A pleasant evening at Durdle Door

This is my second trip to Durdle Door.
We were intending to get there in time for sunset but it didn't go quite to plan. I was quite pleased on the drive over as I could see the sky would've been very colourful so i was pleased that i'd identified good conditions for the shoot. Just a bit of a shame we totally failed to get there on time.

Durdle Door is a great spot for night photography but, as with a lot of these nice coastal sites it's not the most accessible location, the walk back up the steep cliff path is a bit hard going at 2am. ;)

Anyway, we set up pretty quickly and, assuming that the moon would be rising over the door in a reasonable amount of time I decided to set up for a timelapse. (it took an hour and a half)
I turned the resulting timelapse into the following animated .gif.

On a side, whilst the timelapse was shooting away I had a little explore around the door and saw something glowing. On investigation it turned out it was a glow worm!
I've never seen a glow worm before, when I first notice the little light I thought it was someone sat in the dark with an e-cigarette or something.
Due to my camera being busy I snapped a photo on my camera, which failed to get anything except a glowy smudge to serve as evidence that it happened. :)

By the time my camera was available the little chap had gone.

After the timelapse I moved onto just trying out different angles that I wasn't terribly happy with and eventually moved on to a bit of "painting with light" using some new tools I got a while ago.
They have a nice effect I think. It's more subtle than the old glowsticks but looks a lot more fluid. I'll post about them in more detail another time when i've played with them a bit more.

We decided to move to the otherside of the Door and see what other kinds of shots we could get. Unfortunately it clouded over a bit so a minimal amount of stars to capture in any shots. There was some visible lightning flashes on the distant horizon but nothing that was captured on camera.

I decided to try and play with lights again.

The shots with the blue lights are not as good as I'd like but there is lots of potential. I've got a lot of ideas on things to do with it and the final shot was an attempt at some nice milky white water, I was happy with the shot but I wanted more colour than the night sky could reasonably provide.

Big thanks to Shaun Vye over at http://www.digital-deviant.com for keeping me company, go have a look at his shots and version of events.

Baltic Holidays - Day 12 - Amsterdam

Day 12.
The final Day of our Baltic Cruise and holiday and we are to spend it in Amsterdam.

Needless to say Rembrandt and Van Gogh were on the menu.

Straight off we hunted for the Rijksmuseum(wiki-link) knowing that it was an infamously popular destination. Upon arrival though it was clear the queue just to get a ticket to go in was going to take at least half an hour and they were already putting up signs saying that tickets were only available for later in the afternoon. Bearing in mind we'd have to be back on board the ship that afternoon it seemed unlikely that we were going to get in at all, cut our losses and went to get lunch at the hard rock cafe that was about a block away.

After that was when we stumbled on a canal cruise ride that included a package that promised access to the Rijksmuseum afterwards with no time restraints or queuing at all, so we snapped it up.
The following batch of shots are from the canal ride.

Due to the number of images please see the rest of this post beyond the break...

A moon-lit evening at Winspit Quarry

So, another new amazing location found on the Jurassic Coast, this one is Winspit Quarry.
On this trip I was joined by two fellow photographers, Chris and Shaun. (Who found and suggested this location and joined me on two recent trips.)

It's a fairly short walk from Worth Matravers and not quite where we expected after having spent quite a while reviewing google maps.
When we hit this sign(left), we turned left as a nearly full moon rose(That's the moon not the sun), which does lead down to the water but was not much use to us. We couldn't find any of the apparent ruined structures that could be seen from the satellite imagery, only some slightly treacherous looking climbs down to the rocks.


So, failing there and deciding not to explore the beach below due to the tide being in and the rocks being uneven and slippery we tried turning right at the sign. Where very shortly after we were greeted by the most amazing sight!


An opening in the cliff side to a  great hollow filled with ruins and lined with caves all lit by the right moon light. There was so much potential we didn't know where/how to start.

Regrettably I didn't get a shot as we arrived to show what we saw but it probably wouldn't be that impressive as a photo it just would've been nice too have to document the occasion.
Here is a panoramic shot of the area though .

Due to the volume of images and the inclusion of some animations I've broken this post up so please click the link to read further:

Hunting Panstarrs

Tonight I went hunting Panstarrs.
It is a comet that will be viewable for most if not all of the latter part of this month.(March 2013)
So far though tonight has been my only clear sky, which is unfortunate as it's both a work-night and it's been raining all day, but not wanting to risk missing my only opportunity I grabbed my gear and ran for it before the sun set.

Todays pick of location would be Badbury Rings. A place I recently went to scout it's star-scape viability and to play with glow sticks.

Sadly there were consequences...

I took two pretty harsh trips on the slippery muddy slopes of Badbury rings

Panstarrs should be visible, with some assistance from binoculars or similar, chasing the setting sun below the horizon, during sunset.
This is fiddly for me as the sky is a lot brighter than i'd normally expect it to be and so the settings I need to use will be largely different. As it turns out though it wouldn't matter too much as the following animation should illustrate.

The source of that long line of thick clouds is, as you might guess, exactly where i'd expect the comet to be, by the time it cleared up the comet was below the horizon.

I tried to make the most of the trip and took some other shots, including a string of shots I shall be trying to composite into a panoramic shot. If it works well it will possibly be photograph of the week this week.

Here are a few of the other star snaps I took.

Photograph of the Week #0031

 "When not scribbling away in a sketch book or dabbling on a Wacom tablet i'm invariably fiddling around with exposure settings on my Nikon D90 trying to capture moments in aesthetically pleasing ways.
So here we have "Photograph of the week" a (mostly) weekly feature showcasing my favourite photo of the week."

During my past attempts at photographing stars i've had various stabs at "shooting-the-moon" which i've repeatedly failed at. I looked up some tips that advised shooting the moon as if it's broad daylight, an object lit directly by the sun, as it is, so just take a manual shot with that in mind.
I'm happy with the results, finally I got a shot where you can make out the details in the moons surface.

It really does take quite small things to cheer me up.

Shooting night into day

A couple of months ago I was linked to an article about a certain kind of photography where the objective is to make a night time shot look like day.
It's a simple premise, a long exposure on a moonlit night that brings out the blue in the sky and still illuminates all the scenery down below. Some of the images created from such a technique are truely impressive.

I've been having a stab at it for a few weeks now but with little success, often just getting my settings all wrong or completely failing to manage to focus on anything. The thoery is you focus on infinity but this is very easy to get wrong as just turning the focusing ring all the way to one side won't do the job.

Anyway, last night, whilst the moon is nearer, fuller and brighter than it has been for last twenty years I finally got some results I'm happy with. Admittedly I think my ISO settings were a bit too high so there's more grain in the images than i'd like but now i'm more comfident with my technique I will happily bring that setting down a bit.(resulting in longer shutter speed times)