Camping in Pomeroy

Since we went to Arbor Low on the bank holiday weekend, we thought we may as well stay over at a local campsite, of which there are lots. We picked Pomeroy Camping and Caravan Park because it was cheap and had a website. The tale of attempting to book this place is long, complex, annoying and for another time.

As you can see from the pictures, and in spite of the weather being reasonably good when we went to Arbor Low, it rained. A lot.

There were also a proliferation of pylons running through the site with "Live Overhead Cables" warnings all over the place.

That being said, we were at least in the Peak District, with everything it has to offer. The golden evening sun made things a little nicer.

And the clear midnight skies proved wonderful for stargazing.

Unfortunately I didn't pack my tripod, so the only star pictures were taken pointing straight up while the camera balanced on top of the car. If I'd have had my tripod I would have liked to take some shots of silhouetted trees. I did have a go, but it went wrong when I dropped the camera halfway through a 25 second exposure.

The morning after saw a lovely, if very damp, bright morning. The tractors were in the field ready for the day and the sun was casting long, soft shadows on the damp grass. Then it rained again.

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Another canal walk

The sun has started being a little more present lately, so some mornings are actually quite pleasant. On one such morning I decided to have a wander up the canal.

The clouds made everything look a bit Toy Story, and the low sun gave a lovely light and contrast to everything else.

Of course, it wasn't sunny everywhere. But even in the darker places, such as right underneath Leeds railway station, the sun had a go at peeking in.

Leeds Hyperbeastly

It's been five long months since I posted anything to this blog. Including this post here, I have posted no less than three times in 2014. As you can tell, I am nothing if not prolific.
A lot has changed since the last time I posted anything. I sold all my SLR gear, for a start, and switched to micro four-thirds. I got a lovely, lovely little Olympus OM-D E-M10 and a small selection of lenses including the must-have Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake and the stunning Olympus 45mm f/1.8. Marvellous, and the camera, four lenses and spare batteries and SD cards in a bag that wouldn't fit the SLR and a single lens. Cracking stuff, because it's now small enough to carry all the time. In fact the body and pancake lens is barely bigger than my Fuji X10 compact!
Anyway, the point of this post; I've taken several walks through Leeds while I've worked there over the past few years and I've been finding it more and more difficult to find non-boring subjects. Everything is so dr…

Shooting the Enterprise

I was recently asked if I could help out providing an image for a magazine article about stress management. For reasons as yet undiscovered the requested image would be of the USS Enterprise flying through a storm in space. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time (just a couple of hours), but I did have a very nice model of the Enterprise D I could use to build the image around.

Thinking fast, I rigged up a rather slapdash rig consisting of a black reflector backdrop, an umbrella and stand from which dangled the model by a thread, and a couple of strobes. One light above, diffused, to provide the key light, and another, reflected and lower power, to fill some of the very dark shadows. It ended up all looking something like this:

Using a fast shutter, f/16 and cunning flash positioning I managed to keep the background black and give the model suitably textured lighting so it didn't have that flat, uniform, shadowless appearance of, well, a model. The narrow aperture obviously…

Lazy Robot

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