Enchanted Wood at Syon Park

 Another visit to the Enchanted Wood, in nearby Syon Park, on a very cold Sunday evening just past. I'ts almost become an annual event for me; its only open for a few weekends this time of year and I've been before - the photo in the header of this blog (at the time of posting) was taken there last year.

I've posted some of last year's pictures in ths blog here and here   Some of the light displays around the trees had changed, and I was trying to get something different. The light levels are low, and so a tripod is really necessary -  some of the exposures were in seconds - yet some of the other visitors were handholding their cameras. Others were using on-camera flash. I wonder if they were disappointed with their results. I took fewer pictures than last year, and on an initial review, this years selection looks promising. I may think different when I print them.

It wasn't an evening for hanging around - the temperature in the car when we left read -2 C. Not that I cared a that point - a hot latte in the cafe on the way out to the car park helped.

   

Fixed Focal Length

So far I haven't posted the exercises for my evening photoclass in any particular order, something I'll rectify in future - you may have read some of my previous posts on some of the other exercises in the last couple of weeks. So for now, its back to the initial exercise for this post - "Fixed Focal Length". Most of us in the class (me included) were using a variety of lenses where the photographer can vary the focal length, raher than using a prime lens. The idea of this exercise was to set the lens at one focal length and stick with that same length for the entire shoot.- you may walk backwards or forwards if you have to, or even choose compostions which work ....

Anyways I put a 70-210mm on my camera and headed for nearby Richmond with the idea of taking some pictures along the Thames riverfront. When I got there I set the focal length of the lens to 85 mm.. Unfortunately for me the light was poor and flat that day and so, while I took many pictures, the results when looking at the screen on the back of the camera looked uninteresting. They can often look better on a larger computer screen later but I wasn't optimistic. And walking backwards and forwards isn't necessarily a good idea beside a river, or in some cases possible !

I like picture with bold (often primary) colours, and some colour in a side street leading away from the river caught my attention - a large fence painted mainly bright yellow but also with some red.  So the pictures just taken of the riverside were quickly forgotten, in favour of these -

All the pictures were taken with the lens at 85 mm, and its relatively easy to walk to and fro in a side street, dodging the occasional van or bicycle.

The results, whilst not brilliant. I seen and done a lot worse. Preferred my texture pictures, in the previous post.  There are some texture to be seen here, which better (side) lighting would have brought out. I'll go back there again when the light is better, and if the fence is still coloured, I''ll re-shoot.

I had these pictures here (amongst others) printed (6" by 4" size) by Tesco by their in-store one hour photo service, in order to show the prints in class. What a waste, am not sure if I'll use them again . They don't seem to know the difference between Yellow and Orange, the delivered prints were distinctly ORANGE.

Night time - downtown Twickenham

Our evening photoclass took time out of the class room the other week. Now that winter is on its way, it is dark by the time we get to class, an ideal opportunity to try out our tripods and long exposures with some night time photography in this case nearby Twickenham. I'm sure Twickenham has many attributes, but a vibrant night life is not up there amongst them - at least outside of match days at the rugby stadium - and there was no match on the day of our visit. Having said that we were not looking for reportage type photographs, and the object of the exercise was tripods/long exposure and not using flash.

 

I had been concerned about getting the correct colour balance, and set the camera to auto for this shoot, put the camera through its paces and set hoe it handled the conditions - street lights, traffic and moon; after all this was supposed to be a learning experience not a professional shoot nor a hunt for potential competition winners. Anyways - what ever about the subsequent pictures turned out to be, the initial shots of some street side (eg Heath Road, above) was acceptable. As you can see from the other pictures we ended up beside the river Thames for the remainder of the evening.  Even late in  the evening, the local airport Heathrow makes its presence felt - the long exposures used captures the aircraft coming into land as trails of light - as can be seen in the third and last pictures. And of course the long exposures mean that moving people (also the some of the local bird population, do they ever sleep ?) become blured.

Didn't capture any potential prize winners, or exhibition pictures, but then I wasn't expecting to. A useful exercise, one which I'd plan on doing again..

