One Big Yawn

You may have noticed that other photo bloggers on the interweb write about their travels. Images of the snow capped mountains of Oregon. A dramatic sunset over the Great Wall Of China. A smoke-filled riot in Rio de Janeiro. The Northern Lights ablaze over Tromso. Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically over the plains of Tanzania.

Here’s Jesse having a yawn on our bedroom windowsill:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 38mm, 1/1600 sec at f 4, ISO 200, hand held no flash. I submit this to the global wildlife image bank and trust my fellow photo bloggers will give it the respect it deserves.

Here’s Jess posing for me while I practice my HDR techniques:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/2500 sec at f 4, ISO 200, hand held no flash. I’m a novice at HDR, but twiddled with Photomatix Pro until I got something fairly tidy. It’s nice, as windowsill shots of a cat go, and 21 March 2009 (The Ides Of March) was a lovely morning. Note house with conservatory in the background – we nearly bought that one instead, but we’re so glad we didn’t. Ours has a much nicer view out the back…

Ralph Has The Last Laugh

Apologies for the ‘muddy’ black and white photography here.

Starring: John Oakley, father to Marie my wife, therefore ‘Dad’ to me for ever more (although he’s just six years older than me…). Occasion: John’s 50th birthday (note badges). Location: his parents’ house in Shafton, Barnsley – all of us once again enjoying the good hospitality of Annie and Ralph. Event: watching The Grand National, on Saturday 4th April 2009.

We all had three horses each in the sweepstakes. The mood is good in the room, Ralph’s second horse has just fallen down, and he only has one left in the race … and that’s a 100-1 shot: 

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/60 sec at f 8, ISO 200, hand held with Nikon SB-800 flash. For some reason, whenever Ralph’s horses fell down, everybody started laughing. You can see Devon thinking: Why is it so much funnier when Ralph’s horses fall over?

The mood grew darker when Ralph’s 100-1 horse somehow made its way to the front of the race: 

 Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/60 sec at f 8, ISO 200, hand held with Nikon SB-800 flash.

And when it actually won, there was an explosion of joy from one of the room’s occupants: 

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/60 sec at f 8, ISO 200, hand held with Nikon SB-800 flash.

Bev, John and Devon were gracious winners: 

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/60 sec at f 8, ISO 200, hand held with Nikon SB-800 flash. Well done Ralph, you had the last laugh…

Stamford Sk8R Boi

Latest on Devon’s list of 1,001 Things To Do Before Bedtime is skateboarding. I think he may actually stick with this one…

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/60 sec at f6.3, ISO 200, hand held with Nikon SB-800 flash. Converted to mono in Lightroom 1.2, this was one of the few shots I got on this particular night where I didn’t blow all the highlights out on his white shirt, and still kept some detail in the stormy sky behind him. It’s not easy to bounce flash off a night sky…

Look hard and you’ll see my feet. Devon was trying one of his new skills, my shins were his launch pad. It’s the sort of shot you can only get with an extreme wide angle lens (or if you have very, very long legs).

By The Window

Here’s Marie, by the window, in a restaurant (spot which one), patiently trying to look serene while her fella tries out his new flashgun:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 16mm, 1/2000 sec at f 5, ISO 200, hand held with Nikon SB-800 flash. I took this soon after I got the big SB-800 flashgun, and as I write, over a year later, I would still rate myself as no more than 3 out of 10 for my flash photography skills. It’s always an experiment with me, but this one simply worked beautifully, with the flash no more than a subtle highlight, adding to the lovely late afternoon light which was already coming through the window. Helps if you have a good model too

The Grey Rider

In Stamford we have the Mid Lent Fair each year, and at night the town is ablaze with colour. When I’ve had a ride or two on the Jumping Frog with Devon, I predictably chicken out for a while and take a few pictures:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 27mm, 3 sec at f22, ISO 800, on a tripod, no flash. It’s great fun shooting long-exposure light trails at any time, it is pure 100% experimental photography.

