"I could eat a thousand stars..."

It's been windy, cloudy and rainy for week round these parts and little in the way of opportunities for photography so when I noticed the little non-clouded moon icon hovering over the Isle of  Purbeck at 22:00 on friday night, on the met-office weather-forecast web-site, I knew I had to go out and try to shoot the stars at Mupe Bay, even try my hand at getting some timelapses maybe.
I wasn't about to let a bit of wind put me off.

Because it was a midnight run I put out a general enquiry for interest amongst friends. Clambering over 300ft cliffs in the pitch black is fun but it's probably a good idea to bring someone along just in case of incident but also because sitting around for several hours while your camera clicks every 30'ish seconds is not necessarily the greatest entertainment in and of itself. Thankfully on this trip I was fortunate enough to have my good friend Mark join me.

My first mistake, despite checking the weather and that the Lulworth firing ranges were open was to not check the tides, (I always forget one of the three). So when we arrived at Lulworth Cove we discovered there was no way of walking around the beach as we normally would. The alternative was to climb up and over the 525 foot tall cliff that surrounds the inner curve of the bay. Good exercise, just unexpected.

Whilst we made our way towards Mupe Bay I was constantly looking at the sky around us, worryingly the clouds didn't seem to be parting at all and there was a consistently thick layer covering the entire sky. It wasn't until we reached the cliffs of Mupe Bay itself that it started clearing. (Probably a little later than forecast, I suspect it wasn't clear enough for the shots I got until about 00:00-01:00am)

I shot three time-lapses which I've edited into the video below.

• The first sequence is from on the cliff tops where I tried to use the old pill-box/war-fortification as a wind break. (This one is mostly just clouds rolling towards Swanage)
• The second sequence is shot down on the beach facing East towards swanage, etc
• The third sequence is facing south out to see where the moon rather unexpectedly rose, which thankfully didn't blow out the rest of the image into over-exposure.

(To view the video in higher res you can click on the 'youtube' logo in the bottom right hand corner of the embeded video and manually adjust it. YOu should be able to put it up to 720p-1080p)

Frustratingly I'd left my camera set to shoot Jpegs for a large portion of the trip but thankfully I've gotten some good results I think. The burnt in white balance of the jpegs does cause some flickering in the first two time-lapse sequences though. I changed the setting in time only for the third sequence(where the clouds blew back in)

Here are some stills from the sequences. I've not performed any sort of noise-reduction on these images as I'm quite inexperienced at it, I intend to research some good techniques and apply it to them later.

Where the ice giants dragged their feet...

This past week I've been on holiday with my family, on a P&O cruise ship called the Ventura, sailing across the North Sea and up and down the great Fjords of Norway.

We visited Stavanger, Skjolden, Geiranger and Bergen, due to the toddler amongst us we weren't able to do any particularly adventurous treks into the mountains or Norwegian wilds however we did see some extraordinary views as we sailed right up the middle of some of the most beautiful mountain ranges in the world.

This also gave me a brilliant excuse to put the Tokina 11-16mm lens I bought recently to a proper test and try my hand at some landscape photography. Having such a wide angle is something that takes some getting used to. A lot of things can sneak into frame that you wouldn't necessarily expect and often the details within the shot are too seemingly 'distant' or small to comprehend when reviewing them through or on the camera. In some cases it wasn't until I got the image home and post-processed it that I realised what I had.
Hopefully with sufficient practice I'll become more accustomed.

The following three shots were the first few shots I took on the top deck of the cruise ship in Stavanger. To amuse my self-sense of irony I decided to use the wide angle lens to see if I could make a panoramic 'photo-stitch' image of an even wider angle.

I didn't take many photographs in Stavanger itself, most of what I did were very touristy, more so than the above three (The third isn't very obviously stitched anyway).

The following shots are from the departure of Stavanger and the sunset that punctuated it.

Some random shots from Skjolden

... and then Geiranger...

The views from our rear facing balcony on the journey out of Geiranger.

To put things into a bit of perspective I snapped this one of the back of the ship.

