Road to Wortley

The sun was out for the first time in living memory, so I went for a short walk up the Wortley road off the A61. The sky was very blue, and the grass was very green. The light was spectacular, the colours of the mid-day sun with the saturation of the golden hour.

See the full set in the Road to Wortley gallery.

Red Sky At Night

Not sure what's going on with the weather tonight, but it's pretty spectacular. Check this out.

Blustery Burbage

We have been sprucing up the old photography skills of late with Practical Photography's Camera School series. I figure that everyone can use a bit of back-to-basics now and again to blow off the cobwebs to think about the craft more clearly. So to this end we headed up to Burbage this fine, blustery day to see about module 1 of Camera School; Landscapes.

See the full set at the Burbage Edge gallery.

The Meteoric Decline of Blossom

Now that we've finally got the snow out of the way it's time for Spring to start poking it's nose out and testing the air. Over the last three years it's become increasingly obvious that the quality of the blossom has seriously declined, not least, I'm sure, because of the frozen arctic wasteland that is 21st century Britain.

For reference, this is the blossom from 2011:

And this is the blossom from 2012:

Densely packed trees of and full flowers. This year's crop, however, hasn't faired so well. It has done better, oddly, in Leeds in the town centre.

Still large blossoms, but not nearly so dense. Far more green than pink. They faired even worse in the north of Sheffield, despite it being somewhat more rural.

The only word I have for that miserable effort is "depressing".

Crikey

Crikey, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

iPhone photos ahoy! Another one! This time just because the light was so amazingly perfect that I had to take a picture of *something*. I wanted to see how the iPhone camera would handle the branches and tiny twigs with this type of light on them. Turns out, pretty darn well. Almost but not quite as well as, I would say, a 2002 era APS-C digital sensor. Which is damned impressive, considering that the entire camera is a 6mm cube that fits inside a mobile phone.

100% crop of the twig detail

It's very noisy though. 100% crop shows just how noisy this sensor is, even being back-lit and shooting at ISO 50. It's the sort of noise level that, given the good light, I would expect to see at about ISO 400 on an older sensor, and ISO 1600 on a modern APS-C SLR.

100% crop of the noisy sky

Keep off the track

Keep off the track, a photo by craigand on Flickr.

I've been playing with a new iOS camera app (yes, another one) called ThirtySix. It's a strange thing; you can only take black and white pictures, and you have to use up a whole virtual "roll" of 36 exposures before you can see any of them. The processing done is a basic high contrast b&w and is applied automatically with no option to change it.

The idea is to make iOS photographers thoughtful about their photographs. No "keep shooting until you get the right one", no "shoot 100 and pick the best", no "fix a crap photo with Instagram filters". There is no exposure to worry about, no colour, only the light and the framing. Slow down, frame, consider, reframe, add light? move? duck? climb? and finally shoot. Of course you have your "gut feel" for when something didn't quite work out so you can reshoot, but you won't find out until (potentially much) later.

It's an interesting idea. One I can get on board with, to a point. It's something I sometimes try to do with my "proper" cameras; turn off auto-preview, force myself not to chimp, don't look until I get home. It's a good exercise to do.

Digital photography, and the magic of raw shooting and fancy post-processing tools, have made the possibility of "rescuing" a photo, or making it into something else (ostensibly artistic) through adding filters (aside: this is just a word that means "processing presets". It is not related to actual filters that fit on your lens. Peeve) and other gimmicks.

Practice, either using ThirtySix, turning off autopreview, or, you know, actually shooting film, helps you learn to shoot less pictures that need "rescuing" in the first place. And seeing as "the best camera is the one that's with you", and my iPhone is with me all the time, ThirtySix seems like a really good idea.

Although it's terrible if all you want to do is shoot a picture and upload it to Facebook.

Incidentally, this picture is the only one I actually liked out of my first few tries. It's alright, I suppose. Although the limitations of the technology are apparent if you pixel peep - the posterisation is almost laughable.

See? It's like an old VGA computer game graphic. Still, you with 8 million pixels to play with you wouldn't actually notice this at normal viewing sizes. Just don't go printing 15x10 posters.

Read about ThirtySix here: www.tuaw.com/2013/02/05/thirty-six-app-makes-you-a-though...

Colemere

The weather isn't really improving a great deal. It's not thick snow, but it comes in fits and starts and the rain and cold is pretty much constant. Still, heading out for a walk can clear the brain and keep one fit. Last weekend we went to Colemere in Shropshire and very nice it was too.

The view across Colemere

Bare trees by Colemere

Reflections

Snowdrops, but thankfully no snow

Mossy stump

Ripples on the water

Reflections in the mist

Trees by the canal

On the bridge

Broken wood

Have a gander

Warts and all

Bridge 54

Graffitree

How the mighty have fallen

By the roots

SUC