The whole week is a riot for the senses, England’s finest stone town is, quite simply, brutalised for six days, and the gentle townsfolk of Stamford come flocking: 

 

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 32mm, 1 sec at f22, ISO 800, on a tripod, no flash.

And into the cacophany, each year, strides the warrior, the One, the Legend. The fairground travellers whisper of the one they call The Grey Rider, a dreadful wraith some say, who rides the fairground’s oldest rides each year, never paying, seldom glimpsed save for in the blink of an eyelash, a ghostly apparition who, so the travellers tell, haunts the Mid Lent Fair with dark promises of retribution for some long-forgotten slight, perhaps a ride cut short due to electrical failure, or a token un-redeemed, or a burger half-cooked. Nobody knows. Aye, or a grim fairy, others say, who dwells in the marshes beyond the Meadows, called ‘Remarker’ by some, ‘She Who Says Things About People That Should Remain Un-Said’ by others. She pounces without warning. With a comment here, a look there, she tells people what they don’t want to hear, and then she is gone, into the night of the Mid Lent Fair, to the Rides…

Harsh tales, the dark secret of Stamford is rarely referred to directly, but in 2008 I caught her on camera, appearing in an unguarded moment with her horse-man Mark, driving his steed on towards The Grey Rider’s next appalling appointment with doom…

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 90mm, 1/50 sec at f5.3, ISO 1250, hand held no flash.

Behind the scenes, when the Crazy Shake lorry opens up its smoke cannons and floodlights the darkening March sky, there is spectacle, and drama, that is the essence of photo blogs:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 22m, 1 sec at f6.3, ISO 800, on a tripod, no flash.

And somewhere in the darkness of the spaces in between the fairground attractions, The Grey Rider creeps un-noticed back to her Lair in the marshes beyond the Meadows, to hibernate till the Mid Lent Fair arrives, once again, next year…

Diesel Electric Porn

Let me set the scene. A sunny Sunday afternoon in early April, England. Our nine year old boy is out skateboarding (about which, another time…). Sweetheart pregnant wife acting very hormonal, issuing clear signals to stay back at least ten yards. So I grabbed my camera bag, and headed out to muck around taking some landscape shots, since the sunset was only two hours away. Sadly, we live in one of the least photogenic parts of England. Stamford’s a pretty town, but I wanted some dramatic countryside, which we don’t have, and with limited time available it was just beyond me, that afternoon. So I gave in to my small boy instincts, and headed off to the main London to Edinburgh railway line – words that thrilled me when I was a kid, gr0wing up near the railway tracks in Somerset – to try and take a certain type of picture.

Namely, a long exposure, train streaking by, creating a long colourful blur. It wasn’t as easy as I thought:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 14mm, 1/15 sec at f22, ISO 200, no flash. I shot in Aperture priority (my favourite – I really haven’t learnt any other way properly yet), stuck it on a tripod, used the wide angle Sigma, and used a really small aperture and a low ISO to force a slow shutter speed. But this picture was about my tenth try, and I was still cocking it up…

It was harder than I thought. I was either missing the train completely, or the long exposure completely blew out the sky. I had to ether crop them in tight to lose as much of the sky as possible, as per the one below, or I’d have to take a few sky shots and paste them in afterwards. Either way, I wasn’t getting the results I wanted:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/4 sec at f22, ISO 100, on a tripod, no flash. I was kind of getting there, but to be frank it was more enjoyable as a peaceful couple of hours, rather than as a fulfilling photo shoot. And I had big fast trains whizzing by, which – as has been covered elsewhere in this blog – appeals to me, in the same way that big ships, planes and even big shiny lorries do. I guess I just like big machines.

Being trackside like this isn’t encouraged in our modern British terrorist-conscious, suicide-story, vandalist culture. In other words, in the eyes of the train drivers I was more likely to be a troublemaker or a suicidal fortysomething, than the rather geeky, but completely relaxed (and indeed very cool) Andy Dad which Devon knows me as. I was simply there to get some fresh air and get some practice in on the camera, but I’m sure I gave the drivers a few nervous moments.

