Photographer
Title-Lines
It hasn’t escaped my attention that this blog is slowly turning into a series of Mono Monday posts, but have no fear as I intend to remedy this soon.
Here is a simple shot of office block windows found near the Millennium bridge in London, just across from the Tate Modern. Always pays to look up.
Title-Chillin’
Ok ok so it’s Wednesday but better late that never. Lots of things going on at the Wares houshold over the past few weeks which has put me slightly behind on a few things, one being this blog, however things should be settling down again so on with the show.
Today’s shot was taken at Covent Garden London on a photo day I took with my cousin Steve. Covent Garden is a great place for photographers who want to hone their people photography skills as it’s such a vibrant and bustling location with lots of things going on at pretty much all hours of the day. Amongst all the hustle and bustle I did manages to spot this fella taking some time out while listening to some sounds and having a wee smoke. I quite like how the harsh light has produced great contrast in the background.
When I’m out doing people photography I like to have the camera switched on and ready to shoot at all times. You never know when a photo opportunity will present itself.
Thanks for stopping by.
Title-Hidden Minor
It’s amazing the things you find just wandering around, like this beat up old morris Minor traveller. Walking up one of the side streets on the outskirts of my town I stumbled across a makeshift car parking area, initially all I saw were a few cars of the local residents, however on closer inspection I noticed an old Jag and a couple of Morris Minors. The one you see here was almost totally obscured by the weeds and bushes that surrounded it. I loved the way you can just see the grill and plate with the rest being totally covered. Making this shot mono adds a sense of forlornness.
Sometimes you don’t need to go far to find hidden treasures.
Thanks for stopping by.
Title-Invisible
A common sight in parts of southern France, these women seem almost to be on every street. Much like the young girl that I posted a while back, it is a sad reality that most of us give these people a wide birth with not so much as a second glance. Yet we all notice them, certainly enough to distance ourselves as we pass by, looking forward as if there was no-one there at all.
Thanks for stopping by.
Title-Through the ages
A straight forward shot today but sometime simplicity works best. As you can probably tell this is a close-up of a sawn through piece of tree trunk, but what caught my eye the most was the definition the light was having on the rings and ripples due to months of weathering. I thought that this would be a perfect candidate for black and white as even though the trunk was monotone in nature to begin with, converting it to tones of grey simplified it even further.
It almost looks like it could be a study of the skin of an elephant or rhino too.
Thanks for stopping by and please take a look at my latest ‘Scenic Outlook’ post over at Current Photographer, this week aimed at the beginner Landscape photographer.
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.
Dave Wares 