SilverEfex2
A week ago I posted a shot of some tulips. I am not entirely happy with that image, so I tried a second shot of the same tulips in decay. The first one had a very shallow depth of field, and did not emphasize the structure of the flowers the way I wanted. This time I have increased the depth of field, and have done some post processing to make the structure of the wilted tulips stand out.
As I pointed out a couple of posts back, this winter has been quite mild and we have had a lot of rain. The temperature started to drop below 0ºC less than a week ago, but streams that would normally would be frozen at this time of year still carry a lot of water which makes shots like this possible. I have chosen to keep it dark to make it a bit surreal.
As I was reviewing the images I took this summer I decided to convert some of them to B&W, and this is one I think works quite well as a B&W image. The small size and the low resolution version I have presented here may not do the image justice, but I still think it works well as a B&W image.
A couple of days ago a friend of mine and I visited a park downtown to do some photography. The light was kind of flat and the autumn colors where not quite as bright as we had hoped. I guess we need a night or two with frost first. So I decided to try to make an image of this artificial waterfall instead. It is a merge of two 30 second exposures, one with the plant in the foreground in focus, and one with the background in focus. A bit tricky to merge the images as there was a slight breeze moving the straws around during the exposures.
This is an image from Lindisfarne, or Holy Island, which is a tidal island; the island is cut of from the mainland at high tide. The view is towards the mainland, and the posts you see on the right mark the Pilgrim's Way leading from the mainland running across the sands, exposed by low tide, over to the island. The posts are about 4 meters tall, and the difference between high and low tide may exceed 4 meters.
Northumberland, Lindisfarne island looking towards the mainland with the Pilgrim's Way to the right
The concrete construction in the foreground is a WWII pillbox, or small bunker. It is built to blend in with its surroundings, whereas the castle in the background is quite the opposite. Built on a hilltop clearly visible from both sea and land, sending a clear message to friends and foes.
WWII pillbox bunker north of Dunstanburgh Castle
Northumberland is an open, rural stretch of english countryside and I developed a thing for these isolated groups of trees dotted around the landscape. So it became a kind of quest to find a nice group of trees without too much clutter next to it.
Northumberland, near Embleton
After starting at the beach of Embleton Bay for a sunrise shoot, we went north to Bamburgh Castle. We started at this lighthouse and made our way back towards the castle. I have used focus stacking to make sure I would have the lighthouse and the rock in the foreground in focus in the final image.
Lighthouse north of Bamburgh Castle
Here is another example of basalt columns. This is from the Black Beach west of Vik. The sand consists of grains of black volcanic rock, and even faint sunlight will make the sand warm to the touch. (And for the fans of Bon Iver, if you have seen the "Holocene" video, these are the very columns the boy is climbing on towards the end of the video. You'll find the video on Vimeo.)
PhaseOne 645DF, IQ160, Schneider Kreuznach LS 80mm f/2.8 - ISO50 f/9 at 1/30s
This is a detail from an image that looked a little chaotic. But cropping it down, and converting it to Black and White transformed the image to something a little more interesting.