Cornwall 2012

By shendy1 Comment
SWMBO and I had a break down in Cornwall a couple of weeks ago, staying at the rather lovely Gurnard's Head, just beyond St Ives. A couple of really excellent meals. It was also a good excuse to actually take some photos - I'll warn you now that if you're not interested in photos of waves then there's not going to be much here for you! After we arrived on the Friday, we took a stroll down to the actual Gurnard's Head - quite pleasant, and rather odd with the cloud level somewhere about the height we were at. Saturday morning was spent at Sennen - we had originally planned to walk round to Land's End but couldn't be bothered in the end. The seas were really spectacular, and combined with a blue sky and sunshine to make brilliant weather for photographing the waves. I like this sequence - it gives you a good idea of how big the seas were. In the afternoon we...
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More stars

By shendyNo Comments
I got the opportunity to take some more star photos at the weekend when I camped in deepest darkest Dorset. This was better than France as there was no moon and even less light pollution - there were an incredible amount of stars on display. Tweaking the images a bit in Lightroom showed one thing - there is a huge amount of information hidden in those images. Check out the two copies of one image below - one as it came out of the camera, the other with auto-levels applied. The two long exposures were about 45 mins and have come out really well, but I think I need to experiment a bit more with the short exposures. 2 minutes at ISO400 is producing just a bit too much movement in the stars and makes the image look out of focus, so I probably need a shorter exposure - but that means a higher ISO and therefore more noise. More experimentation required...
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Starry Starry Night…

By shendyNo Comments
After an unsuccessful attempt at photographing stars in Dorset in May (see previous post), I was determined to have another go in the dark skies of rural France while on holiday. And I have to say, it went quite well. The new batteries did the job and I was able to take some very long exposures. The first two are 687 and 3642 seconds (yes, an hour), while the others were taken on a couple of nights a week or so later and are 30 seconds to a couple of minutes. The only problem was that there was quite a full moon on the later days which reduced the amount of stars you could see. I experimented with lighting the trees in the foreground by the simple method of shining a torch onto them. Coming home yesterday, the view from the middle of the English Channel was excellent while the view of the skies over Hampshire while driving back from Portsmouth was superb....
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