7 May 2011

The best holiday weather since 1996

That says it all doesn’t it – that I can actually remember the last holiday we had with really great weather – and not that recently either.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.
On the Good Friday bank holiday we hit heavy traffic and were held up for some time – Herdwick ewes being moved into pastures closer to the farm ready to have their lambs. Mr Boo christened this photo “Where’s Woolly?”

This was taken over a week later, but only a few yards away so may well be one of the Herdwick ewes above being brought down to lamb. Each ewe only has a single black lamb.

We’ve just spent the extended Easter, Royal Wedding and May Bank Holiday period in the English Lake District and with the exception of one evening with a short-lived downpour – late enough that we’d already drawn the curtains and washed up from dinner, so it really didn’t trouble us – and one day that was grey and drizzly, we had wall to wall sunshine for the entire 12 days.

I’ve always had a bit of a fixation about sunlight through trees, it’s just one of my very favourite things.

Where we stay in a permanent static caravan on a working farm, the bedroom window is on the north east face of the structure and if I wake up with the sun on my face, we know it’s a good start. Unfortunately, that’s a somewhat rarer experience that I’d personally like. Every morning, bar one, the sun kissed my cheeks as the alarm went off. Fabulous.

Ramsen / wild garlic; the hedgerows and woodland were thick with it – the flowers just opening – it gives off a gorgeous sweet garlic smell if you brush the leaves as you pass.

But then you have to get up and to it quite promptly as long, static, metal caravans in full sunshine soon turn into baking tins and whilst the day might start with temperatures close to frost-inducing, the air warms alarmingly rapidly as the sun rises and heats the metal sides.

Our neighbour during our stay – taken through the kitchen window – this spot, nestled against one of the damson trees in the orchard, was a morning favourite as the sun warmed up. Soon after I took this, his brother sidled over and snuggled up next to him.

But it is fabulous to eat breakfast with the patio doors wide open and looking out onto the scenery with the spring breeze playing around you.

One of the very most important things to me is walking through woodland and it was just about perfect last week.

A rare moment of stillness in an otherwise very breezy period.

Walking through woodland along a lake shore and coming across small private (albeit rocky) beaches periodically to perch, catch your breath and admire the view, is about a perfect way to spend a spring day.

The weather was just about perfect for us, lots of sunshine, but cool air and on some days, a distinctly brisk and chilly breeze. Just ideal for getting out and walking, although our lunchtime picnics were a little more lively than ideal on some days. When your crisps blow off your plate and you have to hold bread down, you know it’s time to retreat indoors to eat. Al fresco dining; I love it.

I wish I could have captured the fragrance for you too. There are few things more perfect to enjoy than dappled sunlight on deciduous ancient woodland with masses of wild bluebells.

The trees pretty much fully opened from bud within the time we were there and there’s this short period each spring when the trees are this most magnificent luminous bright spring green – the foliage in the sunlight last week was breathtakingly gorgeous – beech trees especially are the most vibrant fresh colour. Foliage is pristine and un-ravaged by weather, disease or insects and at its most perfect – combined with the lovely clear air and sunshine, the Lakes were about as beautiful as I’ve ever seen them – and I’ve spent a lot of my life there in just about every possible set of conditions.

When we arrived, most of the ferns and brackens were unfurling and within a week, were all totally open

I wish I could share with you the fabulous fresh air, scent of the bluebells and the invigorating freshness of woodland in sunshine, but I’ll just have to leave you with the photos and your imagination will have to fill in the rest. There’s a more complete set of photographs in my image sharing gallery.

I love to sit on this seat around a tree and view the fabulous rock garden with its gorgeous maple trees at Sizergh Castle. I never tire of looking at it.

I love this scene in the castle gardens – the water lillies are just growing.

These flowers are less than an inch in diameter, yet fabulously complex geometric structures.

I was so excited when I came upon this pen of pigs – there must have been 50 assorted pigs of different breeds, colours and sizes, all sunbathing in a pile together – that I almost forgot to take photos – I was too busy trying to stop myself from squealing and jumping up and down in excitement.

Did I mention that I totally love walking through woodland and seeing the sunlight filtering through. I suspect I did.

18 Apr 2011

Garden abstracts

We had another lovely sunny spring weekend and whilst the warm weather makes it feel summery – it’s still rather too early to plant summer annuals. Consequently, whilst I’m out in the garden working on it and getting some much needed fresh air and sunshine, there still isn’t that much to see – and certainly not much colour – and it looks a tad barren at the moment. I do however grow quite a lot of greenery to keep it looking interesting even without flowers, so I decided to enjoy that for what it was and not worry about the lack of flowers.

