the right is a large open area full of muddy humps and bumps. Proper off-roaders probably have better, more macho names than ‘humps and bumps’. The site extends well into the distance, and there is higher ground out of view to the left of this picture too.

On this day, there must have been around 100 different vehicles:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/125 sec at f11, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

In the shot below, I was standing on the muddy mound in the middle of the lake. Look in the wide view pic above – you can see the muddy mound in the distant centre right, it’s slightly yellower in colour, jutting out into the water. From here I could lean over the lake exit and, with feet firmly placed (one slip = goodbye camera gear), get the vehicles as they climbed up out of the water. These guys were going at a fair speed. After leaving the lake, they stopped, opened the rear doors, and gallons of muddy water rushed out…:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/320 sec at f 5.0, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

Below is the other time when I probably got TOO CLOSE. With the Sigma 10-20mm lens (which, by the way, I thoroughly recommend to anyone not looking to spend £1k on Nikon’s own, legendarily sharp 14-24mm pro-spec wide angle lens), you feel miles away through the viewfinder. In reality, I was close enough for these guys to take my legs off at the knees if they’d got it wrong, given that they gun the throttle hard when leaving the lake. The car bucks around under power, water goes everywhere, and a novice driver could well have ended up coming straight at me. But I’d seen this guy do it a few times, and he looked competent, so I took a chance to get into this position…:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, very bloody close indeed, 1/250 sec at f 5.0, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

Up on the more level ground, this guy was doing ‘laps’ on the steepest, bounciest part of the quarry, and at one point I saw his mate get out of the co-driver’s seat and position himself at the end of a very large, deep puddle with his camera. The driver revved up at the end of a short-run-up, and it was obviously a case of ‘take a pic of me making the biggest splash possible’. So, with a quick lens change (the D300 is my one and only camera body for now – if things go well, maybe we’ll get a D3 one day), I was able to get a couple of shots off from a distance. He achieved a good splash. So much so, that his car broke down straight after this photograph, and he was towed back to base to dry out the engine:

Nikon D300, Nikon 70-300mm VR lens at 180mm, 1/320 sec at f5.6, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

And finally, there’s something exceptionally photogenic about a mud-splattered vehicle … This was one of the first shots I took on the day, and it’s probably my favourite:

Nikon D300, Nikon 70-300mm VR lens at 80mm, 1/200 sec at f5.6, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Brilliantly sharp result from the VR-stabilised Nikon telephoto, again not one of their ‘professional’ lenses but with a nice low ISO and a bit of good light, who needs to spend thousands?

A super couple of hours darn t’quarry with a very hospitable group of guys. Many thumbs-up and smiles from the drivers as I carefully crept around, trying not to get in their way. I’ll be back in the springtime…

Dogs Take Over

Billy is an extremely affectionate dog:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 13mm, 1/60 sec at f 4.5, ISO 200, hand held with flash. Heavily (and clumsily) retouched but what the hell, it’s just a snapshot. It’s just as well Billy’s not a Saint Bernard.

Sunsets

We’re very lucky, we have a beautiful uninterrupted view due West, across Rutland, from our back garden, and we get amazing sunsets – which means colour:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f1.8 prime lens, 1/3200 at f1.8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. I got a lot of lovely shots that evening (back in July 2007), of both Devon and Marie. This is one of our favourites.

The iPod Drug

Here’s our 8 year old mainlining Kanye West at around eleven last night:

 

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm at 38mm, 1/160 at f11, ISO 200, hand held with flash. Shot in mono.

‘Love Lockdown’ is now hard-wired into Devon’s brain, and within 60 seconds of getting up this morning he asked the question: ‘Mum, where’s your iPod?’.

Marie got an iPod Touch 16Gb for her birthday on Fri 19th December, and both Devon and I now have severe iEnvy. I have a Blackberry Storm which, despite being absolutely fine at retrieving emails and being a calendar, is completely trashed by the iPod as a media player,

Billy Wears A Cone

Some dogs keep them for their whole lives; others, like Billy, have them for less than a year. 9 days ago Billy said goodbye to his conkers, and hello to his cone. This is him dealing with the shame, and getting some revenge, by sitting on Marie’s ironing pile:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm at 29mm, 1/160 at f2.8, ISO 1600, hand held no flash. Sharpened considerably in Paint Shop Pro, although the results in natural light at ISO 1600 were pretty good out of the camera.

