The Deltic

Before we get into the big engine, here’s the idyllic scene a couple of days ago just outside the Wansford railway station, on the Nene Valley Railway near Peterborough:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 16mm, 1/250 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. That’s the River Nene. Idle snap with the wide angle Sigma, and rather heavily tweaked in Lightroom and Paint Shop pro to produce a very quick and simple HDR effect. But no amount of photo processing could adequately convey just how lovely a day it was. I’d managed to get away from the office a few hours early one Friday afternoon in July 2009, craving fresh air, sunshine and a warm breeze after a week’s heavy lifting of a few golf industry marketing plans. Leaving Marie and her parents happily (honestly) building baby bedroom furniture, I headed to the NVR where I’d heard our favourite train (me and my big brother – mild trainspotting tendencies having been covered elsewhere in this blog) was going to be running up and down the line for ‘enthusiasts’.

The Deltic was the biggest, most powerful diesel engine ever to run on British Rail. Only 22 were ever made, and they ran up and down the East Coast main line between London and Edinburgh, just the most mighty trains imaginable with distinctive, bulbous noses and making a throbbing, pulsating growl that got you in the chest like the noise of a thousand sub-woofers. Mark and I loved them as much for the how they sounded, as for how they looked. The Deltics were the closest we ever came, in Britain, to the giant freight-pulling monster engines they have in the USA. Seeing one up close, for a small boy, was one of the biggest thrills you could have in the pre-CGI, pre-internet, pre-video game late Sixties and Seventies.

Sadly, on this day, D9009 Alycidon failed to live up to the legend, and by the time I got there the enthusiasts had drifted away, thwarted by ‘operational difficulties’, which I took to mean that this notably temperamental beast had simply broken down a bit. Either that, or they didn’t sell enough tickets:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/400 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Brutalised slightly in Lightroom, to produce a slightly over the top HDR effect, but hey this is only a little photo blog and I like to make the pictures pop a bit. Here’s the Deltic anyway, parked in the crowded NVR marshalling yard, next to your actual Thomas The Tank Engine. The Deltic is so big and beefy, with such a huge snout, you have to get a fair way away from it if you’re taking pictures at ground level. I probably shouldn’t have been down in the dirt and cinders of the yard, but it was pretty much deserted so I took the photographer’s chance, and walked around unhindered.

Here’s the one from the footbridge:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 48mm, 1/200 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Various colour channels de-saturated in Lightroom to pop the greens and yellows. There’s not an awful lot one can write about this picture – my brother Mark will probably appreciate why I took it, in fact why I was there at all. Like me, he will be wishing that they’d restored it in the Blue & Yellow livery, rather than the old British Rail green. But to us, this picture brings back many happy memories of a childhood now gone, but not forgotten.

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).

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

Ride The Mighty Waltzer

If you can’t take great pictures when you’re at the fairground, then it’s time to take up philately.

This post is all about the funfair. From the little details, to the spectacle, to the personal. As a kick off, here’s three of my best friends – my wife Marie, my stepson Devon, and my father in law John – relaxing on the truly mighty Waltzer, at Skegness fair in August 2008:

 

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 32mm, 1/400 sec at f 5.6, ISO 800, hand held no flash. I couldn’t be happier with this shot. I pushed up the ISO as it was quite dark inside the Waltzer, and I needed a fast shutter speed to freeze the action. But I got a great expression on all three faces (Devon ALWAYS gives good face). The thing was moving at what looked like 500 miles an hour, so it was a complete lottery – but this was the very first picture I took in the Waltzer, and the best. Love it! I used the reliable Nikon 18-200 VR ’superzoom’ more or less throughout the day, it’s all you really need for a day out like this.

Now, here’s the science. I applied a custom Setting to the the pic above, and applied the same Setting to almost all of the pics in Ride The Mighty Waltzer, in Adobe Lightroom 1.2’s Develop module. Basically I de-saturated Reds and Yellows by 50%, applied a 50% Recovery setting to bring back some of the overexposed areas, and increased the Colour Temperature by 25%  to warm everything up. I then took it into Paint Shop Pro, applied a slight boost in Clarify, and gave it a final, quite modest Sharpen. I’ve done that across all but one of the pics in this set (I’ll say which one), to give it a nice, coherent look. I thought it would be nice not to overload this set with highly saturated colours, as is normally the way with funfair pictures. Instead, the colour palette is quite reserved. I’m pretty pleased with the results, creatively.

