Dungeness and Rye

Day off again today and with the weather still good I went down to Dungeness and then on to Rye. Nice to be out in the sun even though the wind is still cold.

Sunny Sunday

V was in work. I was in no mood for DIY and the sun was out. A quick trip up to London seemed to be the order of the day.

Back after a long break

Its been months since I put a new post up on the blog, months since I added any images to Instagram, Months since I took any pictures.

Not going to give any reasons, but today I had my camera out on a trip.

It was just down to Igtham Mote, but as the weather was nice and the sun was warm, my mood turned to tacking some pictures.

Just a few and with a pit of post production I was pleased with the results.

Free Lensing

A slightly different post today. I haven't done a how to post before and this is not going to be a traditional one now.

I have been reading about free lensing and I realised I had all the things I needed.

1/ A digital dSLR camera
2/ An old lens that can be dismantled
3/ A pair of hands.

First I took apart the old lens. It was a 50mm f1.8 Zuiko lens off my old Olympus system. The lens was in a bad condition and I had another so it was stripped back as far as I could. I had intended to leave the aperture mechanism intact unfortunately due a bit of over enthusiasm and the removal of some important screws the aperture blades cam loose and ended up removed. In the end not a problem as I wanted to shoot wide open anyway.
I was finally left with a very compact unit containing only the glass lenses in a plastic unit.

The lens is just held in front of the camera, in my hand, and moved around until the picture looks right through the lens. there is vignetting and light leaks but that is the fun of the images.

Part 3

The last part of Wednesday was an attempt to do some star images. 

I needed to get away from the light pollution from cities. In Kent there is nowhere where I could go to get a clean sky. Even in Scotland I needed to be well away from Glasgow. In the morning I had noticed some possible locations on the banks of Loch Lomond near the Loch Sloy power station. 

This area was about 30 miles from Glasgow and 20 miles from Balloch. Even here the light pollution was greater than I would have liked. In the images here the clouds show lots of light reflecting of them.

The technical details were as follows.:- 

ISO 6400

30s @ F2.8

Autofocus and noise reduction off. Lens focused at infinity

Part 2

As Wednesday was such a fantastic day as far as weather and photography goes, I am going to split the day into sections. 

After getting up early and getting frozen shooting at The Knapps, I returned home and had some breakfast. The weather was good for photography and the north beckoned. 

The southern end of Loch Lomond was nothing special but I could tell that the light was getting better the further north I went. I stopped at The Loch Sloy car park and did a couple of images. The clouds had come over quiet heavy and I was beginning to wonder if the forecast was wrong. 

Driving up Glen Falloch, the snow at the roadside got deeper but still the sun was behind clouds. Turning left at Crianlarich towards Tyndrum and I could see sunlight breaking through the clouds ahead. I stopped at the Black mount to look south across Loch Tulla. There were a few snow flurries but after that the sun came out to give me some of the best photography weather in months.

Part one

Today was the day that I had set aside as a 'me' day, with the only aim was to do some photography. The weather forecast was good and with snow on the hills the only sensible choice was to go north. But before I did that I had a run out to the Knapps before breakfast. At this time of the year it takes some time for the sun to come up over the hills and hit the water. The wind was blowing strongly from the from the north and it was bitter standing waiting for the light. 

When the light came up I managed to find some nice images which set the day up well for my trip up north.

It's been a long time since I did so little photography in January.
Apart from my Instagram images which I take mostly while commuting, I have not had a chance to shoot with my 'big' camera. Today was different. The sun was out for the first time in days and the weather had warmed up from the icy blast that has been wrapping itself around us for the past week or so.
I drove up to Greenwich and found a parking space near the power station. The tide was approaching full and the wind was blowing hard, but as the sun was out it felt almost warm. I walked downstream and almost got to the O2 before I had to turn around and walk back to get my car.

Welcome to 2013

As the first day of the New Year dawned dry and sunny, we had a trip down the coast to Herne Bay. We were both sure that we had visited there in the past but we did not recognise anything there. Anyway we had a picnic in the car and then a bracing walk along the prom, and out on the pier.

Cold

It is very cold in Gravesend today

Blogging

As can be seen from the lack of posting on my blog, I am really lacking in inspiration and images to fill the pages. Most of the action has been on my Instagram account. These images are done very fast and with little planning. Just the idea of trying to post an image most days

There will be occasions when I will have images that I will post here but for the moment my main location to post images will be Instagram.

The image I posted today was of a Citroen SM