Waterlilies

By shendyNo Comments
While at the gite in France, we took just one day trip (we basically spent two weeks sat in the shade of a large oak tree, reading) - this was to the "Jardin des Nenuphars", Latour-Marliac, at Le Temple sur Lot, a few minutes from Villeneuve-sur-Lot. This is where hardy waterliliy hybrids were first grown and from where Monet bought the lilies for his garden at Giverny. They house the French national collection. A lovely place, really interesting (and with a good cafe), although the greenhouse containing the exotic/large lilies was unbelievably hot and humid - it took me a fair while to recover from just a few minutes in there!...
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Gnaargh!

By shendyNo Comments
So, I'd got this smudge on the sensor, which buggered up a few reasonable photos. I also discovered a downside to the long exposures - the longer you leave the shutter open, the more chance of dust landing on the sensor. I spent the afternoon at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, and at one point it clouded over a bit - this shot is a 1 minute exposure and is pretty much everything I wanted to achieve with the 10-stop filter - you get the movement of the clouds and the water smooths itself out. And a couple of bloody great dust sports. I really like the picture, but it's been ruined by dust and the mystery smear....
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Been a while…

By shendyNo Comments
Been a while since I posted - mainly explained because I haven't taken any photos... Anyway, I recently invested in a 10-stop ND filter - it only lets through 1/1000th of the light, so a 1/30sec exposure becomes 30secs, making it easy to get long exposures in broad daylight. I spent Monday morning wandering along the Grand Union Canal just outside Northampton. Took me ages to find it, as the roads bear no relation to what they were when I last went (probably about 25 years ago), and it's mainly a big set of distribution centres. It's one of the places I can genuinely look at and say "I can remember when all this was fields". A 15 second exposure 30 seconds - really annoyed by the smudge top-centre. I cleaned the sensor before the rugby on Sunday and still ended up with it. Really annoying. As the canal passed under the M1, there was an interesting juxtaposition of the old canal and the stark...
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Getting creative

By shendyNo Comments
A bit of experimentation following a chat with a friend - try and photograph water drops. Pretty easy to do - poke a small hole in the lid of a plastic bottle and an even smaller one in the bottom of it - that provides the drips. Gaffer tape it to a tripod that's sat over a bowl of water. A single flash off to the side works pretty well, and then a bit of colour from some card/paper under and behind the bowl. It worked pretty well, but looked a little bland. The stroke of genius was adding orange squash into the water! Another way to do it is apparently to drip milk into ordinary water. Setting it all up is pretty easy - the hard bits are first of all focusing correctly and then getting the timing right. But, once you work out the timing, you can get really good results......
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