Mind you, shooting wide angle means you need to get up close, so the nervous moments weren’t exclusive to train drivers. Yikes:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/6 sec at f22, ISO 100, on a tripod, no flash. This was a big ugly freight train, without any trucks – just the engine. He gave me the full siren (and probably the finger) as he went past. The wind rocked the tripod, which is why the ‘196′ sgn on the left is a bit blurry. This one was riding on the ‘local’ track, right at the edge of the four-line tracks. But you see, I’m comfortable close to trains. Mark (big bro) and I spent much of our youth literally lying on the railway tracks on the main South Western line from Bristol down to Taunton. Our neck of the woods, just north of Bridgwater station, was on a very, very long straight, and you could see the trains coming for miles. Just like the stretch I was on here (between Peterborough and Grantham) – straight as an arrow, and flat. As kids, we’d spend hours playing – I am ashamed to admit – on the main railway lines. If you put your ear to the track, you could hear the tiny vibration noises – wiry tuning-fork sounds that sounded like the pulse missiles on Star Trek – that trains were making miles up the track. Trains that were thundering towards us at high speed, of course, but trains that we could see coming, thanks to their bright yellow danger fronts, for at least five minutes before they reached us. Our parents never knew, of course, but they do now. Never once did we feel in danger, just excited. We weren’t vandals. We were just young kids with – if memory serves me right – eternal summers and endless hot days to while away with nothing better to do than to watch the giant diesel trains thunder by just feet away. But in truth, there was nothing that we would rather have been doing. And we never once got stopped by British Railway trackside marshals.

Any road, forty years later I had got better at the camera thing, having shot a few skies for post-production, and I finally got a decent photograph of one of the big high-speed express trains headed at 125mph for London:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/6 sec at f22, ISO 100, on a tripod, no flash. VERY over-cooked on the computer afterwards, that’s a sky which I shot beforehand, imported hurriedly and very amateurishly into this image. It’s bad HDR, highly over-saturated, garish, and a bit of a shambles… But it’s more like the shot I had in mind when I went out that day. By this time I had the camera on Continuous High mode, which gave me 14 shots of this particular train speeding by. I picked this one because of the reds and the blues…

But I wanted one more. This time, I packed the tripod away, climbed back up out of the railway cutting, and went to another of the most dangerous places possible – the level crossing on a country lane nearby. These places are fantastically scary: even though the barriers may be up, I’m sure I’m not the only one who always zips over level crossings a bit quicker than necessary, grimacing in anticipation of a 300,000-ton express train side-swipe…

And as the sun was setting, still with my trusty Sigma wide-angle lens, and crouched down the wrong side of the level crossing as the barriers came down, I got the best picture of the day - this is more or less straight out of the lens:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/2500 sec at f6.3, ISO 800, hand held no flash. No blur, lightning fast shutter speed, high ISO, hand held. The complete opposite of what I’d been taking all afternoon, but the light hitting the trains from the setting sun was so crisp, and the Sigma was exposing the track and the sky together so nicely (thanks to the D300’s excellent metering system), I thought I’d try and take a Rail Enthusiast double page spread. Trainspotters, feel free to email me for the full diesel electric porn, high resolution version.

