Cars at Greenwich Market

One night a month there is a car meet at the market at Greenwich. Undercover in the old market area a selection of cars and bikes gather. There are food and drink stalls around the sides and a life band plays.

Dartford Bridge images 22 years apart.

Another warm evening today and I decided to go out to see what I could find to photograph.

At this time of year the sun sets directly behind the Dartford Bridge as viewed from Greenhithe. It is a return to the scene of one of my most used image. Twenty two years ago, just before the Dartford bridge joined in the middle, I got a picture of the sun setting right in the gap of the unfinished bridge.

Shot on film, Ektachrome or whatever 100 ISO film I was shooting at the time. The camera would have been an Olympus OM1 or OM2sp lens most likely a 50mm or 35mm.

Luck played a great part in the image. The bridge had been under construction for some time but was completed very quickly from this point, as the risk of wind damage to the bridge increases as the two sides get closer together, due to vortices created by the wind interacting with the edge of the deck. The weather that spring had been very poor with few clear evenings only a grey overcast when I was free to shoot. One evening the sun came out and I was free, so I went out with my camera. I knew roughly where I needed to be to get the image as I had tracked the sun on an OS map, but I could only get the exact location by being on the ground. This was long before the internet and smart phones with apps that can work out all that information. Also I had to accept the tide as it was on that night.

The results were worth the effort. I shot several rolls of film and a couple of the images have been used on several occasions. This image was used as a magazine cover and won me the prize of Transport photographer of the year in 1991.

Tonights images are slightly different.

Evening by the river.

I had not taken any pictures of the wind turbines at Tilbury.

It was a fantastic day weatherwise. A trip down to Sevenoaks and a visit to Knole. 

In the car park was a Frog eyed sprite, in wonderful condition. The face on the front is always worth a picture.

More from Dungeness

Here are a few more images taken yesterday down on the coast. I have tried a bit of black and white conversion of the images just to see how they perform.

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.