A few old shots

I started this blog after I had started shooting for this project, so there's quite a few photographs I'm really pleased with that I haven't blogged yet - so here's a few.

Velvet Shanks: A classic arrangement.  I shot a few times, but preferred this version which used to flashes to light the underside gills better.

I used a flash gun to light the foreground gorse in the foggy shot - it has an exposure of around 4 minutes

I love shooting this shot from the same position again and again.  Hopefully I'll have a collection of seasonal change by the end of this project.

Red Dawn

I got up before well before sunrise again, ready to sit and wait for the fox to appear.  It didn't, but prior to setting up my hide I noticed a vibrant streak of red in the sky.  Walking past one of the ponds the sky was beautifully reflected in the still water.  It was one of the coldest days for Cornwall this winter and there was a thick frost covering the ground.  The air was still and the water even stiller.  This was the shot I got - a 30 second exposure with an ND grad over the sky.  It was taken about an hour before sunrise.

As I have already been asked a few times, I will clarify that these were the actual colours of the morning.  Nothing added in Photoshop.  I did run the RAW file through Photoshop, as I do with every shot I take, to make basic adjustments such as tweaking the brightness and contrast levels.

More nice weather please!

What a difference a day makes! Yesterday; grey and cloudy. Today; golden (and warm) sunshine.  Good job I chose to go on a shoot instead of go for a surf.

I purposefully arrived at Bissoe while it was still dark so I could set up and be ready for when the wildlife arrived.  Unfortunately it didn't.  Well, the wildlife I was expecting didn't and wildlife I wasn't expecting did.  At about 8am I saw a fox staring at me.  Needless to say it ran off quickly but it gives me hope of getting shots of a new species.  Later I scared a Dunlin away.  It ended up being a very productive 6 hour shoot.

I tried focus-stacking the Wrinkled Club specimens again with much better light conditions this time.  It is made up of 15 photographs. I got down to ground level so the background would become blurred as it was too far from the point of focus.  As I didn't have access to a suitable macro lens, I used a 70-200mm with extension tubes to get close enough to fill the frame with the fungi, which incidentally is only about 3-4cm tall.

As I was walking round the reserve during sunrise looking for things to photograph I passed one of the reed beds.  It was quite a misty morning and when the sun came out, behind the reeds, it lit them beautifully, highlighting the dew on the branches behind them too.

A new year at Bissoe

So the Christmas holidays have come and gone and I'm now back in Cornwall for my penultimate term at University College Falmouth. I had a few successful shoots back home in Wiltshire but was looking forward to getting back to Bissoe Valley Nature Reserve to continue my ongoing assignment.

True to form, the weather wouldn't clear up.  Dark, dull, grey clouds.  So without a ray of sunshine for a week, my photography was limited to a few mediocre shots.  But this week I have been much more successful.  Initially, I had a few failures, which I expected.  I've also been experimenting with capturing birds in flight using flash and am slowly improving. But it is my other shoots which have proved best.

I went to Bissoe at night to try and capture the stars, but it got very foggy. Although I wasn't getting the shots I wanted I kept shooting long exposures and got some really interesting results.  I have shot this 'stack' before but in different conditions.  The fog gave quite a ghostly effect.  It is lit by surrounding buildings.

This is another location I have shot numerous times in different conditions and shooting it in fog, with a 4 minute exposure, created quite a surreal image.  The 'stack' on the left was lit by a building site to the right.

This fungi, a Wrinkled Club, Clavulina rugosa, was a surprise to me.  I thought it was a lichen species originally, and struggled to get a decent shot of it.  I used a Canon 70-200mm lens with extension tubes to take 12 photos of differing focus.  I then stacked all 12 shots on Photoshop giving a perfectly sharp shot.