Please click on any of the photographs to see a larger view.

I have one spectacular potted hosta that has lovely variegated leaves and it is just opening up – the bits that the snails haven’t already consumed are opening in lovely tight spirals.

I kept coming back to the same leaves as the light changed, totally besotted with the lovely shapes and lines.

The textures of the greenery do tend to give rise to some lovely abstracts and textures and that was what I focused on for my garden photography this weekend.

Newly opening ivy leaves which are seemingly quite hairy as they uncurl.

I often do this when out on my lunchtime walk or if the weather isn’t good – I pick a theme or subject and concentrate on looking for images to fit that theme – it’s good for making you look at things differently and even in limited locations (i.e. my postage stamp sized garden or the familiar walk to the next village) and poor weather, means there’s much more to see that you initially think – once you attune your eyes to seeing them.

Not all my foliage is green – my Japanese maple opens with these scrawny thin red leaves that gradually fill out – red at first, turning green as they mature.

I might pick a theme like shadows, reflections, texture etc. and only take photographs that fit this theme – on other occasions I might limit myself to a particular fixed focal length lens or camera mode. It’s very liberating to work this way – and good for finding something interesting when in a creative funk like I am at present. Who needs flowers with all this lovely texture and interest in the foliage.

A long growing tendril from my honeysuckle – it’s an evergreen, but like everything else in the garden, it starts growing again with gusto once we get some sunshine and longer days.

I like variegated foliage for additional interest.

Some new opening foliage on alpine strawberry plants – making a lovely carpet of texture.

This bud will open out into tiny red and white candy-striped flowers.

The only thing this monkey puzzle is good for is taking photos of – if you lean against it or brush past it it slices you like a razor blade, falling leaves get totally ensnared in the spikes and need removing with surgical precision and protective gear.

12 Apr 2011

An advance taster of summer to come

Here in the UK over the last few days we’ve had glorious warm sunny weather. Spring has well and truly arrived with the bonus of some unseasonably early warmth. I even managed to get several loads of washing dried outside and put away the same day.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.

I have collected lots of interesting pieces of driftwood and bought a bag of large pebbles to scatter around and I love the textural interest they provide in the garden even when nothing much is growing.

It was actually slightly odd to be outside in shirt sleeves, yet be able to see trees that were still bare. But that in itself has now changed, 4 days of sunshine and everything has erupted. That gorgeous new spring green foliage that positively glows in the sunlight.

I have a small corkscrew hazel in a pot and the ‘lambs tail’ flowers emerge before the foliage, which just emerged with the lovely sunshine we just had.

I love this time of year with the promise of summer ahead but with everything still emerging – lovely pristine foliage in fresh perfect colour, before weather, disease and insects take their toll over the summer months.

I have a large feature hosta in a tall glazed pot which looks stunning until the snails find it. It starts off as purple spikes which gradually unfurl the stripey leaves. I didn’t spot this family of greenfly until I looked at the photos.

One of the big advantages of being self-employed and working from home is that I can choose when and where to work – for the most part. Clearly work demands take priority if I’m to keep happy customers, but I do love the warmer weather (shirt-sleeve warm, preferably not hot) when I can work with the back door open and potter in and out of the garden to do work outside when it’s possible. I have a favourite bench in the shade that I love to sit at and work. It has been warm enough over the last few days to be able to do that and I was actually remarkably productive.

We even had bees busy at work collecting pollen and making the garden sound summery as well as feel it.

I had several pieces of wire wrapped work that I wanted to replace in my stock and several part finished pieces that needed hand polishing and I got through all of it over the weekend in rests between vigorous garden work – like stripping back a lot of the ivy that grows up the outside of the house. We tend to trim it right back, rather like a severe hair cut and it will re-grow rampantly over summer and still more over winter, ready to be curtailed again next spring. It’s a messy, dusty job that we both hate, but always want to get done before we plant the summer annuals as the process drops hundreds of loose leaves in the garden.

