Blog, Events, HDR

Red Fantastic

The star of the show.

Of all the Morgans that I saw during my visit to Bodiam Castle, it has to be this gorgeous fiery red beast that won the day. Red is just a fantastic colour, especially when applied to sports cars as they just pop out at you exclaiming, ‘here I am, come look at me’.

There’s so much detail on older cars that it sometimes can be difficult to know where to start. You could spend ages concentrating on the headlights or a spoked wheel, let alone getting the car as a whole.

I suppose when you own such a vehicle it would be very hard, if not impossible, not to be a member of some kind of club. This person certainly seems to be a loyal member, and gives folks like us even more great details to hone in on. The shot above is in fact a different car, sporting a slightly darker, metallic finish.

I was rather pleased how this shot of the rear came out, with so much vibrancy and detail it almost leaps off the screen.

The only thing that was slightly disappointing yet unavoidable, was the run of the mill family cars that were park all around them, meaning that there was virtually no angle that could be taken where you eliminate them from the frame.  Still, I was pretty happy with what I got all the same.

Blog, Events, HDR, Mono, Tips

Mono Monday-Morgan

So I thought I’d continue with another shot taken a couple of Sundays ago at Bodiam castle for this weeks mono Monday. For this shot I got in close with a fairly wide angle (26mm on cropped sensor) to try and achieve a more dynamic view of this classic Morgan, keeping the aperture to a modest f8 to throw the background just out of focus to create a sense of depth. I still bracketed my shots due to the harsh sunlight but when it came to putting them all together in Photomatix, the top half being of soft focus did not work out at all well, with lots of nasty edges to be seen. I decided the best way around this would be to bring both the HDR version and one of the single brackets into Photoshop combining them using layers, then I gently erased the top half of the HDR image to reveal the single exposure underneath . So what you see above is a mix of both HDR and a single exposure.

The next step was to bring this back into Lightroom, where I used a combination of two or three of onOne software’s free plugins to convert to black and white, then I continued to tweak things until I was happy. HDR mono is not something I’ve really done before, I hope you like the result.

Thanks for looking.

Blog, Events

Hastings Jack in the Green

Mad Jacks Morris-Who revived the custom back in 1983

May 1st is the start of summer in this part of the world and since the revival of an old custom in 1983 by the Mad Jacks Morris dancers, the first May bank holiday has always been a day of celebration in Hastings. What is Jack in the Green I hear you ask: Well, it’s probably better if I just link to this page here rather than just copy a chunk out of it.

There has been much talk in recent times of moving the May Day bank holiday in order to spread our bank holidays out a bit more as there are a few of them in close proximity. As you can imagine this has upset many people, especially with those involved in the Jack in the Green as it would essentially mean that the event would not be able to happen. With this in mind we made an extra special effort to make sure we got to see the event this year.

So here are a few of my efforts from the day. I hope you enjoy them.

 

Blog, Events, Mono

Hounds live @ the Coalition

One of the support acts for ‘Does it Offend You, Yeah‘ at the Coalition in Brighton this past weekend was the Hounds, a modern punk style group with an electronic edge. And can they knock out a banging tune or what! Thoroughly enjoyed their set, albeit short.

Anyhow, I took all the shots using the same settings as described in the previous post so I’ll just let the pictures do the talking. Was really pleased with how they came out, I hope both you and they like them too.

The pics look better if clicked on. And bigger!

Thanks for stopping by.

Blog, Events, Mono, Tips

Does it Offend You Yeah @ Coalition Brighton

Due to a stroke of luck my wife and I were invited along to see Does it Offend You Yeah at the Brighton Coalition venue this past Sunday. Bass player Chloe (pictured below), used our son for some of their own pictures that are being used on their upcoming CD and asked if we would like to come along and see them in action. We of course jumped at the chance and a chance to use my camera immediately sprung to mind.

Shooting using only the stage lighting was going to be a challenge as essentially I would have to be constantly rearranging my composition and pressing the shutter when the lights were up. As you can imagine this was very hit and miss as a fair number of times I would trip the shutter just as the lighting dropped. There was a fair amount of strobe lighting in their set too which sent my autofocus up the wall.

After doing a bunch of shots of the two support bands (I’ll show in another post) I decided the best srtategy was to set the camera to Manual at ISO800 1/60thsec at f2.8, I found that this seemed to give a good balance between exposure and keeping motion blur to a minimum. Pretty much all the shots I did that evening were on this setting, allowing me to concentrate on capturing the moment.

Shooting with a higher ISO meant I would get a fair amount of noise and with this in mind I knew black and white was a good way to go to use the noise to my advantage; I’ve always had a soft spot for grainy back and white photos. 🙂

Just a hint of colour in the shot of frontman James (above) using the Coldtone preset in Lightroom to accentuate the mood of the moment captured.

These are just a few of my favourites from the evening, hope you enjoyed them. Just a couple more below with one being colour for good measure.

Thanks for viewing. 🙂