Self-Portrait

Another exercise for my BTEC evening photography was Portrait. That's fine I thought, I'll bring in some from my recent trip to the Notting Hill Carnival, this year, when I concentrated mainly on "street" portraits, as distinct from the Carnival as an event. No such luck for this exercise, the catch was the portraits had to be self-portraits.

Hmmm, don't want to put my face up here.

Winter hadn't quite arrived here in London just yet, there were still some sunny days around, and I'd been developing some ideas for the last few months - photographically - I'd been making images of people and their shadows. You can read my previous post on these pictures here. Anyways, I thought I'd make use of the sunny days (while they were still available !) and combine the self-portrait exercise with the shadow idea ... and here are some of the results ...

 The photographs were taken on 3 different days and at 4 different locations. I'm not sure I like the results, especially the 3rd and 4th in the sequence - I was very concious of the patterns made by the different coloured paving stones and was looking to make a pleasing composition. Think I prefer the other shadow pictures taken previously, they've got more mood. 

 

South Bank Meander

I've been to the New England area of the US this time of year - October - quite a few times over the past few years. You can take a chance with the weather - some days can be cold and miserable - but often you
get a glorious Autumn (should that be Fall ?) day with bright sunshine, blue skies and half way decent temperatures. Add in the colours (colors ?) of the foliage and it can be, as I say, glorious.

Monday last, in London, was almost such a day. Bright sunshine, blue skies and half way decent temperatures, Yes. Foliage in full Fall Colour, definitely Not. I have yet to see anything in the UK which matches the scale and variety of colours found in New England - in Autumm - something which the locals here in London seem to have difficulty believing.

Anyway, I took a walk along the South Bank in London then, and for once (if you have read some of my earlier posts) ignored the people (along with  the boring trees) and photographed some of the sights ......

Eadweard Muybridge Exhibition at Tate Britain

Enjoyed visiting the Eadweard Muybridge exhibition at Tate Britain last week. This is the third exhibition I've been to in the last year or so, in London, featuring works of 19th Century photographers. The other two exhibitions were Camille Silvy at the National Portrait Gallery and Points of View and you may have read my previous posts on them.

Muybridge is probably better known for “Animals in Motion” photographs, and these are well represented in this exhibition. What is more interesting to me was his earlier photographs, his landscapes taken in Yosemite, the reportage style stereo pictures and the large panoramas of San Francisco,

From the viewpoint of the early years of the 21^st century we are well used to manipulation in photography; the personal computer and digital camera have made that fairly straight forward. Silvy and Muybridge were using the technology available at the time – mid/late nineteenth century – which was the wet collodion process and large format glass plate negatives. Some of Muybridge’s negatives were 17 inch by 22 inches, and yet he managed the make prints from multiple negatives for examples clouds from Pigeon Point Lighthouse were printed into later photos of the Mariposa Trail in Yosemite.

I really must get to Yosemite next time I'm in California.

Textures

This year I've signed up for an evening photography course at a local college; there is a BTEC qualification to aim for, with plenty of tutorials and practical sessions to enjoy. We had our second session  yesterday evening. One of more useful activities in the course are the practical excercise, and last evening we were given the lastest - textures. I really need to get out and take some photographs expecially for the class, but I couldnt't help looking through some previously taken textures ......

And just to prove I don't only take close up photos of walls or in primary colours .... 

Which ever photographs I use - these here - or some I manage to take between now and the next class I will have to print, and then present them to my class-mates at the next session. Should be good to get their comments.

Another Night Carnival

The now annual Thames Festival came around again on September 11/12, with its Night Carnival on the evening of  the 12th. I had tried to take some photograph last years event, and despite some success with one of them achieved mainly disappointing results (please look at my previous posts on Thames Festival), and so I wanted to try again.

I managed to take a number of images, but on an initial look at the results, nothing  stands out of the pack.

