Cornish Landscape Escape

Sleeping in the theatre.

Well, October started off with a visit to the Theatre Severn to see Landscape photographer Joe Cornish give a talk about some of his photos, some of his methods and his theories about what makes a photo or taking the photograph worth doing.

It was quite an inspirational lecture with some breathtaking images that obviously took a lot of patience and skill to capture . Most of our photographic society stayed awake through the slightly harder work of the second half and then we decided that the assignment for October would be Landscape.

Wide Open Space

I’m not a massive fan of landscape photos and with my widest lens being an 18mm I thought it may be tricky to capture something that I’d be proud to enter into the fray. In short, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the topic but I endeavoured to do my best.

The first chance I had to take a landscape photo came that same weekend when I was shooting clay pigeons at Llynclys Quarry, there was a mist or fog around and I figured that the fog bank would be in the quarry whilst we’d be above the fog and I’d be able to capture a picture of the landscape with the tree tops poking through.

Unfortunately, the fog was a pea souper and the photos I took were of a white wall of moisture. I got a picture of a friend shooting a pair of clay targets which on another day would have been tricky to do as the clays would be lost against the background of the quarry workings.

Haunted Castle

The next idea I had was to do another visit to Moreton Corbet Castle and do a Star Trail with the building in the foreground, some landscape in the background and an interesting layout of stars rotating through the picture.

This was to be achieved with a new Intervalometer i’d purchased from ebay. It’s a Giga t Pro II Intervalometer that I can use to remote shutter release or program up to do three hundred shots repeated over again. It’s a wireless (Radio Frequency) device which is far superior to my Infra Red remote release that doesn’t work well in bright sunshine.

All was going well until around 11pm when a group of around five people to carry out a seance using a ouija board. I freaked ’em out a little bit as I was sat in the pitch black supervising my camera as it took loads of photos. They stood in front of the lens and even shone a torch down it at one point. As it happens the cloud came in then too and ruined the rest of the shoot.

Star Trails is something I’ve tried before but I’ve never considered entering it into the monthly compo, but fate would see that I didn’t enter one this month too.

I was happy with this one particular photo out of the whole lot but the rest were an abomination.

Time of the month

Around this time of the month I had a week off work and we went and did loads of great stuff as a family. We visited my brothers family  and his new grandchild, Harry Potter Studio Tour, Thorpe Park, Legoland Manchester and going to see MUSE live at the LG Arena but there were no landscape photos to be had anywhere.

Well I say that but the WB Harry Potter tour did give me an opportunity to do some scale landscape photography with one of their most impressive models, and Legoland Discovery Centre had small Lego Landscapes too, but all of the pictures failed to have some great impact.

Steeperstones

It was getting close to the deadline of Friday at midnight for uploading the picture to the Cat PS Website. So in the afternoon of that Friday I set off to the Stiperstones in Shropshire, about a 40 min drive and planned on taking some landscape shots to include some daylight, some sunset and a startrail if it stayed clear.

I pulled up in the car park next to the OneLife-mobile of another member of the CatPS, Steve. Obviously I wasn’t the only one stuck for ideas and time. After getting to the top of this huge glacier formed ridge of quartzite I scanned the area for some photogenic scenery. I took this picture of a particular formation with Shropshire in the background.

Looking at this picture again I find myself wishing I’d entered it into the competition instead of what I did enter.

ND Finally

Putting up with the bitter wind I waited until the glorious star that is our Sun started setting. I was trying out some new ND Filters and ND Grad Filters that I’d purchased earlier that week from ebay and thought that I’d be able to get an awesome photo of the sunset. My idea was that the darker part of the filter would be above the horizon and reduce the intensity of the sun’s rays while leaving the landscape in the far foreground brighter that would normally be possible.

It wasn’t as easy as I first thought. This is the result, I couldn’t get the sky and light to be dark enough to allow me time to expose the foreground for long enough. Perhaps I’d have got away with an HDR image of it but I wasn’t thinking straight.

This next photo shows the best of the bunch, and while it’s the picture I submitted, I now wish it wasn’t but hey ho. You can see the the sky is filtered a bit but to get the landscape exposed correctly meant burning out the top half of the shot.

When the sun dropped I was hoping to get some better pictures as it just dipped behind that long hill. But clouds popped up right in front of it and I got no further usable shots until the darkness descended.

Darkness on the stiperstones is eerie, I’m stood there with barely any vision of anything close by but able to see for miles. I could hear kids shouting and dogs barking from what seemed like miles away and car headlights silhouetted me against the rocks from the ground level roads around the hill range.

Trials with trails

The sun dropped and the sky changed from orange to a clear sky with a blue tinge. I set the camera up, plugged in the remote intervalometer and then stood back while it took around 120 shots, each 20 second exposure with an ISO of 800 and f/5. I tried other settings and this seemed to be the best for showing the stars.

After I got all of these photos back home I imported them into StarTrails.exe and then built a startrail which looks a bit like this. You can see in the top right of the photo, the North Star, Polaris which stays still in the sky while the Earth spins and the photos look like the stars spin around us. In the last shot I used a torch (flashlight) to illuminate the rock formation but this makes it look like I’ve photoshopped it onto the picture. Again I like this photo but there isn’t enough of a landscape in it to make it relevant.

Wanting to share this star trailing experience I revisited the Stiperstones with Neil another of our Cat PS members to try out this again. Unfortunately, I forgot to focus my camera and the pictures were a bit blurred. They were subsequently made more blurred by  the way the UV filter I use as a lens protector got covered in condensation.

Summary:

• Don’t leave your picture taking until the last minute.
• Be confident enough to politely ask idiots to not shine torches in the lens when your doing a long exposure shot.
• If it’s really foggy like that again go up the Wrekin, a friend took some brill pictures from there while i was staring at a white wall.
• Find ways to enjoy the topic even if it’s not your chosen type of photography.
• Remember torches when out and about in dodgy areas at night.

Now the entries are all in, I’m pretty sure I won’t get any prizes as there are some good landscape pictures from all members of the society. I’m also pleased that the membership has grown by two, Graham and Alan welcome.

Dave did a presentation to the group on HDR and the hows and whys of it so “HDR” is now the category of the assignment for November!!