Enjoy Your Local Canal Waterway

A very sunny afternoon last week was enjoyed by taking my camera with me for a walk along our local canal towpath.

A Moorhen, usually very timid. Took this using the optical zoom feature.

 

Here the "cut" is quite low, with fields and small-holdiings on both sides.

A field allowed to become a "natural" meadow.

Dandelion "clock" aka a seedhead, taken with the macro feature.

Dandelion flower, taken with the macro feature. 

A garden deck built out over the steep bank, here the cut is very deep; at least 80-100 feet.

I mentioned last time about a new Fujifilm Coolpix camera, and it seems to have far more options and features than my Samsung compact, so I thought I needed a crash course. After reading the manual, I decided to make use of the sun and get a little practical class with my camera. I took a number of photographs whilst enjoying a "walk in the country". 

As usual, i found the walk to be so very relaxing and couldn't help thinking about how little used the canal is as a source of fun / leisure activities. When I arrived back home I decided to write a new Squidoo lens about the issue. You can read the resulting article, Enjoy You Local Canal Waterway on Squidoo, hope you get the chance and enjoy it. Lots more photos contained on the page.

Using The Camera's Timer For Self Portraits

Bought myself a couple of tee-shirts from my Zazzle store and decided to photograph myself wearing them. An opportunity to earn a little extra in a competition run by Zazzle. Also another chance to use the camera's timer. Something which I don't often think about. Once or twice on holiday I use it to take photos of my wife and I, just to prove we were there together.

On most modern cameras it is simplicity itself to use, and can be very useful to take shots you could not get without third party help. The only issue is composing the shot. When taking my wife and I, it is simple to arrange the camera to frame her and then after pressing the shutter I have the usual 10 seconds to join in the pose. However, taking my own picture as here, I needed several shots to get one which didn't cut off my head.

If you have never used this facility, you need to press the button which sets up the timer (with an expensive model you may need to set the time) and when the shot is ready press the exposure button. Then quickly put yourself into the shot. View the result and decide if it is what you wanted. If not then repeat - as many times as necessary!

The images shave been cropped here to show off the tee-shirts. The text on the images is what you can't see on the shirts below the respective images. Perhaps a little help with taking the shots and composing them would have been useful with these.

Safari Park Visit 2010

Wow, time passes so quickly when you don't have enough. Family illnesses have kept me away from the business of updating my blogs and just generally busy. So here are a few photos which were taken on a visit to the West Midlands Safari Park a couple of years ago.

You can see one of the big problems with driving around the Safari Park, the animals do not respect the rules of the road. One of the largest, most numerous species/families seems to be deer and antelope. The park has many endangered species and takes part in projects to reintroduce them to the wild.

A trip around the Park is a very enjoyable day for the family, we took my mother-in-law on this trip. At nearly 100 years old at that time she enjoyed it enormously.

See more of this set of photographs on RedGage, I will be posting more photos quite soon as long as cicumstances allow.

Aerial photography from a model plane

Something different this time. My son has always been into planes, he achieved a licence to fly a glider solo at 16 and is now into radio controlled models. A new interest is using a small video camera to video the views from one of these models.

The camerais attached at the moment with sellotape and kept away from the fuselage with a chunk of polystyrene foam. Otherwise the field of vision is spoiled by the propeller. You can see the edge of it in some stills from the video.

These shots were taken in a park just across the road to our house.

Ready for take-off, sitting on the grass in the park

The nearby canal is lined with mature trees

The traffic at the entrance to the park is the sunday footballers

A new development not far away

The other side of the park, we are on the edge of the urbanisation

The sunday footballers and the childrens, play area in the park

I may well be posting more but not really sure, the plane is extremely light and the vibratons from the engine and the buffeting of the wind affect the focusing. But it certainly made a difference from the usual stuff.

Arched Windows and Doorways

Architecture, especially arched windows and doorways is not something that I often consider as subjects for my photography. I have nothing against them or the subject of architecture itself but they don't seem to be high priorities for me. This raises the question of wether a photographer should have priorities but that is another story, and I will leave it for another day.

Anyway, on a recent trip I came across a building, quite a small house really, which had been built in the style of a medieval castle. It was on a quite road to nowhere and seemed quite an anachronistic find. Of course I had my camera with me and thought, "Why not?" The following few photos are the result.

It was quite difficult to get a decent angle to photograph the whole building and so after some contortions I grabbed this shot from the window of our hotel.

 Not well versed in architecture but a quick search showed this to be a Gothic style, some of the more extensive uses of this style can be seen in an article on Wikipedia.

The window here is a Box Bay style and can be seen in the first photo just to the right of the bottom of the telegraph pole. The Rustic (?) door seems to be in a tudor style. Don't you just love the door furniture?

Well who would have thought that taking a couple of photos could lead to so much learning, I can now differentiate between several architectural styles which I did not know before; cor luv-a-duc, you learn something everyday.

Christmas Holly

My wife loves to include sprigs of holly around the house as part of our christmas decorations and luckily we have a holly tree in the garden. Well actually, it is in next doors garden but it is very close to the fence and its branches overhang to a degree. Enough to give us a few small twigs every year.
However the number of berries on each branch is sometimes a little hit and miss.

This year has been a tremendous year for the holly berry harvest, good for us and even better for the garden birds. Before we took too much off for the decorations I took a small series of photos to preserve the memory as it has been such a good year, probably the best I remember.

Here is a sample of the images:-

I also had a new laptop over christmas and in playing around with the new software, I have made one or two adjustments to some of the images, only very minor edits but fun nevertheless. An example is:-

cute little bells, or what?

Sunset From My Back Yard

From time to time we all see fantastic sunsets, and many of us even rush to pick up our cameras to try and record the event. What is it about this natural happening that stirs us so very much?

What ever it is everybody has one or two in their photographic collection. I am no exception, here are a few shots taken in my back garden.

You can see larger versions of three of these photographs

I am also very fond of painting this subject, it usually makes for very dramatic art, I use water colours and pastel mostly but have been known to use other media now and again. I always feel that the real thing can be so much better than the artistic interpretation because as an artist I feel constrained to make the sky seem real. Of course the answer is to claim artistic licence, or that the subject was actually an example of the aurora borealis, or similar. Or just show a photo of a sunset like the above.