Category Archives: Landscapes - Page 2

Another HDR experiment

Posted by on February 19, 2012 1 comment

This picture was taken on Trooper’s Hill as another test of my HDR technique. It certainly looks odd, but there’s a strange charm to it, I think.

Clevedon Pier & Troopers Hill

Posted by on February 5, 2012 No comments

This film has been in my Mamiya RB67 since December 2011, when we went to Clevedon for Hannah’s birthday. Unfortunately a storm blew up while we were on the end of the pier with ridiculous amounts of wind and rain. Nonetheless, we’re English, and we sat there and damn well enjoyed it. When the rain eased off a little, I was able to get the RB67 out and take a few snaps.

Clevedon Pier

As we returned to solid land, the people in the gatehouse looked surprised. They said they didn’t know we were out there and assuming the pier was empty, had closed it because it was too windy to walk safely.

Clevedon Pier

Fast forward to February 2011, and the RB67 had another outing, this time for a walk on Troopers Hill.

Troopers Hill steps

Troopers Hill chimney

Troopers Hill chimney

River

Troopers Hill Road

Conham River Park

Posted by on January 27, 2012 No comments

Our January trip to Conham River Park was a good excuse to test my new Ensign Ranger Special, given to me for Christmas by Hannah’s dad Arthur.

It’s a fairly typical folding camera, except that it allows you to take pictures either in square or rectangular format. On this occasion, I chose square (and then you’re stuck with your choice for the whole film). It’s a nice camera and it handles well, but my example (dating to 1953) has a little bit of rust on the film gate which appears to have come off and become stuck to the film. In some places it stayed stuck, causing white dots on the film, and in other places it scratched the surface, causing black dots.

Perhaps more alarming, a small insect apparently got inside at one point and was sat on the film when I took a picture, leaving a perfect silhouette. It’s strangely transparent, but I hope it got crushed in the rollers!

Still, you didn’t come here to see pictures of a fly stuck to some film in an old camera. Here are the pictures I took at Conham on a cold and bleak day.

At one stage we veered away from the river and passed through this gate.

Through the gate and across the field, you can see the Cadbury factory in Keynsham.

Mainly Cabot Tower

Posted by on January 16, 2012 No comments

I’ve had a film in my Zorki 4 for a few months now but it has seen hardly any use. I took it to work in central Bristol and left it on my desk, so it would be more likely to see some outings at lunchtimes.

My cycling route to work takes me through Castle Park, where somebody had laid this poppy wrath on a memorial stone on a misty November morning.

Poppy wreath

After several years of closure for refurbishment, Cabot Tower is now open to the public once again. I went up with Chris and Paul (who took a panorama). The lighting was a bit grey and flat but I think the photos are OK. The same can’t be said for my ears and fingers, which almost froze off.

Bristol seen from Cabot Tower

Bristol seen from Cabot Tower

In this picture you can see the bridge piers of Brunel‘s Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Bristol seen from Cabot Tower

Cabot Tower stonework

On a different day, a photowalk found Chris, Paul and me in a children’s playground in Redland. After I had spun them round on the roundabout, I managed this photo of the log swing.

Playground

Misty morning

Posted by on November 20, 2011 No comments

I took these photos of Oldbury Court Estate in October but it’s taken me a while to get round to processing the film, as I have moved house. The good news is my new darkroom is much larger and better equipped. The first film to emerge from it has come out perfectly.

These photos are unusual for me, because they are taken in the early morning. Usually I’m too lazy for that, and sunsets are much more common on this blog. But fog is also my favourite weather and so the sight of mist out of the window is usually enough to get me out of bed early and outdoors with a camera.

On this occasion, the camera of choice was the mighty Horseman 980, loaded with Kodak Ektar film.

This photo of the weir near Snuff Mills was taken a few days earlier, but it was on the same film so it can live here too.

On Troopers Hill at night

Posted by on November 18, 2011 No comments

Tonight found me on top of Troopers Hill, which overlooks the city of Bristol. It’s about three miles from the centre, so it affords pretty spectacular views.

Click this image below for a somewhat larger version, or inspect the really huge version.

View of Bristol from Troopers Hill

I also took this long-exposure shot of the chimney on the top of the hill.

