Me and Meg went for a walk up Holcombe Hill to get a view of the surrounding countryside.
On the way up we passed through a little village filled with old country houses, some of which actually needed somebody to HDR them so I am glad I was given the privilege. It was such a quaint little area and I had to work quickly to capture the great clouds in the distance.
Although similar to yesterday’s post I still put this up because I learnt my lesson from an old close up I shot a while back. It was of a record player which had blown out highlights because I lit the shot with a desk lamp so I didn’t need a long exposure.
Boy that was an amateur mistake…
I didn’t want to use flash or artificial light for this shot, it was a 3 second exposure so enough light got in through the window to keep the lovely warm tones this guitar has.
I actually am amazed by the sharpness of this shot. The Sigma macro’s have a good rep for sharpness and it’s easy to see why!
I can’t remember where I got the idea to get some close ups of instruments but this is (fairly obviously) a close up of some guitar strings.
For those of you know may be inclined to want to know more, it’s one of these: Les Paul
I was playing around with various focal points at various different places on the guitar. Also, I was only using the late afternoon light, which was coming in through the window so I needed to tweak the colours a little in post.
Overall I’m pretty happy with this shot. I quite like how the out of focus area of the strings actually look as though they are vibrating/being played and also the difference in thickness but that might just be me.
On a day trip to Moss Bank Park in Bolton, Meg and I took a walk through “Animal World”!
Here are some pretty birds (peach faced-lovebirds).
I do quite like how the chap on the right looks like he’s smiling! 
Spent most of the day shooting with my Sigma macro lens, which did a pretty bang up job of most of the shots I took that day.
The shots did need some contrast added to them and some sharpening and upping the saturation but all this was due to shooting through the wire cage the birds were in.
Inspired by some of the Bokeh groups of Flickr.
I came back to a stage of enjoying my 50mm 1.8 and was wandering around taking snaps around the house. I saw this glass star ornament thing hanging down from above my girlfriends window and decided to frame it up with a shallow depth of field.
I quite like the idea of picking out various details with very narrow focus depths but felt like while this star made for great practice, it’s not the most interesting subject.
After a day out in Salford Quays we got the met back into Manchester.
As we got off at G-Mex I peered out over the wall of the met stop and saw this view of Deansgate locks below.
The water turned out alright-ish and I was forced to cut out a lot of the sky which is why the shot is in this square like format.
I’m glad the light was good because I needed a fairly quick shutter speed to freeze that black car you see in the road.
Nothing would ruin a tilt_shift more than blur….in a manner of speaking.
With a little help I found out that this flower is a Dianthus.
According to wiki:
Common names include Carnation (D. caryophyllus), Pink (D. plumarius and related species) and Sweet William (D. barbatus). The name Dianthus is from the Greek words ‘dios’ (”god”) and ‘anthos’ (”flower”), and was cited by the Greek botanist Theophrastus.
The colour pink may be named after the flower. The origin of the flower name ‘pink’ may come from the frilled edge of the flowers: the verb “pink” dates from the 14th century and means “to decorate with a perforated or punched pattern” (maybe from German “pinken” = to peck). Source: Collins Dictionary.
Pretty interesting stuff really.
I added an orange Warming filter to this shot to bring out a little warmth in the pink.
This is another shot of the Red Rum Lily in the back garden.
I was playing around with a variety of focal points, in this shot I was trying to pick out the little black seed like things sitting on the petals.
Unfortunately, there was another “type” of lily growing in the front garden with beautifully coloured petals, but it died before I got a chance to shoot.
I spent an afternoon outside chasing insects around the garden. I wasn’t having much luck at first, the majority of the flies were sitting around on some dog poo and I wasn’t too keen on getting close up to that. Luckily a few flies decided to take a little break to sunbathe on this plastic sheet. I’d gotten some tips on how to shoot insects online, apparently it’s best if you try and sneak up on them from eye level or below because they have a hard time seeing you, or early in the day/morning when it’s colder because they have a harder time flying because their wings haven’t warmed up. (It was a pretty interesting read)
Anyway, this is a blue bottle fly or bottlebee (Calliphora vomitoria) and I prefer them to a common housefly. Well, I say prefer… but I don’t mean it.
My girlfriend’s rabbit is called Elvis. He spends much of his time in his hutch, outside, being forgotten about.
There was a really nice day recently, so we decided to let him run around and I’d do my best to capture him with my Sigma 180mm, handheld. It wasn’t easy.
Out of about 100 shots, only 5 were any good. This is one of the sharpest ones.
It was quite good practice. It was especially difficult to manually focus because it hardly stopped running around.