I never used to understand the appeal of going to the beach. I still don’t, but I do appreciate the simplicity and stillness of gazing out to sea from the coast instead.
Sunlight on clouds
Taken above Portpatrick harbour, looking mostly south.
Nothing beats a silhouette of shapely trees against a clear blue sky, tinged with glimpses of warm autumn light.
Low autumn light and undulating landscape
More evidence of autumn: glorious golden light at just the right time to walk Dog.
Trees casting strong shadows across the road, with hints of a clear blue sky beyond. Definitely a pleasant way to spend half an hour of one’s morning.
Patterns of sunlight and shadow gently playing with leaves on the woodland floor.
Not yet autumn though đŸ˜‰
After the rains of yesterday evening, today had turned out sunny so far. Naturally, Dog’s bed had to be moved for optimum ray-catching potential.
This is the view from near the far end of the evening stroll with Dog, up at the junction with Lagganmore golf course looking back toward the coast. Quite often the clouds catch my eye – especially with the sight display of crepuscular rays.
Another weekend, another bonfire. And while it’s a pain avoiding the smoke as it’s blown around in the changing wind, it does make for some wonderful light and colours streaming through the trees.
More nature’s bokeh – a solitary sycamore leaf basking in the sunlight on the road.
One of the few New Year resolutions I’ve ever made was this year, and it was to look for photo opportunities characterised as much by areas of dark as by light – a kind of counter to the principle of seeking “good light”, largely because I find the term distasteful, so rather than photography, “writing with light” I hoped to print with dark instead. It’s actually been quite a successful strategy, over that I hope to continue using on occasion, as often as I remember anyway.
After a comment on blipfoto today, I did a bit of research into ferns. Earliest fossils of ferns data back to the Carboniferous period (325Mya), although the more modern species go as far back as the Cretaceous (145Mya). So now we know…
Out of focus: patterns of light and shadows of tree leaves.
It appears to be summer – too hot for me, and even Dog doesn’t seem to like it that much, taking to lying in the hall in the middle of the house to stay cool. Walkies is best done in the woodland where it stays pleasantly cool and the light is beautifully dappled.
I did only say this blog would be mostly mobile photography. Time for something a little different.
Thanks to a tip-off from a Facebook page and some friends in Leeds, a couple of nights ago I watched the International Space Station passing overhead for the first time. I didn’t know what to expect; the magnitude (-3.0) hinted at it being “incredibly bright”, and indeed so it was. Bearing in mind I had no idea what to expect, the less said about those attempts at photographing it, the better.
But last night, I investigated further using Heavens Above and saw another passing was scheduled for 2329hrs. Seeing the weather conditions were favourable, I chose a location toward the top of a nearby hill and stood around to wait.
Approaching from the west:
disappearing toward the east:
Some notes on the image processing:
The approach image comes from 6 frames at ISO800, f/4, 14mm, 15s each, taken in quick successsion; the departure image used 12 frames at ISO800, f/5, 29mm, 30s each. The high ISO was chosen partly in order to give me a chance to compose and track, partly to ensure the ISS showed up bright against the background. Both apertures are fairly wide to maximize the light captured yet give a reasonable depth of field in the landscape given the wide-angle focal lengths in use (I had pre-focussed the camera on infinity half an hour before setting out). High-ISO sensor noise is thermal and therefore random; however, long-exposure sensor noise gives a fixed pattern of hot and dead pixels. Therefore, by keeping the exposures short at 15-30s I was able to pan between shots, aiding the composition (the ISS’ path is subject to slight changes at the last minute), meaning all pixels could be calculated from more than one image with spatial offsets – stacking reduces image-noise. Finally, I took a dark frame (with the lens-cap on) to record the actual noise profile.
Initial RAW conversion used RawTherapee in order to subtract the dark-frame; images were stitched together using Hugin and enfuse biassed toward image entropy for high quality landscape and sky tones; because the averaging process reduced the intensity of the ISS’s track, I further blended the intermediate aligned images using ImageMagick and the maximum operator and overlaid the results selectively using the GIMP. Final colour toning and spatial control (high- and low-pass filters) was done in Darktable.
Update 2013-06-18: the approach photo is now available for prints or download at 500px.
Dappled sunlight on bluebells and geraniums
More dappled sunlight on a mixture of bluebells and pink geraniums.