I bought two phlox plants last summer that looked stunning when I planted them, but the first flush of flowers finished and they never seemed to get more than the odd further one. I was surprised to see that not only had they survived the hard winter, but were positively thriving. They’ve gone from tight buds, that I hoped were flowers, to full of these delicate flowers in a matter of days. I love how they uncurl as they open.
I do however have to share my garden. We have a very steep pitched roof which overhangs the house rather more than most houses, giving rise to deep eaves which provide good shelter for nesting birds and each spring and summer we have a whole neighbourhood of nesting house sparrows coming and going under the eaves and into holes where the roof crosses the stone walls. They seem to squeeze themselves through implausibly small holes and vanish out of sight.

For the most part, the sparrows don’t mind us being in the garden, they seem to accept that we’re going to be there but don’t interfere with them and we happily share the space – I’m happy to do so as they’re in serious decline and I enjoy being close to them. As the sparrows raise their families, we often get baby birds dropping from the nests when they’re fledging and on more than one occasion, one has dropped down the drainpipe from perching on the guttering and we’ve had to take a section out of the drainpipe to release the trapped baby where they get stuck near a bend in the pipe.

I pointed out that as he wasn’t paying rent and I fed him too, he might exercise a little more control over his manners.

But sparrows are pretty vocal, especially when a few gather and they sound like they’re having heated discussions. I don’t know if they’re trying to chase us off, just let us know they’re there, or just are chatting. So we often have individual birds that seem more vocal than others and make a big fuss as they come and go. The bird in the photos was one such 2011 resident. Every time he arrived or left, he sang loudly and very pointedly looked at me as he perched inside his own particular front door a few feet above me. Several times he hopped over to a length of the telephone cable coming into the house and would look down at me, very pointedly and loudly having his say.

The lovely weather gave me the opportunity to sit and do some wire wrapping and to polish several pieces in progress. There was a distinct ‘heart’ theme to my work this weekend, I made several pendants this shape in both copper and Sterling silver and the matching earrings are just waiting to be antiqued. I also finished a series of antiqued copper earrings featuring squiggled infills wrapped to a frame with Sterling silver. The oval pair were for a commission and I made the teardrop pairs at the same time to make available in the shop.

28 Mar 2011

Revisiting my image processing workflow

As I’ve mentioned before, I was kindly given a new camera for a big birthday I had in January and have spent some time since getting to know it. Despite being a very long term photographer with a lot of experience of different cameras, it’s been rather a steep learning curve with this particular one.

I’ve had to work on how to get the best of it when actually taking photographs – and that’s something I still haven’t settled on yet – every time I think I’ve mastered what’s required, a series of photographs disproves my earlier conclusions and it’s back to the drawing board. I’ve never had a dilemma quite like this before with any camera.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view, they tend to look rather dark here on the page.

A recent image with the new camera taken on a very cold and grey day – which didn’t quite work when I took it, but some extra saturation and a different sharpening technique brought much more out of it.

Some of the problem stems from the fact that I like to work with RAW format images, that is, the camera records the data of the photograph without finally processing it into an actual image – you download the file to the computer, then use software to make that final conversion. The idea being that your computer, coupled with your own knowledge and hopes for the photograph, combined with the luxury of time and sophisticated software, can do a better job of it than the camera can in the milliseconds it has to process the image for you.

I was tinkering with my 720mm equivalent lens on my lunchtime walk and this chap thought I needed investigating and came over for a closer look – at the time he was the other side of the field.

The camera itself is restricted to the recipe of image processing algorithms that are preset between the camera manufacturers taste and the settings you chose in the camera – like saturation level, in-camera sharpening etc. That becomes a sort of one-shot deal – once the moment has passed, that image has been recorded within those constraints and whilst you can post-process it later to quite a large degree, some aspects of it may be beyond retrieval.

The daffodils outside the house are at their most perfect at the moment and the patch of them gets the last dying rays of the sun as it sets behind buildings opposite and gives them a lovely evening glow.

So working with a RAW format gives you a second chance to wrangle a better image from the data you recorded when not constrained by the camera processing. It also gives you an opportunity to develop more than one version of an image and merge the best from each – this is a practice I especially like to do, predominantly with landscapes, which have a lot of contrast in the scene – if you get dark areas under trees well exposed for example, this might leave the sky too pale and you might blow the highlights of white clouds or reflections from water. In the past you might have done this with bracketed exposures taken at the same time, but this needs a tripod and still conditions to work well.

This image could not have been achieved, as it looks here, from a single in-camera JPEG – I developed two versions from the RAW file – one to expose for the distant hillside in full sun and another for the dark foreground areas in deep shadow. I manually blended them to get the best from each exposure.