End of science. And now to the fun, where we join Devon and his Auntie Maxine on the chuffa train:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 170mm, 1/250 sec at f 5.6, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Just one of those lucky moments again, I spotted Dev and Max waiting for the train ride to start, and gave them a shout. Got it spot on, nice and sharp and a lovely smile from them both. Notice the lad in front, on the right, who by his haircut is a tad too old to be riding this particular train without an 8-year old to make it cool. Either that or he’s one scary looking little kid.

This is the picture that I didn’t apply that fancy Lightroom setting to, by the way.

Talking of scary kids, this is ours, contemplating life with a group of eight adults who, within thirty minutes of arriving at the fairground, already wanted to stop for fish and chips:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 18mm, 1/400 sec at f 3.5, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Looks like a dark vignette around the outside of the pic, but it’s nothing artificial, just the way the light fell off a bit at the edges. But I love this sort of natural light portrait, it makes a mundane moment into something a bit more memorable.

There are some fantastic chippys in Skegness, this one’s right at the heart of the pleasure beach. Devon’s just got his motor running, and all the grown ups seem to be obsessed with food. Despite his protests, the wrinklies put their foot down and we settled down at the trough. Devon ate a few chips and watched the other kids outside having fun.  Gritty urban portrait of a child wishing he was spinning around on some death defying machine, rather than listening to the sounds of lip-smacking and “Byyyyy this fish batter is reyt nice”. 

He perked up when he spotted that he had his own brand of tomato sauce:

 Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 24mm, 1/125 sec at f 3.8, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Six months later, at Stamford Fair in 2009, we found more Devon Stile tommy sauce by our favourite burger van. We like burgers too much.

Back outside at last, it was my (Andy’s) turn to hit the rides, so John (Marie’s Dad) grabbed the camera, and within minutes produced one of the shots of the day, curse him:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 112mm, 1/2500 sec at f5.3, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Note how I am paying respect to my mother in law in time honoured fashion, and note also how we are all being very soft by cowering like girls at the bottom of the water slide. Great picture, John.

And here he is proving how tough he is after a circuit of the Ghost Train:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 22mm, 1/160 sec at f5.6, ISO 640, hand held no flash. Looking well, John. Easy to look so confident on a kiddy ride mate. Let’s see you up on the bungee trampoline like your wife… You can see the effect of that custom Lightroom setting here, the car was actually rather redder than that.

Up on the Surf Rider, Devon was trying to stay calm:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 75mm, 1/2500 sec at f5.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Great fun taking action pictures on a sunny day – you don’t have to worry about shutter speed and as long as you’re focusing right (easy with these great modern lenses) you can freeze it perfectly. This thing was travelling at a heck of a speed, notice how cool Max is compared to the other three. She lives in Skegness and that’s a far scarier thing than any fairground ride.

Here’s how high it goes:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 18mm, 1/8000 sec at f5.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Really great exposure, if you look at the original there’s plenty of detail in people’s faces. You can see the terror in Bev’s eyes.

Once again, here’s the difference between Bev and Maxine. Try and take a guess why my wife Marie is so feisty:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 200mm, 1/800 sec at f5.6, ISO 400, hand held no flash. She doesn’t half pull some faces, that woman. And once again, Max looks like she has just taken something lovely out of the oven, rather than screaming towards imminent oblivion in the rickety Skegness Pirate Ship. Note that I was sponsored by SkyCaddie for this trip to the fair.

Marie really hates the way her nose looks in this picture, but I had to include it as it’s just an incredible freeze-frame given how fast they were going:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 18mm, 1/1250 sec at f4.5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. They were flashing by on this terrible machine, you simply can’t imagine how fast unless you were there. These great mechanical arms shove them out to the edge, and pull them back in, spinning the cars round at an unbelievable speed… it looks dead unsafe, and a really bad thing to do after a big plate of fish and chips, but Marie was game for it as always. Any road, just have a look at how sharp this picture is, it’s pretty unbelievable. Once again I am in awe of what you can get out of a good camera. I just stood there, wound it back to max wide-angle, and snapped away, grateful to not be sitting in there with them. Eagle eyed viewers will notice a slightly queasy looking John Oakley at the bottom-right. At this very moment he was regretting that visit to the chippy, and that lovely, tasty batter.

And finally, here’s one of my father in law with a handbag:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 112mm, 1/800 sec at f5.6, ISO 200, hand held no flash. He likes to try it out sometimes, you know, it feels nice and they’re really very useful, you can put your money in them and everything, and why shouldn’t a man carry a  bag anyway? John it’s nothing to be ashamed of. His weekend name is Wendy you know. And here also, at last, is Uncle Al Shepherd, Bev’s brother, partner to Max. They always look after us well when we come to Skeggy for a day out, roughly once a year. This was a great day, great fodder for taking pictures, lots of laughs, brilliant food, warm and sunny. Who needs Disney?

