A quick trip to Berne

So work sent me to Switzerland this week to do worky things for worky reasons.
The above shot was taken on the train that formed part of the journey to reach Berne, (where the worky things would come to pass).
It is an image of clouds breaking over Lake Geneva which, as lakes go, is pretty big.

That's pretty much all I got for the trip until the final day when I had an hour and thirty minutes before checking out of the hotel to explore Berne, so a quick self planned tour of the Old Town was underway, as can be seen below.
There were only two things I was told about to keep my eye open for. A child eating ogre and a pit full of bears... I didn't find the bears...

I don't know what this game is but I guess someone had forgotten to put it away the last time they played it.

A Gargoyle. I have a thing for gargoyles and wish I could've investigated further to see what else was around. This chap managed to catch my eye without much scrutiny however... Poor chap!
... Enter now the Baby eating ogre fountain!

I'm not sure if the baby eating boogey man fountain is that wierd though as, on my way back to the hotel to check-out I noticed another of the fountains that otherwise looked quite normal bearing a slight... oddity that otherwise might've been missed. ..

... Is that a musket wielding bear-cub?

Finally, one of my favourite shots, clouds breaking over the Alps I believe. I never usually have opportunity to see things like this and it was great to get to capture it in my camera.

Star Trails

After the experiment I did in this Photography of the Week blog post I realised I could apply the same effect, retrospectively to the previous series of shots I've done at other locations.

So this blog post is going to be a rehash of previous shots/videos compiled into star-trail image stacks.

St Aldhelms Head:

Corfe Castle:

Horton Tower:

Knowlton Church:

(The two above look different as there was an intermittence between the series of shots where the tripod moved and there was rolling mists that gave different white balance readings.)

Grange Arch:

Each one of these I've got at full resolution for print and wallpaper size but only lower resolution versions are available below.

 How I offer wallpaper versions or print versions will depend on any interest I get, it's likely the wallpaper ones will become available for free at a later date but I'm considering selling prints at some point of some of the tidier images.

Another night at Horton Tower

Another clear night struck my radar this week and I finally decided to plan a trip to Horton Tower with significantly more fore-sight.
I spent a few hours going over maps and right-of-ways on-line before hitting the location before deciding how I would approach the location.
Last time we started from a foot-style at the bottom of the hill which resulted in about a 20-30 minute walk up the hill in the dark, which felt a little uncomfortable as, even though there are styles and paths they are occupied and functioning farmlands.

However I discovered there is a fairly easily accessible bridle-path that leads right in front of the tower and made reaching the location to shoot very trivial.
The noly problem with the evening was a lot of condensation forming on the lens and making the images go blurry halfway through the night. I noticed it pretty quickly but it is cause for concern.

Anyway, here are some still from the time-lapses I shot. (I'm saving the time-lapses up now for a longer vid in the future)

Photograph of the Week #059

"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."

I'm running way to far behind on Photograph of the week this year. It's quite disapointing but, this week I've got something new.
This one is a new experiment that i'm going to play around with some more.
I was on my way home from a friends house late at night when I felt the need to try and shoot some stars over a river/flood-land. It's not a perfect shot of the location and the passing cars cause a massive over-exposure in the middle but the main experiment is above in the sky.

This is my first attempt at purposeful star-trails. The intention was not to get static sharp stars but clear trails that highlight the movement going on. I'm happy with this first experiment though I'll likely retry the location from a different spot next time.

Knowlton Church 2

I did a revisit at Knowlton Church last night as I spotted some clear weather and felt I had to take advantage.
Just  quick couple of shots but I'm happy with how they came out. Again I took a series of photos that I can work into a animation at a later date.

Photograph of the week #058

"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."
Whoops! I'm four months behind on these.
Though I've not been unproductive in that time with quite a lot of night time photography.
This week though I managed to grab some macro shots of a spider in my garden. He was extemely well lit by a bright sun on clear summers day.

Here's a couple more angles for fun.

Knowlton Church

Tonight I did a quick run to Knowlton Church.
An old ruined church situated in the middle of a barrow henge.

The decision to go out was very last minute as the sky just happened to seem very clear and I'd noticed the next weeks worth of whether was going to be very poor. The site is quite local to me relative to some of the other locations I've been visiting lately so I didn't feel like I was risking much by just having a look.

As it turned out there was a very bright and almost full moon in the southern sky which, while interesting to see how much of an effect it has on the sky, was a bit inconvenient as that's precisely the direction I wanted to face and completely blots out that whole area of sky.

What it does do however is nicely illuminate the subject of the photography. These photographs were shot in the dead of night at 23:00-02:00.
With exposure lengths of thirty seconds the moon-light appears to do as good a job as the sun in lighting up the area.