Go out more, take less photographs

I am a member of "Images" an English speaking photography club in Den Haag in the Netherlands.

The club meets every month but I only attend occasionally as it always seems to coincide with some work commitment.

Last week was the first meeting after the summer, just before the meeting the chairperson asked for some volunteers to talk about a favorite photographer and show a few of their pictures.
I chose to talk about Joe Cornish and just showed a few pages from his website and talked a bit about why I liked his pictures.

You can see his web site for your self here  http://www.joecornishgallery.co.uk/

I spent a few days with Joe and another photographer called Richard Childs last year in the Lake District. ( http://www.richardchildsphotography.co.uk/ )

They taught me to think a lot more carefully about what picture I was trying to take, and to not get caught by the digital disease of taking 100 photographs in the hope that one will turn out to be a real winner.

So now I mostly have my camera on a tripod if I am being serious, and I take far less photographs.
(Although I do currently have about 65,000 photographs on my computer, covering a lot years.)

I could do with a good clear up but when I try this I only manage to delete a few hundred each time before I get fed up with the process but this hardly makes a dent in the total.    

Yesterday I was in the house and I became aware of a lot of noise outside the house - this turned out to be a massive flock of birds - starlings I think - there must have been thousands in the flock and they landed on the nearby trees and roofs.

Birds on the roof

I have seen this before at a nearby nature site, Kinderdijk, when the flocks get bigger and bigger as night approaches, with groups of birds flying in to join the main flock.

The site is famous for its large number of windmills - which are used as is common in the Netherlands for pumping water rather than milling grain

 

Mountain Lion problems and Dry Flowers

Back at work after the summer holidays and everything back in the same routine except that we have moved office from Europoort into the centre of Rotterdam.  To be honest I was not looking forward to the move, but actually it is really great, my travel time is about an hour less each day, and I don't face a major traffic jam every afternoon trying to get home.

The new office has a minimalist style -  everything completely in white, walls, desks, everything.
Its already nicknamed the apple store.

It has an surprisingly calming effect on everyone who works there - next Saturday is the open day for families plus a boat trip on the river Maas in the City and Port of Rotterdam.

After the holiday I updated my mac computer to the new Mountain Lion operating system - what a complete disaster - far from the usual Apple promise that "it just works" - I cannot keep one of our computers on the wireless network for more than about 15 minutes, this seems to be a widespread problem but no-one yet has discovered how to fix it - in the end I gave up and bought a wire and went back to the old way of just plugging it into the network.  At least now the computer stays connected but it does not really feel like progress.

On the next stage of my photo course - last week making photographs using depth of field effects (in and out of focus)  Technically not difficult but they introduce the idea of trying to pre-visualise what you wanted the picture to look like when it was finished.

This really makes you think about the photograph in a different way entirely

This is the full colour version
















But I think I prefer this black and white version

















This weeks exercise involved taking many photographs of a piece of grey card. Sounds a bit dull but really helps to understand what the camera is doing. All modern cameras start from the point that if you mixed together all the colours in your photographs then you would end up with a particular grey colour - in fact it adjust all the settings in your camera to ensure this is true.

So what you may think - just point and shoot - probably true but the next stage takes you into the so called zone system - originally invented by one of the greatest photographers of all time -
Ansel Adams - take a look at his photos here    www.anseladams.org

and here he is with his not so compact camera !

Back to the begining

 

Being on holiday I decided to try blogsy to write this weeks update. Unfortunately blogsy ate the first version, probably a mistake by me but I really don't know how it happened

Mixed holiday experience. Started with being sick all night on the ferry to England (food poisoning rather than sea sick) so much that I could not drive the car when we got to England. Lucky that after 2 years of refusing to drive my car Jane suddenly had the nerve to get us where we needed to be. Weather has also been mixed, mostly light rain mixed with heavy rain. Also took me a few days to recover so as a result both walking and photographing has been more limited than we hoped.

We did see a lot of our family which was really nice, and my nephew taught me to watch out for the wingless daddy longlegs which is of course the most poisonous thing on earth. ( lucky that he has weak fangs that cannot bite a tough person like me - the daddy long legs that is - not the nephew).

Both my sister and her two boys walked with us up to Easdale Tarn - a nice afternoon with no rain for a change but still enough water around to get the boys really soaked.

So bit of rain photography was needed........

 

 

 

Although the bridge made a nice photograph, by looking the other way you could see just how full the river was, overflowing onto an area which is normally a dry path.

Walking past the same spot the next day we found the water almost gone from the path and a group of artists sitting in the same spot sketching the bridge.

After the rain a lot of damage could be found all over the hills, with big landslides in some places, including a mini landslide across the main road into Keswick.

I have also started a course in photography from the Photography Institute in England. Online distance learning. Not sure if I need this or if it will improve my photographs but no harm in trying. Have done the first module, which dealt with lenses and cameras, and although I mostly already knew the material it was interesting to do the assignment which dealt with choosing what equipment you would take on different photo assignments

For the second assignment I have to photograph a household object - which is proving more difficult than it sounds to find something slightly interesting.

Back to work tomorrow.........

 

 

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