Definitely my favourite time of year

First Frost

Always worth marking the first frost of the year.

Sony ILCE-7RM2
FE 90mm F2.8 Macro G OSS
f16 0.6s ISO 100

Leaf Study 1

Irish Yew (in the name of the law)

Puncember. Is that a thing? Lets hope not.


Sony ILCE-7RM2
FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS
f8 50mm 1/100 ISO 6400

Downhill all the way

The flashing undersides of the White Poplar leaves looked attractive in the light. From there on it all went downhill. Wrong lens choice, agonising over which of the many versions I produced I liked best. I've entered into the Zone of Paradox with my Textures Series experiments. More layers are better than fewer layers, which tend to look fake. But more layers are also worse than fewer layers, which tend to look less artificial. I (semi-deliberately) threw the lot at this one. Four separate 5 stop HDR images Pep Ventosa'ed into one with an isolated leaf over the top. Yes, that's the right phrase, over the top! As cameras get more sophisticated and increasingly tell us what images to take, they rise up and rebel when we perpetrate abominations such as this. It's got something to do with Asimov's Laws of Photography, "A camera may not injure an image or, through inaction, allow an image to come to harm". In the end the persistent intermittent fault I've had with the camera brought the experiment to a merciful end. Camera has now been dispatched to see what fate awaits it.


EXIF:
You don't want to know. No, seriously, just in case someone tries to repeat this.


Extra: I think I like this better:

The Floating World

I miss the Edo Period.

I tried and tried and tried with this one. The more I tried the worse it got. So I stopped trying.

Sony ILCE-7RM2
FE 90mm F2.8 Macro G OSS
f9 1/80 ISO 1000

Remember Remember

I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.


Textures Series

Leaf Litter

For the past couple of weeks I've been enjoying the work of Glenys Garnett (@ggcimages), so I thought I'd have a go myself, starting by deconstructing it. This isn't a style of "photography" that initially felt satisfying to me, but I've learned a lot. The first point is that with Photoshop textures, less is less. Add one texture layer and the image looks s**t. Add another and it still looks s**t. Add a third and it starts to look marginally better. I can see how this becomes addictive. I can't say I've learned that I have negligible composition skills because I already knew that, but this technique shines a spotlight on that weakness. Anyhow, this is something that I might experiment with occasionally, so brace yourself.


Extra: The Making Of:




Textures Series

Acer palmatum

Not happy with this one... camera is playing up :-( Thankfully I seem to have fixed it (fingers cross emoji).


Sony ILCE-7RM2
FE 90mm F2.8 Macro G OSS
f16 1/100 ISO 6400

This is what f1.8 buys you

Sony ILCE-6000
Yongnuo YN EF 50mm f/1.8 AF
f1.8 1/40 ISO 200

But still plenty of centre sharpness at f9:

A cold coming

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

T.S. Eliot 1927


Sony ILCE-6000
E PZ 16-50mm F3.5-5.6 OSS
f6.3 16mm 1/10 ISO 100

Love the OSS on this little lens.

Guelder-rose

Guelder-rose, Viburnum opulus.

Nikon D7200
Tokina 100mm f/2.8
f3.2 mm 1/100 ISO 100

Equinoctial Autumn

Which ever way you look at it (meteorological autumn beginning on 1st September or equinoctial autumn starting 22nd September), it is now autumn. If you're an ornithologist or a mycologist that's a good thing. The birds have their winter plumage and are back on show or on migration, and the fungi are pushing up from the damp soil. If you're a botanist, autumn could be the start of a lean period, unless you're into bryophytes, and for entomologists, as the flying insects thin out it's time to start scrabbling around under logs for beetles and springtails. Autumn is a Marmite season - love it or hate it. Personally, it's my favourite.

Nikon D7200
Tokina 100mm f/2.8
f6.3 1/160 ISO 220