We love our waterfall shots here at PK so this was an interesting visual guide to illustrate what effects can be achieved by trying out different things.

Ian’s image of the Birks of Aberfeldy

What I love about these kind of shots is that it is all about personal preference. There is no rule to what shutter speed should be used when shooting a waterfall – it’s all in the eye of the camera holder!

Check out their article HERE and try to vary your shutter speed the next time you are faced with with some falls.

Nick Fleming writes “the way to impactful pictures is as much about what you decide to include as what you choose to omit.”

Too true!

Star trails were always gonna happen

Sarah and I headed to Little Glenshee (not that far from my house) armed with tripods, cameras and as it turns out, not enough layers of clothing.

I was determined to shoot the stars as they appear in the sky instead of the usual long exposure star trails and there had been much Googling for advice as I could stomach beforehand.

Basic advice was to shoot at iso 1600 or more and for no more than 100 seconds as any longer starts to make trails in your stars.

Even on this exposure, the stars started to make a trail

After being a bit unwell I had cabin fever, so called Ian to request a photo shoot as it was a lovely bright day, but no, as his day went from bad to worse we didn’t get to enjoy the beautiful November Sun, instead we get the rather cold November night. Really should of put on at least 3 more layers and remembered the other one of my gloves. After listening to Ian for a change and taking in the info about star shots, I tried the offical way, thought it didn’t work well as it looked like daylight, so turned my ISO (well the cameras ISO, personally i don’t come with an ISO control!) down to 400 and shortened the shutter speed to about 2 mins. Found this worked a lot better and captured many stars and colours which you really don’t notice with the naked eye. And with the help of an app on Ian’s phone (1st app I’ve actually been impressed by) we managed to identify the constellations we could see, not that I remember any now. To finsih off before we froze over I turned down the ISO to 100, turned off the noise reduction and expanded the shutter speed to about 20 mins to take a star trail shot and got a great circle of stars in the moon bathed countryside.

Stars over the hills of Little Glen Shee

Star Trial over the Bridge

Perth firework show back in 2005

The 5th of November is approaching fast, and even though we still have hallowe’en to get past, it’s a date that I always look forward to. That hasn’t always been the case – it was only when I discovered my love of photography that the date became important to me.

Fireworks are a fantastic subject to shoot thanks to the their array of colours, effects and sizes but most importantly a spectular result is not a difficult thing to achieve. As long as you are in posession of a sturdy tripod and a camera that allows manual exposures (or even up to 30 seconds exposures) then you are in business. I would recommend that you use a shutter release cable to trigger your shots in order to stop camera shake when you press the button,however using the self timer on the camera will also work, but will limit your timing for the big explosions.

I tend to shoot in manual mode and arrive at my chosen location early in order to set up shop and take a few test images to check exposure times and aperture setting – always bearing in mind that the sky is about to get a whole lot brighter!

This year it looks like there will be four or five of us heading down to shoot together so keep an eye out for us on the bridge or somewhere close by.

The Rather Brutal Fly Killer

As potter is still working hard to support his family (how selfish!) I haven’t been on a proper photo trip for a while and thought I would do something else a bit in depth and proper photography like. I chose to have a macro day so put the Sigma 50mm Macro lens on, the one which doesn’t have an auto focus that works with the D40x. The Weather was a bit wild again so I roamed my flat, hunting for a subject. After stalking the cats and annoying them until they simply walked away every time I came near I thought to do my carnivorous plants, which I have 4 of (3 different species). Keeping the Aperture to 2.8 and 3.2 to give a very tight depth of field and a good shutter speed on ISO 100 or 200 I  got up close to the monster plants, being careful not to actually touch them with the lens as got a suspicion they would eat anything that got too close. They are really interesting and quite brutal plants up close, with leaves and stalks running red form their kills. Strange thing for a Veggie like me, maybe, but they keep the fly’s down and hence keep the spiders away! Above the plant in the bathroom is a small glass wind chime that my sister gave me a couple of years back which was spinning gently in the light. With a bit of struggle I managed to get a few shots of this too though it was hard to focus on something moving with such a small aperture especially with only manual focus, needless to say a few were out of focus! But the glass looked beautiful with the sunshine dancing over it.