You can blend separately developed images from the RAW file for colour as well as exposure – in this interior I did for a client recently, the grey tiles under the cupboard had a different colour cast from the rest of the room and were over exposed too due to the proximity of the lights – but I could blend the best of two versions of the image to get a natural looking result, more in line with what your eye and brain are capable of interpreting at the time.

You do of course see an image in the camera as you work with RAW files, as usually a small format JPEG is recorded at the same time as the RAW file is saved and embedded within it, otherwise you couldn’t view your photos back in the camera or preview and identify them on your computer.

An image that I never did get to look quite how I wanted and in line with how the scene was, but some work on it retrospectively gave the result I had been after. Sometimes revisiting such images later with fresh eyes gives better results.

With my DSLRs I’ve always chosen to work with a RAW format and had a good workflow for doing so – I thought any extra time that process took (and I’m not convinced that it actually did) was more than repaid in better results. I got into good habits early on and didn’t actually find the process tiresome, as many often cite as a reason for NOT shooting RAW. I preview my photographs (i.e looking at the embedded JPEGs just mentioned) in image viewing software and choose the ones I want to look at in more detail, then move to the RAW development software and only work on the ones I’ve already shortlisted – I certainly don’t develop all of the images I take in a RAW format and often, the embedded JPEG is good enough for many uses.

What’s not to love about sleepy piggies – another older image revisited with the revised workflow which gives a result more like what I saw and wanted from it.

And this is where my difficulties stem from with this camera. It has the ability to shoot RAW which was a big tick in the plus column when initially choosing the model. But, the particular file format is not well supported by many of the main RAW development softwares and those that do, won’t work on my now old and insufficiently specced computer or they cost lots of pennies – and still won’t work on my old computer. It does of course come bundled with a suitable application – but it’s very much a stripped down ‘lite’ version without many of the functions I would consider essential – although they tantalisingly leave them visible but greyed out to add to the frustration. It’s also very slow and a resource hog on my poor tired old computer. Plus, I simply don’t like it very much. I really like the application I use with my DSLR images and that has spoiled me somewhat.

The scene at the top of the hill on one of my lunchtime walk routes. By the time I reach this point I tend to be gasping and panting and happy to just stop a moment and enjoy this scene.

So I’m currently having a battle between short term ease of use at the moment and better potential image quality – complicated by the likelihood that I will hopefully get a new computer in the not-too-distant and then I would be able to revisit images I’ve already taken more easily. So, for today at least, I’m just shooting JPEGs and as soon as I take an image that needs something more than I recorded, regret not having a RAW image to tweak. I’ll certainly change my mind again next week; I’m already on ‘Plan J’.

This is an image I’ve no doubt posted before, but as it’s typical of the type of scene I can’t resist, it was important to me to hone a methodology for both taking images like this and for post-processing them, to get results I liked. I finally got this one to look how I envisaged it.

But all this contemplation has caused me to revisit my image workflow too – perhaps a task that was long overdue. With the need to produce jewellery images very quickly and efficiently, I developed a workflow for them specifically and set up scripts for functions like sharpening, that gave decent quick and dirty results. These worked well enough for the web based jewellery images, so I got into lazy habits and started using the same workflow for all of my images. But this didn’t seem to work quite as well with images from my new camera, so I decided to go back to basics and work through my original more thorough workflow for my ‘leisure images’ and see if I could hone a new workflow that could be made just as efficient and hopefully give better results.

I can’t resist the abstract shapes and colours of fungi and this was taken on one of my favourite walks in the Lake District that in autumn has a diverse range of fungi growing amongst the trees.

I always used to enjoy tinkering with images to get the best possible result from them, but the need to bang out jewellery photos in volume as efficiently as possible had somewhat spoiled that process for me, but looking at it more carefully again, the bug re-bit me and I think I’ve now settled on a processing routine that will work well with my new camera images, but can also be applied to all of my other images too as I’ve honed some scripts that use the best of both workflows.

I’d forgotten about this particular version of my woodland chum – I’d taken it from down the hill, but with a long focal length to give that feeling of a low perspective and him slithering between the trees. Imagine if you bumped into that in the dark without knowing it was there.

So armed with my re-awakened enthusiasm, I picked some older photos at random and re-worked them, just to see if my new ideas had merit across a range of images from different cameras, some of which are posted above.

This was taken on a damp drizzly and cold August day and I wanted to try and re-capture that misty glow that the scene had with all the moisture in the air.

Time to grab my camera and head out for some fresh air whilst it’s nice – now what settings was I supposed to be trying today . . . ?