But yes, it’s just a train, and to some of my more urbane, fashionable friends – it’s been nice knowing you

Devon’s School Play 2009

For a lovely hour, on April 1st 2009, Marie and I watched Devon in the spotlight in the Malcolm Sargent School Years 3& 4 stage production of The Snow Queen. Don’t ask me what on earth happened in the play, I was too busy trying to make Devon laugh:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 70mm, 1/40 sec at f 2.8, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. This was a real low-light shoot. Famously you really want one of those awesome Nikon D3s for this sort of thing (I know I do), but the D300’s low light ability often gets overlooked in comparison. And sure, it’s no D3 – there’s no other camera that comes close to the D3 in low light - but the D300 is still one of the best cameras there’s ever been at high ISOs. None of the pics in this blog (apart from the last one, which was taken outside in the sunshine) is less than ISO 1000, which is a setting that people could only dream of using a as recently as three years ago – if you were looking to produce a sharp picture with vibrant colours, that is. Now, ISO 1000 is a doddle, and with a good lens on the front – the 24-70mm f 2.8 being one of the best in the business – you’re looking good even when sitting in the semi-darkness of a school assembly hall, watching nine year olds perform under the gloom of a row of 60W bulbs.

Look at the pic above, taken just before the play started… right on the limit as regards shutter speed (dangerously slow), and taken when the lights were dimmed. It’s grainy, and slightly noisy, but Devon’s in focus and – on the web at least – I think it’s a nice start to this blog.

Once things started rolling, Marie punched me in the ribs and made me promise not to distract Devon again. We were sitting several rows back, but I could still put him off by sticking out my tongue. With this simple pleasure denied me, I focused instead on using my unfeasibly large camera without making the other parents too upset. Flash photography was seriously frowned upon (especially by Marie, who gets embarrassed when I plop the huge SB-800 flashgun on top of the chunky D300 with battery pack plus the giant chunky 24-70 lens… I look like a real paparazzi), so it was all about trying to get a shutter speed high enough to get it sharp, but keeping the ISO low enough to keep some colour in the picture.

The one below is one of the better ones – and Devon is in full Elvis Presley mode: 

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 60mm, 1/80 sec at f 2.8, ISO 1600, hand held no flash. See that – ISO 1600. Lovely and colourful, nice and crisp, happy with that. Note how Devon’s hair was looking especially red today… I think that’s why they put him right at the front, right in the middle. He drew the eye.

This was the third time he’d performed the play, so he knew all the words, all the actions…

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 70mm, 1/80 sec at f 2.8, ISO 1600, hand held no flash. Devon definitely suits the all black look. But he still looks even better in Spiderman pyjamas.

Towards the end, they all got up on stage for the grand finale, and Devon was still one of the only kids who looked like he was truly in the moment:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 66mm, 1/60 sec at f 2.8, ISO 1600, hand held no flash. Still ISO 1600 and looking good – although I did take all of these pics into Paint Shop Pro and give them a little sharpening tweak, and a bit of  a contrast boost with the Levels command. You need to do that when you’re straining for every last beam of light.

On the one below, taken right at the end, spot the kid who’s enjoyed himself the most:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 70mm, 1/80 sec at f 2.8, ISO 1600, hand held no flash. Note the very bored King in the background, obviously realising that playing the Boss meant that you sat much further away from the audience, while the kids in the choir at the front got all the light and most of the attention. This is one of Devon’s proper smiles – he has a cheesy ‘pose grin’ which I can spot a mile off.

Finally, as the stage emptied, the lights went down again, Devon had to be dragged off the stage (here he’s grinning at Marie, who was sitting just to my left), and I pushed it all the way up to ISO 3200 for one last go at it:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 70mm, 1/200 sec at f 2.8, ISO 3200, hand held no flash. That’s a boy who likes the limelight. Note how the colours are less saturated, and yes that’s a lot of noise on the walls in the background, but this was really pushing it. They were moving about a lot, so I needed ISO 3200 to get the shutter speed nice and high.

Back outside, the D300 breathed a sigh of relief as I wound the ISO way back down again for one last picture of the next James Dean:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/5000 sec at f 2.8, ISO 400, hand held no flash. How bright is that boy’s hair? He’s our matinee idol, sometimes you can see the adult he’s going to be, but most of the time he’s our boy Devon, not yet ten, naughty enough to send to bed early, but loveable enough to creep downstairs, half asleep, just so I can carry him back upstairs again…