Sheffield By The Sea

Summer is here, and in the People's Republic of South Yorkshire, beach fever has hit. Unfortunately we're land-locked, so our options are two-fold; take the people to the beach, or bring the beach to the people.

Every summer the Peace Gardens are overrun with seaside attractions. A beach with buckets and spades, a hook-a-duck, a helter-skelter and even fresh doughnuts. A bit of a break from the usual city life. We took the kids for an afternoon in the relative sunshine.

Being a big fan of crazy golf, I made a bee-line for the 9 hole course behind the fountains. The holes were actually plastic constructions of dubious quality, but I didn't care. It was a good laugh. It took a while for us to notice that the shape of the holes spelled CRAZY GOLF. A pretty nifty idea, I thought.

After all that exertion it was time for a sit down. There were a lot of things on offer and the whole place looked rather quaint and nostalgic. The kids had slushy drinks which, unfortunately, resulted in mass brain freeze.

After our short break the kids wanted to go on the swingboats. While they did that, I examined a small amount of sand.

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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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