I pass this bridge every time I take the all-stops train at 7:18. Ideally I'd take the 6:48, but if I am delayed then it's a handy second option. The journey to and from Castleford is always quite pleasant, with canals and fisheries and boats and ponds scattered apparently at random along the way.
This morning, for the first time, I remembered to take the camera, to sit on a seat by the correct window, and to actually be awake and alert when we went past.
While the scene is quite crisp, although muted by the wintry mists, it was difficult to capture that in the image. The dirty train window, the mist outside and the speed of the train itself meant that I had to turn up the ISO to 1600 to get a high enough shutter to freeze the motion and avoid camera shake.
I had the camera butted right up against the window, tilted slightly to one side, to avoid reflections and the grain of the dirt splattered up the outside of the glass from showing up. The result was a very low contrast, low saturation image with a lot of noise. If I were stationary, a longer shutter, lower ISO and hence less noise would have been achieved. On the other hand, I would also have been run over by a train. You take what you can get in this game.
On the whole, it pretty well captures the crisp, cold bleakness of the canals and rivers between Leeds and Castleford.
Street lights at night can be very pretty. For someone who lives close to the centre of a large city, skirting round the edge of the town centre can provide a host of beautiful views at night. One advantage to using a wide open lens when taking these pictures is the capture of bokeh, or creative blur. An extreme example is shown to your right; a mass of coloured circles that roughly represent the city they are part of. A more subtle example, of course, is in the picture of the day at the top of this post. The lights cluster around the top of the leaves like fireflies, obviously part of a cityscape but at the same time abstract. The extreme out of focus image is a blurred version of the picture on the left. A view over Sheffield from Pitsmoor, looking up Netherthorpe Road and up to the university. Even when the buildings are focussed (roughly; I'm still practicing) the lights take on the shape of the lens's aperture. I try to incorporate some foreground focus wh...
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