Letting Off Steam

Those who know me well have always been worried that I am a bit of a trainspotter, and I’ve always enjoyed living up to the myth. For the record, I don’t take numbers (big brother Mark, now that’s a diferent story), I don’t buy the magazines, but I do appreciate trains. They’re big, fast, and they appeal to the small boy inside. Diesel, electric or steam, if it’s big and runs on rails, I’ll stop and watch it go by. This saddens Marie no end.

One Saturday in April 2008, Marie and I drove up to Whitby, where her Mum and Dad were staying for a week’s holiday. It was a typical British spring day, we had snow, sunshine, rain, wind, and we got cold. But on the way there, we took a dip down into an interesting looking valley, and came across – quite by surprise – the little village of Grosmont, which has at its centre a station on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. And as we arrived in the village, we were met by this magnificent sight:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 26mm, 1/100 sec at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Note rain spots on the lens – it wasn’t a day for the faint hearted. I had the trusty 18-200 lens on, one of the more pricey superzooms but crisp as nuts, especially with the handy VR switch on.

This is the ‘Union Of South Africa’, one of the last of the famous LNER Class A4 locomotives running in the world – often called the Gresley A4 pacific class, after Sir Nigel Gresley, who designed them (see the train named after him, below). These unique trains (more HERE) were among the biggest, and fastest, and the most handsome, ever built in Britain. They only made 35 of them, and sister engine ‘Mallard’ set a world steam record of 126mph in July 1938, just near where we currently live (on a downhill stretch near Little Bytham, between Grantham and our town Stamford). When I worra lad, every boy knew the name ‘Mallard’, and the speed, 126.

Marie admitted that it did look quite interesting, as much as a train can, but could we get on as it was raining. So we headed into Whitby where, after the blizzard, we took a pleasant walk out to the end of the jetty:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 18mm, 1/500 sec at f 5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. To those of you who live in California, this is what’s known as a proper day out with proper weather. You carry umbrellas, plastic bags, your clothes have hoods out of neccessity, not out of fashion, and you wear sturdy shoes, for better grip on slippery pavements and wobbly flagstones which splash water in your face when you step on them. You don’t worry about your hair, because nobody can see you anyway, on account of the driving, horizontal sleet. Note small lifeboat heading out to rescue more drowning holidaymakers.

For a while I wandered off and tried to ignore the hurricane and the downpour, to take A Photograph. But, for once, my creative muse had left me, so I took some hurried shots of fishing boats and crab nets:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/80 sec at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Forget art, and artistic wide angles, this was useless, I had to point away from the rain to get a clear picture, and even I – who enjoyed cold, muddy, skiddy Sunday morning football matches much more than the warm sunny ones – gave it up as a bad job.

We regrouped in the marvellous Hadleys Fish Restaurant – so popular a chippy, you have to book well in advance. Luckily we’d been aware of the legend, and had been in earlier to reserve a table for four weary, wet adventurers.

 Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 60mm, 1/125 sec at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Just using the D300 as a quick point and shoot on a nippy day out, you can’t really beat the Nikon 18-200 VR lens. The camera takes care of the exposure, usually it’s bang-on, and the lens performs just like you’d expect it to (given that it costs a few hundred quid). The meal, by the way, was as good as the legend promised. The Platonic ideal of Fish and Chips…

On the way home I dragged Marie back into Grosmont station, where the sun was finally out and I took a few more cheerful, colourful pictures. Here’s a particularly cheerful, colourful one:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 11mm, 1/640 sec at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. I’ve worked on this one a bit in Paint Shop, but not a great deal – the original had some lovely rich, deep colours. Back on the Sigma wide angle, I’m uncritically in love with that lens, it lets you get right up close and still get it all in.

Here’s another, so close that the Andy Capp driver could have flicked engine grease onto my camera had he bothered to look:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/80 sec at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. See the dark space to the left of the driver? There was a whole person standing there, but he was looking at me in a funny way, so I cloned him out, into oblivion. Lovely detail on this one. And my fellow trainspotters – Mark – might notice that big, blue engine and that 60007 number could only mean one thing:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 18mm, 1/125 sec at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Isn’t she beautiful?

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/200 sec at f 11, ISO 200, hand held no flash. This is the ‘Sir Nigel Gresley’ itself, the original Class A4, in full steam pulling out of Grasmont station. Blimey I sound like a Rail Enthusiast hacker. But you have to admit, this isn’t something you see every day. Wonderful, isn’t it? Oh please, cynics leave now. Small boys young and old know what I mean.

