Ah, the joys of having 24 Mega-pixels to play with.
This is another image from my visit to the National Botanical Gardens of Wales and specifically the "Great Glasshouse". Within, the plants are arranged into beds of varying depth and width. I had my 50mm prime with me so shooting flowers in the centre of the beds was a challenge.
But high pixel count saved the day!
The image is the result of a rather severe crop of the original photograph, but I still have plenty of resolution left, so hurray for Sony and their mighty Exmor sensor!
As promised, an image from my visit to the Great Glasshouse at the National Botanical Garden of Wales.
This is obviously of some sort of succulent - I've no idea what. I should say that I've no real interest in the plants that I photograph beyond their sculptural or other photogenic properties.
Plants, especially flowers, are also very useful for highlighting transience as a central subject of photography. When you look at a photograph of a person who is unknown to you, you speculate as to when the image was made and where that person is now. Their mortality is a central issue here - you're trying to judge, for one thing, if that person is likely to be still in the land of the living. However, unless there is strong internal evidence in the photograph, speculation is all you have.
With a flower there is no room for doubt. That organism will have inevitably perished and the image that you are looking at is the only record of the short period when the bloom was at its best. The epitome of transience, captured forever(-ish) by the power of photography.
On August Bank Holiday Sunday, we visited the National Botanical Gardens of Wales.
This was supposed to be the answer to the question "what activity would suit a five year old and a seventy-eight year old?". In the event, my mother-in-law chose not to accompany us, so it had to suit a five year old and two grumpy forty-somethings - which it did, to an acceptable level.
The image above is of the gardens' wicker figure of Twrch Trwyth, the mythical great boar hunted by King Arthur, which is probably emblematic of the Saxons. Its about seven feet tall at the shoulder and stands at the top of a slope above the ice house, which my son was investigating whilst I was photographing.
I took my Alpha 77 along for the trip, with my 50mm lens attached, as I was expecting to do some macro work - which I did, later in the afternoon - rather than landscapes. So, getting this image involved some pratting about on the slope to get the composition that I wanted.
The weather was good, but a bit windy for making images of the planting and, yet again, I'd left my tripod at home. However, the place boasts a "Great Glasshouse" and I spent some time in there, the results of which I'll post shortly.
Another image from the Pensford session described in my previous post.
The viaduct itself runs more or less due north-south and I was there in mid afternoon with the sun in the south-west. I approached from the east and captured this image as I passed through one of the arches, moving on to make the image that I posted previously.
The ground beneath the structure is boggy in places and heavily overgrown with nettles and thistles. As I'd been in work earlier in the day, I was wearing a light linen suit which proved no protection, so I was stung and scratched incessantly - suffering for my art, for a change.
I've intimated before that, in my view, landscape photography and a paying, nine-to-five job don't mix. This is for the simple reason that, when the right conditions for the image that you have in mind occur, you're generally sat at a desk. And if not, you're doing one of the many other things that your job displaces to those times of the day that are best suited to photographic pursuits.
Recently, however, circumstances conspired in a way that enabled me to make the image above, which is of the railway viaduct at Pensford. I had a couple of hours free on a Friday afternoon and the weather was - almost - perfect. Bright, with broken cloud, which was sufficient to diffuse the sunshine, although the wind was slightly too strong.
So, having found somewhere to park in the village - not easy - I made my way along the footpath that leads into the valley beneath the viaduct and spent about thirty minutes photographing the structure and getting stung to death in the process, before my phone rang and my life reasserted itself.
There are a number of good images that resulted from this jaunt. To be fair, if you can't get something with this sort of raw material then you may as well hang up your camera. This one is my favorite. Its a sort of poor man's HDR, which uses a single image processed as two or more layers. I'm rather pleased with the method that I used to generate the layer mask, which involves making a threshold copy of the image, leaving a black outline of the ground and the viaduct on a white field. Creating a mask from this is then a matter of a couple of minutes work.
This image - and the others that I post from this trip - will probably be the swan-song of the Alpha 100. The Alpha 550 is - all sentiment aside - a much better camera. Apart from the additional 4 Megapixels, it has much improved viewfinder coverage. So today, I swapped the Tamron super zoom to the 550 and that will now go with me on my expeditions, such as they are.
Oh dear, here comes the obligatory sunset photo.
Recently, I found myself at a loose end in Liverpool. The family had been safely packed off back to Somerset and I didn't feel like hanging round my father's house. So, I set off with my camera and followed my nose to the river.
I have a strong sense of connection between my family and the Mersey. My grandfather sailed down it and away to travel the world. My father was a diver in it, then he worked in the shipyard on it. So there was some sense that the images that I was capturing were in his memory, hence the title of this post.
The camera in question was the new Alpha 77. My memory is that I had my 50mm lens with me - which is not the best for landscape - but that's not what the EXIF data on the RAW file says. Again, no tripod. Sometimes, I wonder why I bought the damn thing.
As you might expect in these circumstances, most of the images where useless, but I quite like this one. I've tried to make a mono image out of it but it looses something, so here I am again, presenting a colour image for your consideration. Normal service will be resumed soon.
Still going through the holiday snaps. This is another from the National Wildflower Centre.
Unfortunately the petals at the bottom of the image have drifted out of focus. Such is life. As I've already written, I wasn't carrying my tripod.
However, I can't resist the colours and the light in this image - I don't normally post colour images, but I had to make an exception in this case. The bokeh is quite nice as well.
