As I drove onto the crunchy gravel car park of the swish, modern marina near Newport on the Isle of Wight, it occurred to me what an odd location this was for the beached, rusting paddle steamer PS Ryde. The futuristic harbour control centre, million pound yachts and motor cruisers seemed a world away…
Author: Andy
#202 – High Dynamic Range Photography – A Substitute For Creativity?
Astley Green Colliery Several years ago, I experimented with using Photomatix to produce High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. I reasoned that as a lot of the urbex pictures I was taking were in low light, then this would be the ideal tool to capture the full range of visual information, or something like that. However,…
#201 – before and after – articulating your vision photographically
“It is impossible for a photographic print to duplicate the range of brightnesses (luminances) of most subjects, and thus photographs are to some degree interpretations of the original subject values. Much of the creativity of photography lies in the infinite range of choices open to the photographer between attempting a nearly literal representation of the…
#200 – 200 not out (time for a holiday)
2 years, 200 posts. I’ve somehow managed to make an average of 2 posts a week for 2 years, no idea how (OK, the first few were reposts from my old blogspot blog, but let’s overlook that…). Mind you, I’ve been places and done stuff that I’d never even heard of two years ago, so…
#199 – Nokia N8 – Printing A3 from a cameraphone!
While the needless insanity that was the compact camera megapixel race has seemingly slowed down, the rate of progress seems to have transferred over to the mobile phone market. I heard recently that Samsung (or was it HTC?) are planning a 16mp cameraphone, while my Nokia N8 has a 12mp sensor, which is as many…
#197 – Gwrych Castle Part 3 – No Entry
Taken from a similar vantage point to one of the photos in the first post of this series, I zoomed in a bit to emphasise the shadows. In doing so, the photo has less depth as it is primarily just the flat wall, but I like the way the shadows fell and the different textures…
#198 – Gwrych Castle Part 4 – Ivy
Final one from Grywch Castle, taken from the castellated wall that takes the driveway through the stables to the owners entrance hall, which is some distance from the visitors entrance on the lower level of the property. Large swathes of the walls were once covered in ivy, much has been cleared away but it’s growing…
#196 – Gwrych Castle Part 2 – Weeds
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly nature takes over when man abandons his structures. Like walking through a woodland path the undergrowth makes seeing the stairs increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, inside (I use the term loosely, there’s been no roof for several years), this little plant had managed to take root on the reinforced…
#195 – Gwrych Castle Part 1
Gwrych Castle(pronounced “Grick”, apparently), is notable for being the only castle in the UK to have no vowels in it. Or did I make that up? Not sure. Anyway, if you’ve ever driven along the A55 past Abergele, you’ll probably have seen this place on the wooded hillside to the west of the town. I…
#194 – The Myth Of Manual Mode
A recent discussion on Talk Photography got me thinking about camera technique, something I don’t tend to give much thought to. Someone had asked why they should use manual mode, and the consensus seemed to be, quite refreshingly, use it when you need to, but don’t use it slavishly. Great advice, although some people still…
Mechanical Landscapes 