Billy loses the cone on Monday, three days before Christmas. To be honest he’s perfectly able to lick his bits cone or no cone, and has adapted to cone life very well. It’s an effective weapon with which to entrap and subdue his young sister Poppy, and when he’s eating it gives him a private space on the floor into which no cat or dog can enter.

Light Painting: 1

Devon and I did an experiment the other night, and here’s what happened:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm at 70mm, 25 sec exposure at f16, ISO 640 (my mistake!), tripod, no flash.

Then I ran around the tree for a bit, that’s me, the ghost, just to the left of the trunk (not fast enough, obviously):

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm at 57mm, 30 sec exposure at f16, ISO 200 (that’s better), tripod, no flash.

And finally we had the name-writing competition:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm at 38mm, 30 sec exposure at f16, ISO 200 (that’s better), tripod, no flash.

Filled a pleasant half an hour for me and Devon. Another time, we went out and shot traffic trails, more of which another time…

Kids Can Do Things Adults Can’t

Only a week away from Christmas 08, last night we found ourselves looking back at pictures from Christmas 07. Here’s a sequence which proves that a 7 year old boy can do things that grown ups can’t.

1: Eat a full Christmas dinner, then scoff apple pie and custard straight afterwards. Admittedly, most grown ups can do this, although the guilt they feel with every mouthful cancels out the pleasure from the taste. But they can’t do what Devon did in pictures 2 and 3…

 Nikon D80, Nikon 50mm f1.8 prime lens, 1/60 sec at f1.8, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. This was a couple of months before I bought the D300. The D80 was my first DSLR, and at this stage I’d had it around six weeks. I can trace – through Adobe Lightroom, which is a teriffic piece of software by the way – the progress of my photographs as I went through that steep learning period of figuring out the f-stop vs ISO vs shutter speed vs lens type vs metering equation. I’m still learning now, of course, but the D80 made it easy for me, and the little Nikon f1.8 50mm prime lens took it in its stride. It doesn’t need a lot of light to produce a decent picture, and at this point I didn’t have a flash gun – I’d already learnt that the D80’s pop-up flash produced fairly harsh results, and was learning how to do without it by pushing up the ISO and metering properly.

2. Stand up and sing your heart out as if you’ve got an empty stomach. Adults can’t do this after a full Christmas dinner plus apple pie and custard, particularly not late on a Christmas day.

Nikon D80, 50mm f1.8 prime lens, 1/25 sec at f1.8, ISO 500, hand held no flash, shot in mono. Devon is wearing a genuine (really) shark’s tooth which amazingly enough turned up in the Barnsley Asda at £2.99.

3. Then run around the room blowing bubbles. Adults are asleep by this stage.

Nikon D80, 50mm f1.8 prime lens, 1/125 sec at f1.8, ISO 800, hand held no flash. Sharpened in Paint Shop Pro.

The Kitchen King

My dad, Richard, barbeques whenever the sun comes out in the home he shares with Mairi in central Scotland. This means he’s out there roughly four times a year, and Marie & I were lucky enough to be there on just such a moment, one Friday in August 2008. Note glass of wine in hand, which is apparently more essential than fire in these circumstances.

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens at 10mm, 1/640 sec at f6.3, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Everything straight out of the camera, note how saturated the colours are – I had the D300 set to Vibrant +2 colour, and in good light like this it’s almost too saturated. But then, he does grow extremely green grass, and Mairi’s pot plants are much envied across Stirlingshire.

Watch as he displays textbook pepper-grinding technique:

Nikon D300, Tamron 90mm f2.8 DI macro prime lens, 1/2500 sec at f3.5, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

Barbeque at safe distance from Mairi’s washing. Marie and Mairi in conservatory, off to the left, talking about how unlucky they both were to have married into this family.

Dog v Cat

This is Billy, our dog, on his first day with us. He’s on the lawn regarding Beefy, our cat, from a safe distance.

Nikon D300, Nikon 70-300mm VR lens at 230mm, 1/800 sec at f5.5, hand held no flash, VR on. Saturation slightly boosted and sharpened.

You’ll see a lot more of Billy, and Beefy, and of our numerous other pets, in this blog no doubt.