A STEM Subject

More flora from our garden, but this time something that's supposed to be growing there, rather than a weed - in this case, the stem of a large poppy. 

Against the Clock

You know that you've let your garden go when you're making images of dandelion clocks which are growing in your flower beds.

The recent trip to Cannington has inspired me to return to a way of working which I'd abandoned some time ago - that is, to hand-hold the camera and use a wide aperture to keep the shutter speed up. The new innovation is to use live view with the camera at waist height, which avoids any undignified sprawling about.

This is much quicker than using a tripod, and very freeing. I'm not sure what it does for my hit rate, but it produces images which are quite different from the more formal studies that I've been producing for the past couple of years.

Canned Finale

Yet another image from the Cannington set. There are only so many images like this that anyone can take, so this is the last one that I'll post. Probably.

Canned II

Another image from the Cannington visit - I think this is also a tulip, but I'm not entirely sure.

Canned

The Easter weekend saw us paying a visit to Cannington Walled Gardens in the sunshine, where I made this image of a tulip. I like to think that this has a similar look and feel to that of last year's images from Tyntesfield, which is as close as you get to a house style on this blog.

Again, I was working with my Alpha 550 and again I found myself niggled by its limitations. In this case, I was shooting hand-held, using live view and holding the camera at waste level as I felt slightly inhibited about sprawling full length on the formal lawn. Back in the day, the live view implementation was considered to be amongst the best, but now...For one thing, you have to switch between live view and the OVF manually, using a switch that would be right at home on a tractor. The screen tilts, but doesn't swivel, so shooting in portrait format was almost impossible. And talking of the OVF, it has 95% coverage only, which means that extraneous things creep in at the edge of the fame, like that leaf on the left of this image.

<rant>As an aside, it strikes me that those people who go on about the superiority of an OVF over an EVF are camera snobs who have lashed out on top end gear with >99% OVF coverage and need to justify the expense. An EVF gives 100% coverage and is a real step forwards for the rest of us plebs.</rant>

I could go on, but I think that you get the idea - I suspect that the A550's days are numbered.

Bridge End

British Summer Time started at the end of March and the previous week saw my final visit Clifton Down to photograph the suspension bridge at night. As luck would have it, it was on this occasion that I finally found the best vantage point for this purpose. This turned out to be near the observatory and a few metres from the point at which I'd ended my previous visit, a couple of weeks before.

Frustratingly, the sun had only just set when I had to leave for my training session - the image above is the last that I took before packing up. Also, the tower on the northern bank was surrounded by scaffolding, which hadn't been there a couple of weeks before. 

All in all, not a terribly successful note to end this series on, but I think that enough is enough and I'll move on to another subject in my next post.

Upon Reflection

Another week, another visit to Avon Gorge. This time, I stayed around the Cumberland Basin, waiting for darkness. But the year had moved on and it was still quite light when the time came for me to leave to get to training.

I made this image whilst I was mooching around, looking for something to shoot in the twilight, having noticed the reflection in the river water. It lacks the, um, drama of previous images in this series, but I like the composition.

I should say that, a couple of weeks previously, I had switched back to my Alpha 550 for one reason and another, and I've really started to notice just how agricultural it is compared to my Alpha 77. I'm beginning to think that its days are numbered - at 14 Mega-pixels, with poor high ISO performance, its beginning to show its age. 

The question now becomes this; do I buy myself an RX100 or hold onto my cash for the rumoured A77 replacement due early in 2016? The former neatly dodges the A-mount versus E-mount dilemma, which makes it an attractive option, but means that I'll have to keep the A77 for the foreseeable future, which is obviously a hardship.

Observation & Reflection

We're now onto my third week of attempts to photograph Clifton Suspension Bridge from the top of the gorge, and it was at this point that I finally found a good vantage point. This was near the Observatory, were this image was made.