This was the very last shot I took on the trip. I just held the camera against the window in and took a photo on almost full auto settings(I think it was aperture priority)I after the shutter stayed open for longer than I expected I assumed it'd be a waste of time so never thought to review the image before putting it away. I never expected that taking a long exposure on a moving object(The ship) could work as well as it did. If i'd realised this sooner I would've played with the technique much more.

So there we have it. My trip to Norway. :)

Sunset at Mupe Bay

Last night I decided to do the opposite of what I've been doing previously and instead of going to a location before dawn I would go after sunset.
The weather reports looked like clear skies, albeit with a bit of cloud.
This time I decided to revisit Mupe Bay as the firing ranges would be open and I decided it'd likely be sufficiently shrouded from local light pollution.

In preparation for the trip I did buy some hand-warmers and a torch and found I only needed the torch really, you work up quite a heat whilst hiking over those cliffs when approaching Mupe Bay and I left before the temperature really dropped for the night. The only downside to the evening was it was quite a bit cloudier than I would've hoped.

I got some nice shots early on but eventually left, not due to cold or wind as I thought would be the cause, but simply because the stars ended up covered by cloud. That said I now know what's involved in the trip and am much more confident for planning many more trips in the weeks to come. (firing range open times permitting of course)

That's not a sunset sadly, that's light pollution from Swanage which is about 12 miles away

I caught this by accident, I didn't notice it until I reviewed the photo that initially caught it, then I quickly adjusted my settings so I could grab it's full trajectory until it went out of sight.
It is not a shooting star, though i would love it to be, I'm also certain it's not a plane as I'm sure it wiggled from side to side a bit when observing it by eye. My best guess is that it was one of those floating lanterns you can buy.

For this one I just wanted to get a shot with many stars in to make sure I was understanding the rule of 600 better.
Previously I was calculating based on the focal range of the lens rather than the effective focal range that the cameras sensor gives you.(D90's aren't full frame cameras after all)

I also had my first experiment in time-lapsing some photographs together.

It's only a few frames and just over a second but I think I can see enough to know I've got the hang of it. When on location it's hard to commit to a timelapse because it takes sooooo much time that you're eagerly wanting to spend photographing other things.

Dawn at Kimmeridge 02

Another Dawn trip down to the Bay. This time with my new wide angle lens.

Things did not go quite to plan however. According to the met office this morning would be the last day of decentish weather for the next week and the firing ranges were opened for the Easter holidays which should've given me the opportunity to explore a litte further along the coast to get some slightly different shots. However I failed to check the tide times so halfway through the morning it became clear (on reviewing the photos i'd taken so far) that  the rockpools I was intending to shoot were fairly quickly disapearing and, if i wanted any guarantee of making it back to my car without getting my feet wet before I go to work, i'd best leave immediately.

For my first test run with a new lens I'm quite happy. I got a suprising amount of stars and am hoping to do the same again soon. It's slightly disapointing that my exposures were just a little too long to avoid minor star-trailing but I've done my research now and should be able to avoid it in future.
There's also a disapointingly large volume of noise in the images which i'm currently researching how to compensate for.

I haven't yet worked out what colour temperature to apply to the images so you'll likely notice some slightly different colour tints.
All of these photos are taken at night, nothing but the full moon for illumination.

The next few photos were taken whilst I explored the purbecks after leaving the bay

Dawn at Kimmeridge

For the past couple of weeks the weather in the UK has been particularly good. I couldn't help but take advantage of this and after doing a test run one weekend I worked out I could get to some pretty good photographic locations at dawn, set up, take some shots, pack up again and still make it on time for work.

This has meant I've ended up spending most mornings over the past few days sat on a rock at Kimmeridge Bay, watching the sunrise behind Clavell Tower in the Isle of Purbecks and... once every few minutes, adjusting my camera settings.

It's been great to see this part of the country at this time fo the day. I'm not really even sure what inspired me to start making the trips but i'm very glad for doing it and, weather permitting and whether the MOD allow acces to the firing ranges I will continue to do so.