Synchronicity

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.