A short trip to a new place

I love my home town of Wigan and I want to photograph as much of it as I can during the course of next year.  Yet I've never been good at trying new things and when I went down a stretch of the local canal I kept looking about, half expecting some to try and steal the camera.  Of course nothing happened save one idiot shouting something out of a van in such an unintelligible manner that it could have been a complement.  Apologies to said fellow if it was actually a greeting.

So while it was nice to get to see somewhere new I'm going to have to overcome what is a nasty combination of fear and prejudice if I'm to achieve my goal next year.

Suffering for your art

Have you ever had one of those moments where you know that you have get up out of bed and go outside.  Monet had one in 1873 when he woke up to see a beautiful sunrise and knew he had to paint it.  Well this morning I see the dawn light and knew I had to go up to this farm track about a half mile from where I live.

So I grabbed my Mum's camera, briefly woke her up to ask her permission then headed out the house as fast as I could without looking like a complete idiot twice over by slipping on the ice that still covered the pavements.  Fortunately I got to the farm track without incident and started snapping away.

Even though I had four layers on up top as well as thick gloves, a nice thick coat and a hat, I was still cold.  Even taking a glove off for a few seconds to take a picture left me with a freezing hand to the point where retaining any feeling in my fingers seemed like a victory.  I was only out for an hour and a half so it wasn't too bad.

Later though Mum and I went to Martin Mere, a local wetlands reserve full of various kinds of waterfowl.  While not too bad at first after a few hours, my right hand was so cold from continually taking the glove off to press the shutter, so I stopped.  For all my desire to take great photos, my desire to keep my hands from going numb was greater and so I ended up pressing the shutter button with the gloves still on, despite how clusmy my control was.

Because I now needed to see what my fingers were doing, I ended up using the screen on the camera to view potential pictures rather than the main lense.  As a way of taking photos it's clumsy by comparsion, but if I'd had the gloves off I think my fingers would have frozen in place, so I accepted the compromise.

I still managed to get some great shots though, even if wild birds aren't the most accomodating of subjects.

I'm going to try and go professional

I used to think writing was the main passion in my life but while I still enjoy it, photography has me running out of the house at all hours regardless of what I'm waring or how people look at me in a way that writing doesn't, even adjusting for the different contexts.  It's not that I'm going to stop writing, I've invested too much time and effort for that, but at the same time I see the camera as a way to record stories just as easily as the pen or the keyboard.  It also has the advantage that a camera can record a person's expression more faithfully than a pen can.

This way I can tell different sides of a story and record the way we live now in a more complete fashion and that's what I want to do with my life.  Record the world as it is for posterity.

Finally figured out the Night Portrait function

When I got home tonight I was taking something out to the bin when I saw the clouds.  They were brilliantly illuminated by the Moon in a way that just begged for a picture.  So I hurried back inside and grabbed the camera.  Despite setting it to use the night portrait function, the pictures were still dissapointing so I tried using the Flash.  Now call it naievity or ignorance but I always figured that the flash would obliterate the image but I still tried it.  What I saw was surprising but satisifactory.  I will however let the pictures speak for themselves and let you decide.

A few more pictures

On Wednesday I was able to get out for an hour or so and ended up walking along the Canal in Wigan from Trencherfiled Mill to near the Lidl store.  An interesting part of Wigan to be sure and one I'd not been to before so it gave me a nice opportunity to take some new pictures.

Thursday

A couple of weeks back I went out to take some pictures of a now derelict factory that was slowly being disassembled and I came back with some fairly good shots.  However I just didn't feel that the pictures had quite the same resonance in colour that they would have had in black and white so this week I went back out to the same spot to take some pictures in black and white.to see if they came out any better.  Here's a few of the best.

I then ended up walking back along the canal and into town, taking another hundred or so photos.

Bale for sale

Another quick post as I forgot to show off the reason why I went out in the first place.  I saw these when I was out running and knew I had to go back to preserve them for posterity.

Chalk and Charcoal

Sadly my newer computer doesn't have Microsoft photo editor like my old one does, so it's a case of geting the old girl out if I want to try any fancy effects on my photos.  But she boots up quickly enough so it ain't much of a bother.  I wanted to try and take colour photos and make them black and white afterwards.

The Photo editor comes with a chalk and charcoal option on its effects tab and I just had to try that out.  So here' s some of the results.

I was trying to see if I get them looking like they'd been drawn but I've not quite got there yet.

Sepia spectacular

It's the downpour season around this time of year and any day of sun is to be made use of.  So I headed out for an hour or so and grabbed some good pictures.  Now I've already mentioned that I like taking pictures in black and white, but I've never really bothered with sepia before.  Today though I'd was in a local wood snapping away in black and white and I thought why the hell not.  A lot of the shots I did in colour/black and white as well but it's the sepia I want to show you today.

Holiday snaps

Last year I bankrupted myself with a week's holiday down South.  Long story short Oxford to Worcester should not be via Birmingham.  However my poor sense of direction and ability to find quantum pockets in heavy heavy rain aside, I had a great time and took what I thought was more than a thousand pictures.  Turns out it was only a mild six hundred and seventy-five but anyway here's some of the best of those pictures.

Black and white

Black and white photography is one of the most interesting features of modern digital cameras and I've loved experimenting with them.  Here's s a few pictures done in black and white.

I really like the way the artificial lack of colour provides a different kind of beauty to the picture.  If I were ever able to go professional, I'd take a lot of pictures in black and white rather than in regular colour, especially at night.

New Direction

I was having something of a downer yesterday thinking about my interests and what I could blog about.  I couldn't come up with anything and I was beginning to wonder if I wasn't the most boring man alive.  Anyway, while that might be true, I do at least have something I can blog about.  My interest in photography.  So from now on that's what this blog is going to be about.

To that end I'll start off by adding in a couple of pictures I took of the mist on the hill opposite my house.  Not exciting but seasonal.