All hail Adobe, for they are geniuses.
Oh my.
A couple of minutes in Lightroom with the Clone tool, and look at this. Au revoir smudge!
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Gnaargh!
So, I'd got this smudge on the sensor, which buggered up a few reasonable photos. I also discovered a downside to the long exposures - the longer you leave the shutter open, the more chance of dust landing on the sensor.
I spent the afternoon at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, and at one point it clouded over a bit - this shot is a 1 minute exposure and is pretty much everything I wanted to achieve with the 10-stop filter - you get the movement of the clouds and the water smooths itself out.
And a couple of bloody great dust sports.
I really like the picture, but it's been ruined by dust and the mystery smear.
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Been a while…
Been a while since I posted - mainly explained because I haven't taken any photos...
Anyway, I recently invested in a 10-stop ND filter - it only lets through 1/1000th of the light, so a 1/30sec exposure becomes 30secs, making it easy to get long exposures in broad daylight.
I spent Monday morning wandering along the Grand Union Canal just outside Northampton. Took me ages to find it, as the roads bear no relation to what they were when I last went (probably about 25 years ago), and it's mainly a big set of distribution centres. It's one of the places I can genuinely look at and say "I can remember when all this was fields".
A 15 second exposure
30 seconds - really annoyed by the smudge top-centre. I cleaned the sensor before the rugby on Sunday and still ended up with it. Really annoying.
As the canal passed under the M1, there was an interesting juxtaposition of the old canal and the stark...
Confit
We've spent the last couple of weeks making duck and goose confit.
Aldi has been selling frozen ducks and geese at pretty reasonable prices, and Asda have taken to selling duck legs for £2.70 a pair.
Makes a change from chutney - on which subject, SWMBO cooked up a huge vat of green bean chutney using our entire green bean crop from this summer. And then threw it all away as it wasn't at all nice...
First up, dissect your bird - separate the legs and breast, and perhaps the wings if there's a bit of meat on them.
Marinade in salt, oil, pepper, thyme, bay leaves and juniper berries.
After a couple of days stewing in the marinade, clear off the salt and vegetation and sear the meat.
Put it in a casserole dish, cover with goose fat and cook at 150 degrees C for a couple of hours. Yes, all that liquid is goose fat.
Then put it in jars and cover with lashings of...
Concorde
On Friday we went to have a look at Concorde at Filton - hurry if you want to go and see it, as it closes at the end of the month and there is no guarantee that it will ever re-open.
A fantastic looking aircraft, and a friend of our neighbour designed bits of it - he worked on the air intakes (surprisingly important) and the wings. He was in a BBC documentary a few years ago, and they showed him stood underneath pointing at bits going "I did that bit, and that, and that..."
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