France 2017

By shendyNo Comments
We went back to France for our summery holiday, after a slight aberration last year when we spent a few days in a caravan in Cornwall - any mention of that holiday now gets us both whistling the theme tune to Peter Kaye's Phoenix Nights, given the quality of the evening entertainment the caravan park laid on... We went back to a gite we've been to a couple of times before - it's nice, it's a good size for the two of us, it's quiet, it's very close to the local wine producer and it's got very clear views of the night sky. So here's a few different sets: Giverny On the way down through France, we stopped off at Giverny to visit the Monet gardens - we'd been a couple of times about 15 years ago now and thought it time for another visit. The last image is a little different - not taken at Giverny but fairly close by. Slightly inspired by the...
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Holiday Skies

By shendyNo Comments
Back from a lovely summer holiday in SW France, I've got a few photos to share. First up we have a collection around the theme of "sky" - sunsets, stars and a thunderstorm. Our gite was in the middle of nowhere and was quite high up, so we had a fantastic view of the sky at night - almost a horizon-to-horizon view of the milky way. I want/need a fast aperture wide angle lens as my 50mm f1.4 is nowhere near wide enough to do the sky justice, and my f2.8 24-70 lens isn't really fast enough. Then we have some night-time photos I took at the gite, with the aid of a torch and SWMBO. The third part is sunsets - not so much in the early days because there simply weren't any clouds (!), but some quite good ones later on. We had one thunderstorm - I was woken by lightning just before dawn one day and thundered out to get some photos. All a...
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Stars, Butterflies and Black & White

By shendyNo Comments
As the weather was nice, I took a half day on Friday and headed down to Dorset to camp for the night - the annual Perseid meteor shower was due to peak on Saturday night but I'd seen that the forecast wasn't great for then so tried to make the most of Friday. And it was well worth it - the skies were fantastically clear and I had a great view of the stars - and managed to see probably 20 Perseids over the course of a couple of hours until the moon rose just after 1am. This is the International Space Station And so is this - would have been a far better picture if I'd taken a bit more time to think about it and compose it properly. This is the only shot I got that includes a Perseid. I must have taken about 50 photos of the sky but this is the only one that caught something. Not as easy as...
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