I'm sure I'll have more time during the coming winter months to study the photographs in more detail. I'm thinking now that I may have enough images from this (and last) year's event to put together a sequence of, say 5 to 10 images, showing something the flavour of the Night Carnival, rather than looking for stand alone

 images.  Putting together panels/sequences of 5 to 10 images on  subject is something I've been get into lately - a sort of short photo essay.

Carnival Time Again

How time flies. This time last year - the August Bank Holiday in England - I went to the Notting Hill Carnival in west London for the first time in many years. Now it's a year on and here I go again.

Thankfully there was some half-way decent light - photographically speaking - the people in the event are fast moving and rarely stay put for long, and I didn't want to have to use either flash or slow shutter speeds - time enough for that for the upcoming Night Carnival in a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to doing an edit of my images captured over the weekend - probably down to about 10 or so, from the 300 taken.

Summer ?

Nothing much to blog about, photography speaking, over the last few weeks - I have to thank the vagaries of a summer here in London for that. I've never really been into photographing indoors - in a studio for example (perhaps I should ?) and I don't expect it to be wall-to-wall sunshine outside, but when the light out there is consistently flat, dull and uninteresting outside - in August (it's supposed to be summer here !) then I think I can complain.

However it's not been all bad - I've been to a few photographic shows, and took my camera to visit Brick Lane and Greenwich.  I hadn't visited the Brick Lane area of London for some time- a  year or so perhaps  - and found much has changed since then.  Some of my photos taken then found their way into my Associateship (of the Royal Photographic Society) panel - which you can see on my website here. My last visit to Greenwich was more than a few years ago and the financial area in London's Docklands has sprouted up since then. The views across London of the much older historic areas of the Naval college buildings in the foreground and the modern architecture of  Docklands in the mid distance are worth it. The East/West meridian runs through the observatory at Greenwich (and  haven't you heard of GMT ?), and there were long queues of people waiting to stand astride it with their left side in the East and right in the West.

The photographic exhibitions I've been too include "Exposed" at Tate Modern, the RPS,153rd International Print at Spitalfield, and the Press Photographer Year 2010 the National Theatre on the South Bank. It is always a good idea, I think, to see exhibitions such as these - you can learn from comparing  your own photographic work to what you see on the wall, and also see what others are doing. Shame the London Salon had to be cancelled at the Cotton Centre this year - thats the 2nd time this has happened in the last couple of years.

Camille Silvy Exhibition

      Spent a very pleasant couple of hours on Thursday last at the Camille Silvy Exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in central London. Camille Silvy was a French photographer who was worked in London 1857 - 1867 and the exhibition covers this period.
     Included are several prints made up from more than one negative - for example "River Scene, France" (there are 3 versions on display) and "Twilight", one of the Studies in Light. A figure in "Twilight" (1859) is thought to be the earliest use of using blur to suggest movement. Very easy to do these days with Photoshop and computers, but in the late 1850's there was only a wet collodion process and large format glass negatives.
    Much of Camille's work was commercial carte-de-visite, he employed 40 or so workers in a "photographic factory". An 1863 self protrait is duplicated 4 times on one print, almost foreshadowing Warhol. My visit included an hour long tour of the exhibition with it's curator, which made the exhibition come to life - for the pictures are 150 years old from the early days of photography, and having a commentary on them and why they were choosen was fascinating.

Slow Shutter Speed

I don't always carry an SLR or DLSR with a couple of extra lenses when I visit central London especially if the purpose of my visit is social rather than photographic. Instead I carry  a compact digital camera - it's light, and very portable. I've being trying out my Coolpix indoors with the flash turned off - one of my requirements for such a camera is the ability to switch the flash on or off - so I can choose when to use flash and not have the camera decide to use it for me. The camera records only jpg's. Here are some photos taken with this camera; no flash, hand held, relatively slow shutter speeds,  moving people are blurred.

 

 

A very different technique to those I usually use. Think I might try this out some more, and also different locations and lighting conditions.

Shadows

Lately I've been photographing people and their shadows.

Having found the location - it often means coming back to the same place at different times of the day  - with the sun shine (and more importantly the shadows) at different angles - to assess its suitablity, and then asking someone to walk through the appropriate place.