Leeds canal, early in the morning

On a grim, bleak Tuesday morning I found myself, once again, in Leeds. Something that seems to happen on a daily basis. That's because I work there. Well, somebody has to!

Behind my office there is a canal, and every so often when I have a few spare minutes in a morning I like to walk that way rather than taking the short route through the rushing crowds of commuters. And on the way this morning, I took some photographs.

The wonderful thing about grim weather is that conditions are really, really stable. All of these pictures except the last one were taken with the exact same settings; f/4, 1/125th seconds, ISO 800. For the last one I knocked the shutter speed up to 1/200th, although it didn't make much difference.

The old, the new, the wet ... older canal-side buildings on the left, the railway crossing in the middle,
and in the background the new office buildings of Wellington Place, one of which is mine.

A handy barge for carrying scaffold. Behind it the locks are being renovated.

The railway crosses the canal. The labelled tracks above filter the trains onto the many
and various platforms of Leeds train station.

Under the bridge the puddles and dim lighting are eerie. Water is reflected on the top of the tunnel.

Under the bridge ferns and other plant life grows on the stone walls.
Electric lighting gives the whole place a rather peculiar glow.

Looking down the canal the railway curves off towards Wakefield.

Beyond the old stone walls, some greenery starts to make an appearance.

The river is rather swollen from the large quantities of rainfall of late.

The new blocks of flats beyond Wellington Place curve off into the distance. Peculiar looking
buildings making a rather oppressive looking channel between the looking architecture.

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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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