Joining the online world

Hello everyone, just a quick post to let you know that my website is up and running!

It is entirely designed and built by myself so I hope you like it. It is not quite finalised yet; I will be making a few minor changes over the coming weeks but overall I am very happy with the main design. It may be down for short periods during this time while I perfect it.

Please feel free to take a look: www.moonlightimaging.co.uk

Although almost all of my time over the last week or two has been spent getting my website up and running, I have still managed to take a few photos.

This particular shot of two Goosander (honest!) silhouetted against snow clouds was taken about five minutes walk from where I was designing my website in Nottingham University's Biological Photography Department. It is proof that, given the right conditions, an interesting photograph can be taken anywhere and that taking breaks even in busy periods can be productive.

The same is true of the Grey Heron Below.

Bejewelled Waterfalls

Three weekends ago (What? You didn't expect my blog to be up to date did you?) myself and a few friends embarked upon a two day roadtrip to Gretna Service Station. At first glance this fairly typical refueling stop seems to offer little to the nature photographer, but come dusk a wheeling ballet of millions of starlings fills the sky.

At least this is what usually happens. We arrived right on schedule fresh from a day in the Yorkshire dales to find Gretna basking in the last rays of sunshine emanating from a cloudless sky; the perfect conditions. Unfortunately, to our surprise, the starlings were not playing ball. There were certainly plenty around but for no apparent reason for the most part they were content to stay in small darting flocks.

After one or two fairly underwhelming shots the show was over and we retired to our hotel.

The next day we headed back to Nottingham stopping off in the lakes for a dose of landscape photography. Sam Waldron and I stopped at Raise Beck, a stream on Dunmail Raise between Thirlmere and Grasmere.

All the rocks, trees, and anything else within splash-range of the stream were coated in glistening ice creating a treacherous but very beautiful labyrinth. After a short while of attempting to find iceless paths up the gorge I realised the only way to find grip was to stand in the non-frozen parts of the stream, allowing the ice-cold water to flow into my boots.

One particularly dazzling part of the spectacle was a tree leaning over and partially into a waterfall. Every one of its bows was adorned with countless icicles, each two or three foot long. Unfortunately, the base of the tree was unaccessible but I still managed one or two shots looking down at it.

So what tips do I have for shooting frozen waterfalls?

1) Metering; constantly check your histogram! The combination of white ice and water and black rocks provides quite a task for camera sensors. I had to keep checking the histogram to make sure I was neither blowing the highlights or underexposing shadows.

2) Use a polarising filter. This cuts the reflections out of the water allowing you to see through to the rocks below. It also cuts out enough light to allow exposures long enough to blur the water.

3) Take a lens cloth. When shooting low near waterfalls it is almost impossible to prevent splashes hitting the lens. Keep checking the front of the lens for water drops and mop them up as soon as they occur.

4) Make sure your tripod is as steady as possible. Be very careful if the tripod leg is in water; it may appear steady but the water may be buffeting it.

5) Keep warm!

All Quiet on the Blog Front

Just a very quick blog post today to apologise for not posting for the past day or two. I am currently working on a website (www.moonlightimaging.co.uk) that will soon replace and include this blog. I hope it will be worth waiting for!

Below are two screenshots two wet your appetite. The first shows my home page.

The second shows the (incomplete) mammals gallery.

Play Makes Perfect

Humans learn most during their life in the period when they are most playful. Coincidence? I think not. Research shows that play teaches us vital knowledge about the way the world works and homes our problem solving skills as well as the relatively mundane fact that it teaches us about the game we are playing.

In a similar way experimenting with photographs we would not normally take increases our skill in all areas of photography. Experimentation teaches us more about our cameras and about properties of types of light we may one day encounter.

Take for example yesterday in Sherwood Forest. The afternoon light was too flat for me to take the types of photograph I normally thrive upon (I now know this was because of a build up of cloud cover before an evening snow storm). Instead of despairing I decided to experiment with a few panning shots to try and bring out the colours of the winter woodland whilst blurring out the ordered distractions of an overly-managed woodland.

Hopefully I not only got a few interesting shots but learned a few things in the process that will help my photography in the future. I guess it is too early to tell.

This evening I decided to play with another type of photography I rarely dabble in; physiograms. Physiograms are long-exposure photographs showing the regular patterns produced by the swing of pendulums.

My method of producing physiograms involves suspending a laser pen from the roof by string in a darkened room, setting it going with the camera on bulb, and waiting until the pendulum has come to an almost complete halt. It really is very simple and I would recommend anyone tries it

Subtly different configurations of string produce markedly different patterns, as does swinging the pen in different directions. Without mathematics incomprehensible to my poor biologist mind it is impossible to predict the final pattern until the exposure is complete.

Not only have I hopefully learned something applicable to Nature Photography from this experiment (I have no idea what!) and had a great deal of fun, but this also shows that biology does not have a monopoly on natural beauty. The combination of simple mathematical and physical laws can produce equally surprising and beautiful phenomena.