Then I had the great idea of shooting my tattoo! fabulous! only problem being it is on my stomach (couldn’t do the one on my shoulder or upper arm as couldn’t look through view finder to focus as am not a contortionist!). After twisting and turning my body at odd angles (not good for the old dodgy shoulder) I managed  to find a way to work around my curves and that so I could see my tattoo through the lens so I could focus.  Really would of liked an auto focus for this one as am all sore now! I used window light to give it some highlight and tried to keep the ISO as low as I could without gaining too low a shutter speed as I was shaking a little under the strain, my poor stomach muscles. So with low F number, low to medium ISO and decent light to give a highish shutter speed I finally got some decent shots of my tattoo which I had never seen except upside down or in a mirror. Of course I had to turn it a full 180 on the computer to get it the right way up. It’s quite pretty! With a little photoshop magic to sharpen the images and turn some to monotone, which I have a liking for these days I got some lovely close up shots to make the everyday look interesting.

My Dragon

The Weather had taken a turn for the worse and I was bored of waiting for the cat to give me a urine sample (not an easy thing to do) so I decided to do a multiplicity shot to pass the time. Recently I’ve had some training days that have explored mental health problems, including Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a very interesting mental health problem, when suffering form it the mind does some amazing but very disturbing things. There is the visual hallucinations along with the audible ones and although there are a few recorded incidents about the ‘voices’ saying nice things the vast majority hear and see very negative things, which I feel must say something about humanity. It has existed throughout time and is thought to be what was happening when people were seeing and hearing demons. But guess you could argue it was responsible for people hearing God and angels too. Also psychic mediums could be seen as schizophrenic as they display many of the symptoms, they just know how to control it and make money from it. The training also dispelled the myth that a schizophrenic is more dangerous than someone who isn’t, there is no evidence of this and just like the general public personality plays a part, some are nasty, some nice after all they are just as human as the rest of humanity.  I also learned that 1 in 5 schizophrenics get better within 5 years, 1 in 3 will get better but with some remaining symptoms and only 1 in 5 will continue to have the troublesome symptoms.

Anyway this all inspired me to do a multiplicity on the subject. Multiplicity is made up of several shots put together. To do this 1st you need the shots so it was out with the tripod. I set the camera up with an ISO of 800, as the light was poor to the bad weather, and a F number of 11. After a couple of shots I decided to use the off camera flash to enhance light and detail. As I had no one else to shoot I used myself. In order to do this I used the shutter release remote (another cool gadget I have for the Nikon) which allows me to take a shot without being behind the camera. Then leaving the camera on the tripod I moved around, got changed and changed my hair to get the different characters for the shot.  After about 40 shots I decided I had enough to work with and uploaded them. I then chose the main shot, with the main character and opened it in photoshop. Working with this shot as a center I chose the next character that would fit in to interact with the main one. With this 2nd shot open in photoshop I selected the character in question using the magic wand tool (holding down shift to select more than one area until the whole figure was selected) and copied it over to the main shot on a new layer. Using a new layer for each character means if you make a major mistake you can just delete the layer and not have to start the entire thing from scratch. Once both characters were on the same photo I moved around the 2nd one until in the right position and then using the earser tool rubbed out the bits which needed to seem to be behind the main character. To finish off character 2 I cloned in any bits missed out by the magic wand from the original shot and then brightened her a bit and made her slightly transparent by reducing the opacity of the layer. I then repeated this process for the other 2 characters and once I was happy with them and their positioning I flattened the image before saving it. Then noticed I had a foot missing and had to clone that in too! stupid foot! The finished shot was not perfect but I’m happy enough with it, even if it did take over an hour to work up in photoshop.

The finished image