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.

Return to Granch Arch

A clear night and its been far far too long since i made a trip out.
To ease back into the groove of star photography I picked an old spot I knew well.
Grange Arch.

The evening was fairly trouble free, there was a slight threat of clouds and it was a little windy but otherwise pleasant.
I set the camera up in a couple of different spots, aiming in the directions I thought would work best. Played around with some coloured lights when I wanted to get a bit more creative with a splash of colour/light and got the following results.

Finally the above shot was the last sequence of the evening. I wanted to have a proper stab at a north-star spiral.
The arch presents some problems as it has lots of trees behind it that prevent you seeing it's shape as well as I'd like and I didn't hold out much  hope for a good shot either as there were plenty of clouds but, as it turns out, the clouds gave a sort of star-bursty effect to the sky which i'm not unhappy with.

The Colour Red!!!

So Gizmodo.co.uk like to run the occasional Shooting Challenge.
Generally speaking I miss it or fail to get a shot done in time. This time is not much different except I was determined to get an entry in so... despite not having anything on the final day of entries i decided to give it a stab.

Now today I was in the office so I had the following amounts of time available.
13:00-14:00 lunch hour
17:00-18:00 Time between when I get home and the time submissions must be entered by.

So... 2 hours.

Here's the brief of what needed to be achieved:

For this week’s Shooting Challenge, I want you to make a photograph or series of photographs that focuses on the colour red. I’m looking for creative photographs that instantly draw the viewers to that colour. I don’t want to see any ‘selective colour’ photography as this usually requires some post­processing work and only minimal global post­processing is permitted.

I had a few basic ideas. I wasn't going to have too much time to experiment THAT much but I'd been thinking of grabbing some large black tiles to use as photographic backgrounds for a long while and this seemed like a good excuse.
I grabbed myself two black tiles, one very reflective one and one non-reflective one and a shiney red tile.
I looked for other materials whilst I was there but I had to head back to work.

So that was it. I got home at 17:00, dug out my cheapo studio lighting kit and shot away.
Here are those results.

 The above shot shows one of the problems I had along the way. Dust, lint and just... bits of stuff showed up very easily on the tiles. I spent a fair while wiping them down as even after I got them clear some dust would settle a bit later on.

 My son had left out his felt tip pens, in fact, namely just his red one which I took to be a sign.

After I'd finished with the tiles I had about ten minutes left before I had to get the photos off the camera and sent to Gizmodo.
Before I did  that though I really wanted to try an experiment using red food colouring dropped into water in a clear container.

I didn't submit any of these because they required far too much post-processing to get to how they are but they were an interesting 10-15 minute experiment.

The food colouring will just sink to the bottom of the water on it's own, you need to mix it with something thicker. On this occasion I used milk.

Finally just for fun I played with the Hue/Saturation and made it not red any more.

So there you go. With less than an hours worth of prep and a bit of determination this is the sort of thing you can spin out of your camera folks.

Uk floods in Dorset during the Great Storms of 2014...

So, the Uk was recently hit by big ol' storms. It's done millions in damage, flooded a lot of homes, blown over lots of trees, there's been snow, hail, thunder, lightning, record wind-strengths and massive waves battering the coast, causing land-slips and trashing coastal structures.

Down south however we fared quite well, comparatively, half my shed is gone but otherwise, not too bad. We missing out on some of the worse weather up North AND some of the more severe coastal batterings that the far South East suffered.

I decided I was tired of not taking any photographs for such a long time and decided, as the weather had lulled for one evening I'd nip out and try to get some star shots above some flooded plains.
My first attempt was on a bridge.
See the leading image above. The river here usual leads up from the left corner, the line of grass shows where the bank would normally be. All the water to the right is usually fields.

I took these from a bridge on a main road.
I wasn't too pleased with the location and available angles so I moved on.

This is a spot in a place called Fordingbridge that i'd been told about. To be honest there is a lot of potential for this flooded playground but. sadly, I don't own boots at the moment so couldn't do any wading to get closer to the structures.
The above shot was the closest I could get... so I moved on...

.. to Salisbury.
This is the first shot I took of at Salisbury. A path through the park on the other side of a foot bridge.
The river now runs over the path itself.

Naturally I tried to get some shots of Salisbury's famous Cathedral itself, ideally reflected in the flood-water but again the availability of angles was limited by my inappropriate foot-wear.

The full moon didn't help either as it sat right above the Cathedral so tended to over-power it reflections wise.

I found a really conveniently positioned bridge that I could almost line up with the cathedral and had a play

Next up, I tried to take advantage of some of the features of the park itself. I wanted to do way more but again, limited by my foot-wear. I did come away with pretty wet feet regardless as I did try to reach some spots regardless.

On my way home from Salisbury I decided to drop by the Avon Causeway. The Causeway was closed due to the flooding though I didn't see anywhere that it ran over the road myself.
However, the fact that it was closed meant that I was the only person on it for the evening which meant I could take shots in the middle of the road that would otherwise be impossible... or significantly more risky at any rate.

The local light pollution actually added some interesting colours to the nights sky and made for some photographs I'm rather happy with.

The causeway provided the great advantage of situating me in the middle of the floods whilst at the same time not requiring boots and waders to avoid getting wet. Also, it gives me some nice straight leading-lines to compose the shots with. :)