Hyde Park

I’ve been having fun taking and sharing photos with Instagram. You can only post photos using the dedicated iPhone app. The low resolution and the creative filters it prompts you to apply really encourage you to concentrate on composition, creativity and interesting subjects. Sharing the results on twitter or facebook is a breeze. Highly recommended.

Hover fly

A beautiful sunny morning enticed me out on safari in my garden, armed with my Canon 5D Mk II and 100mm macro lens. This hover fly was particularly cooperative, staying calmly in position whilst I tested how close I could get.

It is incredible the amazing and beautiful things you can find so close to home if you take the time to look closely.

Blue Tit Landing

I’ve been reading Syl Arena’s recently released book “Speedliter’s Handbook”. This wonderful tome covers everything you could ever want to know about flash photography in general, and about the Canon system in particular.

Full of information about both gear and technique, it is also a great source of inspiration for what can be done with flash. If you don’t know what you are doing and use the flash in the traditional “on camera” position, flash can make photographs which are lifeless and flat. With the improvement in low light performance of cameras today, flash had seemed to me to be something best avoided. I now know better.

I had a great time experimenting with using a remotely triggered flash to photograph birds in the garden. The ambient light was awful, a typical grey February day in England. Not conditions that I would normally think about shooting in. But with a flash, a radio trigger and a little patience, I got some great shots of blue tits and other birds feeding in the garden. This was my favourite shot, which could never have been achieved without flash. A highly recommended book.

Squirrel in our garden

On the plus side, it looks like we’re going to get a white Christmas and everything looks very pretty. The downside of course is that the travel plans of millions have been disrupted and families who planned to be together this Christmas may instead spend it apart.

Whether or not the increased incidence of snow and cold temperatures in the UK in recent years is down to climate change is hard to know. But if it is, I want to know who coined the term “Global Warming”.

I would like to have a stern word.

Water drop

I thought I’d try my hand at a little macro photography and decided to have a go at capturing water drops. An initially frustrating but ultimately rewarding afternoon followed.

The recipe which worked for me was using a Canon 5D MkII DSLR with 100mm macro lens attached, set at ISO 100, f/13 and 1/200s. Illumination was a Speedlite 580EX flash set on 1/4 power and bounced off a reflector behind the dish of water. Water drops came from a plastic bag filled with water in which I’d made a small hole. Camera triggered manually using a cable release.

An invaluable aid was Lightroom 3′s new ‘tethered shooting’ mode, which allows you to see your shots in close to real time on an attached laptop’s full size screen. Much easier to judge whether the focus is off than peering at the back of the camera.

I also created some more colourful shots, covering the white reflector with different coloured plastic A4 sleeves. A selection of the best images I managed to produce can be found here at my Flickr account.

Autumn Colours

I’ve been snapping some autumn colours in the garden and hoping that when we visit New England next week we will not be too late to catch some autumn ‘foliage’.

Nemesis

Today was Marcus’ birthday outing at Thorpe Park.  Mid October? Expect rain, wind, closed rides and generally miserable weather.  What were we thinking of?  Well a miracle happened and we had a wonderfully warm and sunny day.  Lovely autumn colours gilded the lily.  Shame about the queues.

Iris

The flowers of this variety of iris (Neomarica gracilis) last just one day. Managed to photograph this one first thing in the morning before it had begun to fade. Beautiful.

Acorn

Finally got some decent photos of our new hamster, Acorn. He’s been a bit shy, but now seems to be getting used to us. Here is one I took this morning… hamsters are so cute!