This was a Good Day, the kind which leaves you feeling very much alive afterwards, and you can ask for no more than that, out of a day.

Advancement, Through Technology…

On 14 November 2008, I took delivery of the stunning Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 professional lens. I happened to have a car service scheduled, and I spent an hour taking pictures inside the Audi dealership in GREAT light – and produced the most amazingly sharp images, even at slow shutter speeds (the one below is, unbelievably, just 1/50 secs and ISO 800):

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/50 secs at f 5, ISO 800, hand held no flash.

Just a jaw-dropping result at a high ISO, slow-ish shutter speed, and this is more or less straight out of the camera. It’s an incredible lens, on an incredible camera. It looks like an HDR image, but believe me it’s not – just a superb combination and some great light (look at that back left alloy wheel…).

Sorry for all the superlatives but, my God, some of this modern technology is awesome.

Rutland Rock Star

To clear out the cobwebs on Jan 2nd we visited The Rockblok rock climbing centre at Rutland Water’s Whitwell centre. Devon did three laps of the sky circuit and went up and down the climbing wall a couple of times. He was his element:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 82mm, 1/250 sec at f 5, ISO 400, hand held no flash. For this quick trip I used the Nikon 18-200 VR superzoom, which is a perfect all-round lens for a family day out. Devon loved the harness and wants to go back to Rockblok every day now.

Here’s the big wall with part of the sky circuit on the right. Spot the 8 yr old making his first ever ascent: 

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 18mm, 1/250 sec at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

In the pic below, note that Devon’s wearing no gloves. Given it was very cold (3 degrees), he did pretty well to get up and down the wall twice before announcing that he’d lost all feeling in his fingers:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 112mm, 1/400 sec at f 8, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Like most photographers I live in pursuit of nice crisp pictures, and for a relatively budget ’superzoom’ lens, the Nikon 18-200 really delivers. At the start we had some lovely light and the above tack-sharp photo needed nothing other than a quick sharpen in Paint Shop Pro.

This one almost has a studio-like quality:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 65mm, 1/320 sec at f 5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Paint Shop Pro has a nifty (and simple to use) ‘Clarify’ function which I often use to give a quick injection of character to photographs. You can produce much more refined results using Levels in Photoshop, or by adding some HDR in Photomatix for example, but cheap and cheerful old Paint Shop Pro is great for ‘quick fixes’, especially if you’re producing images for the web.

It wasn’t all plain sailing for Devon up on the ropes:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 150mm, 1/100 sec at f 5.6, ISO 640, hand held no flash. Here’s an example of that ‘Clarify’ command at work.  By this time we’d got him a pair of gloves…

Just in case you thought it all looks too easy, here’s how high it was:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 18mm, 1/1600 sec at f 4, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Up there with Devon is the excellent Rockblok instructor, Richard. You buy a certain amount of time, and Richard had told us most young kids get around twice within the time, but sometimes they manage a third. Devon, bless him, managed three easily and would have gone for thirty three, but by that time his Grandad John, Grandma Bev and mum Marie had begun to ‘chelp’ about how cold it was. His faithful Andydad, on the other hand, was itching for a go himself… so next time it’ll be Man and Boy up there.

Devon gives us hell most holiday days, which consist of regular portions of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Drake & Josh, The Wizards Of Waverly Place and (although he doesn’t admit to it), a whole lot of Hannah Montana. That, and man-sized portions of PlayStation 3 (we’re into Little Big Planet now). So it was great to get outside for some real activity at Rockblok. He absolutely loved it: 

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 65mm, 1/1000 sec at f 5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. This is a close crop from Lap One of the sky circuit. Note the difference in confidence levels in the picture below, which is from Lap Three – by which time he was spending some quality time scuttling along using the pulley, feet hanging in space, and to hell with ropes (which are, after all, for kids…):

 Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 135mm, 1/1000 sec at f 5.6, ISO 800, hand held no flash. I’d switched to spot metering by this time, and was exposing for his face. It had grown more dull, and we’d lost the blue sky.

Here’s the main man simply swinging around:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 150mm, 1/1000 sec at f 5.6, ISO 800, hand held no flash. 

It was a great half hour for Devon, and good practice for me

Here he is afterwards with his new-found mate, Richard.

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 35mm, 1/500 sec at f 4.2, ISO 800, hand held no flash.

So now we can add Rock Climbing to Hip Hop, Karate, Guitar Lessons, Football Practice and Golf Lessons… One day, he might actually finish something

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…