Troopers Hill chimney

Season of mists

Posted by on November 16, 2011 No comments

Troopers Hill

This picture of Troopers Hill inspired me to look up John Keats’s well-known poem. I also entered this picture into the Photo Challenge.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

–John Keats

Sunset in sepia

Posted by on September 28, 2011 No comments

If you read my blog, you might have seen that I recently posted some pictures from my new camera, the Horseman 980. One of them was a photo of the last few rays of evening sunlight shining through trees before the sun dipped below the horizon.

The picture was shot on black & white film, and the version here is a scan directly from the negative.

Evening sunlight in Oldbury Court

It’s a nice picture and I think it does give the impression of light. However, it doesn’t capture the orange warmth of the sunset. Yesterday I made a print from the negative in my darkroom, which I then toned sepia. This is a scan of the print.

Evening sunlight in Oldbury Court

Which do you prefer?

The sepia print is not as “widescreen” as the original negative. The negative was 6×9cm but the paper I use for printing is 8×10″, so it requires some cropping.

First go on the Horseman

Posted by on September 25, 2011 1 comment

No, not a man on a horse. My new Horseman 980 field camera! For geeks: it’s a view camera with movements. For normal people: it’s a complicated and fiddly camera, excellent for landscape work.

Horseman 980

I ran a film through the camera to make sure it was more-or-less working before taking any hard-to-repeat photos. The camera seems to be free of light leaks and other major faults, although this film produced some rather thin negatives. Might be an inaccurate shutter or aperture, or poor development of the film on my part.

First let me start with a simple demonstration of what the movements can do. The first picture of Brunel’s bridge has the camera in normal alignment. The picture looks “normal”.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

In the second image, I have tilted the lens away from bridge and in doing so, I have caused only the very centre of the bridge to be in focus. The near and far bridge towers are blurred. This can be a bit of a gimmicky effect, but it makes the subject look like a model. This is commonly called tilt-shift miniature because the camera is physically tilted and shifted.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

I’ve used the same effect again with this clock tower in Stoke Park. I’ve also used front rise to “look up” at the tower without it tapering towards the top. Unfortunately I appear to have double-exposed this picture by mistake.

Clock tower

And here are a couple more pictures, taken around Bristol.

Evening sunlight in Oldbury Court

Dower House

Like I said, this was mainly a test roll to make sure the camera was working and to start to get a feel for it. I hope there will be lots of improving pictures on this website in future.

Bristol from a vantage point

Posted by on August 30, 2011 No comments

While I was out taking my panorama of Bristol at the weekend, I also packed a long lens and went to see what I could see. This was also the first outing of my “new” Canon FTb, which I bought mainly for astronomy. Paired with a 400mm lens, it’s an excellent combination.

As a cyclist, I frequently curse Bristol’s steep undulations. But as a photographer I love them, because they let me take shots like these. This one centres on the campus of Bristol University.

This one shows a tower block in Bedminster and a slightly more distant office building in the centre.

The cranes on the horizon are being used to construct the new hospital at Southmead, and are almost five miles away.

The tower block in Bedminster again, this time seen with the rounded building in Cabot Circus and the square one at Castlemead.

Cabot Tower, on Brandon Hill.

Here’s Purdown BT tower. It’s almost 4½ miles from where I took the picture.

I’m not quite sure where these houses are, but I like the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of rooftops.

A little bit more zoomed out, here we see Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge towering over south Bristol.

The prominent central buildings, (e.g. the University, Broadmead and Clifton Suspension Bridge) are about three miles from my vantage point on Nover’s Common. Three miles through the atmosphere of a city causes a lot of haze, and the pictures are lacking in sharpness and contrast if you inspect them closely. Given that the majority of urban haze is in the ultraviolet and blue regions of the spectrum, I could probably achieve much better sharpness with an orange filter, which would not register the blue end of the spectrum. It didn’t look that hazy to the eye, but human eyes are less sensitive to ultraviolet radiation than camera film, and it’s also surprising how good the brain is at showing you what you want to see!

The images are also quite grainy. This is probably due to the fact I overexposed a little and pulled the films in development. Next time I will be more careful with my metering!