Sunday 18 January 2009

New year walk.

I managed to get out with my camera and go for a little walk down the fields next to our house, and found a really nice little path running along the Hedgerow.

I was experimenting with various things, shutter speed, aperture etc and was quite pleased with the results, I WILL get to be off the auto modes... I WILL!!

I've been reading a lot about various techniques and although I'm not ready to try most of them, I thought I'd just go out, play about with the settings, and see what happened.

So here we go...

The bottom of the field next door - I love the shape of trees in Winter, and hedges - gotta love hedges!




I saw this Ivy on a tree and loved the icy leaves, with the flash it really brought the Ivy out from the background.



This is looking towards Lewes, but again, the frostiness of the nettles seemed to grab me when I walked past. I love taking this sort of photo, with the depth of field thing going on!



This next photo was one of my more experimental photographs, I have seen in books wonderful long exposures of waterfalls, rocky coast lines...

...unfortunately all we have round our place is a pipe sticking out the ground with a little stream (although we DO have the fishing lakes at the bottom of the field next door - photos to come one day).

I decided to use the Gorilla tripod I got for Christmas, plus my shutter remote.
I experimented with lots of different settings, a lot of my photos were over exposed, and I soon learnt that I didn't have to have the shutter open for too long to get the effect I wanted. I also experimented with Iso's and aperture sizes.



I like this next photo - it's one of my faves so far. This is one of about 10 or so I took of the same view.

I like the way the eye gets drawn into the photo, it's a very interesting area for shots like this.



As I was walking back home, I quickly snapped this shot - again it relates to how excellent trees look in Winter, and how sometimes they make an excellent frame.



This was one of my last shots before heading back home. The frost on the weeds was amazing - as I trod through them, it flew like dust around my feet.

I found the trees in the background so interesting, I thought I'd combine them with the frosty weeds here.

It's amazing how the frost makes such fantastic crystals and architecture within itself.



I really enjoyed going out on my own to take these photos, I hope you enjoy them. These have been chosen out of about 180 photographs I took that morning in about 1-2 hours.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

What an eye you have for beauty. Thank you for sharing!

Anonymous said...

you have so many photo ops! I agree with you about the wooded path. Wow, that is really nice!

You've got the eye for the camera.

Anonymous said...

Well I know nothing about the 'techie' side of photography - so its like you are speaking a foreign language to me

But your photos speak volumes - and are stunning - so I will be paying you more visits.

I love all of them - but my favourite is probably not the one you would expect - its the lovely 'tunnel' effect photo of the footpath.

It does as you say - draws you in so that you just want more, more, more.

Lottie
http://kooringa.com

Anonymous said...

Well thank you all for your comments.

I actually took over 170 photographs in about 2 hours, so to get a few out of those is very pleasing.

I still don't crop my pictures, I really need to start doing that, but at the moment I'm composing and framing the photographs as a complete thing when I take the shots.

Thank you again for your kind words!

:D

Anonymous said...

I do love the path photo. Especially on the frosty, cool morning...*sigh* I remember when I was in England and had morning walks with my step-mom, walking those farm trails.

That would be a perfect picture to matte!

Anonymous said...

You're very kind L - would love to hear more about your time in England some day!

:D

Anonymous said...

love them Stiggy - have you ever checked out http://www.anitamundt.typepad.com/hsmshs/ its a fun challenge site if you like taking photos....