Photography: Italy Trip, Part 2

Some more photos from my Italian trip.

 Angera Castle

 Villa Taranto Botanic Gardens

Revival/Photography: Italy

So I've decided to have a go at reviving this blog, as I did enjoy doing it. Forgive the prolonged absence. It started due to a period of unemployment, and doing nothing, due to too much free time.  Anyway, to kick us off, here are a few photos of my trip home to Italy during the summer:

 Lago Maggiore

 Statue of Apollo on Isola Madre

 View from Isola Bella

 Statue on Isola Bella

 One of the many chapels on the pilgrim route up Sacro Monte

Photography: Fields of Gold

On a family trip to the beach at Berwick upon Tweed we stopped at a service somewhere along the way.   There was a glorious view of an oilseed rape field.   It put me in mind of Sting's Fields of Gold.   Take a look around you!   There's plenty of beauty to be found in everyday unglamourous things.   Shame the sky wasn't blue, but you can't have everyone in the North of England.

Clothes: Indian Silk Skirt

I bought myself a really nice skirt a little while ago.   It's silk, handmade and lovely.   It's long and wrap around and also double layered.   One layer of fabric sits on top of a longer one so that you can see both patterns, but if you wanted to you could reverse it so that you could only see one.   I love it because it's really summery, really casual, yet still lovely.  I love the fabric too.   So pretty!  

Cosmetics:Vineyard Peach Body Butter

This stuff is AWESOME!   Vineyard Peach Body Butter, from The Body Shop.   It's not one of their normal ones, but they do bring it back every other summer or so as a special, under different names.   It's glorious!   Summer in a pot.   I am a fan of The Body Shop body butters in general.   They're really rich and good quality and they last forever, and as well as all that this one also smells amazing.   It is a truth universally acknowledged that peaches are in fact the best things in the entire world ever, and I think I've finally found something that captures how great they are.   It doesn't smell like uber sweet peach flavouring, but like real, juicy, delicious peaches.   Fresh, fruity and sweet.   It does lose something on the skin though, sadly.   It loses a bit of the tang, and smells a bit more like peach flavouring, but nice peach flavouring.   Highly recommended.   It's great stuff!

Photography: Summer Flowers

I tried to take some HDR photos of some of the lovely summer flowers in my mum's garden.   Oddly, I found that somehow, no matter what I did, the HDR photos just didn't look as good as the JPEGs.   This hasn't been a one time thing either.   Whenever I've tried to take HDR flower photos they never seem to quite work.   So that being said, here are the JPEG versions.   A touch of summer for you.   All taken with my macro lens.  

 Notice how the fence in the background is hardly noticeable?   I used a wide aperture to throw the background out of focus.   handy trick for hiding unsightly fences!

                                      Irises are so gorgeous.  Such rich colours and textures.

Jupiter Artland

All summer I waited for nice weather on one of my days off to go and see this place, and finally, in September, I got my wish.   I went off to Jupiter Artland (http://www.jupiterartland.org/) with my camera, naturally!   It's a plot of land with a collection of odd outdoor sculptures.   It's like nothing I've ever seen before.   The biggest and most famous one, Life Mounds, made me feel like I was in Super Mario Land.

This photoshoot was also my first attempt at HDR (high dynamic range) photography.  The way it works is that you take 3 shots of the same thing, but bracket the exposures so that you get one "normal" shot, one overexposed one and one underexposed one.   You then combine the three shots using clever software (Photomatix, in my case).   This lets you capture as much detail as possible.  Quite often with landscape photos you will expose the land perfectly, but find that you've lost all the drama in the sky.   The underexposed photo will capture the detail in the sky and let you put it back into your photo.   You can also make photos look very weird and cool!    Like so:

                                                                  Normal photo

                                                                   Overexposed

                                                                Underexposed

                                                                      HDR!


I was really surprised at how easy the software is to use, and how easy it is to get the photo looking good without too much time spent mucking about with it.  I also discovered that the technique is not nearly as forgiving as I would have liked.   If your "normal" photo isn't correctly exposed there's not really any way to rescue that in the HDR.   Bother.   I also discovered that there are many many different ways to edit an HDR photo and completely change its look.   You can create something very surreal and very obviously HDR, or you can use the technique very subtly so that you can hardly tell the photo is an HDR at all. 

I really enjoyed this shoot, and learning this new technique was really good fun.   Jupiter Artland was well worth the money (though sneaking in without paying would be the easiest thing in the world) and a really interesting place to photograph.   HDR is also definitely something I'll be trying again and hopefully I'll get better at it.  :)  Here are a few of favorite HDR pics from the day:

                                                                         Very HDR

                                                        Much more subtle HDR

And a couple of non HDR photos from the day:

France

So back in August I had a lovely holiday in France.   Being in the middle of nowhere the photo oppurtunities could have been really good but sadly the weather was not on my side.   It was lovely and warm, but often hazy as is so often the case in the height of summer.   Still, I got a few good shots out of it.   Here are a few favorites:

                                                          

                                                                French countryside

                                                                   Thistle Macro

                                                 And a couple of night sky pictures


I took advantage of being in the middle of nowhere to take a few night shots.   Obviously for photos like this a tripod is a necessity and not an optional extra.   A remote release is good too, to minimise camera shake.  Seeing as stars move, it's possible to use a long exposure and capture their paths across the sky.   The above photo had an exposure of about 15 minutes.   For a stationary night sky shot it's a bit of a fine balance between freezing the stars and getting them to look bright.   I find that as long as the stars are frozen you can brighten them up a fair amount in photoshop afterwards.  The biggest problem with getting shots like these (especially with an older camera like mine) is noise.   Long exposures mean that the sensor heats up and you get hot pixels.   There are also problems with night pollution creeping in, hence the rather drastic crops of both these photos.   Still, overall I'm pretty happy with both of them.   :) 

Botanic Macros

So, back in August (yeah, I have quite a big backlog of photos to get through...) I waited patiently for a sunny day, and believe me, there were not many of them!   Once the elusive sunnyish day finally presented itself I took my camera (Nikon D80) and my macro lens (Tamron 90mm, f1.8) along to the botanic gardens and spent a couple of happy hours among the flowers (oooh, that rhymes!).   Now, the first thing to know about my photography is that I am very much an amateur!   Almost everything I know I taught myself.   I have never been to a class in my life, and there are only a very few things I have learned from friends.   I am still very much a learner!   Anyway, my macro lens is still relatively new and I haven't had a huge amount of practice with it yet.   Here are a few of my favorite photos from that day:

There were hoverflies EVERYWHERE that day and they were very co-operative and happy to pose for me.   I think their colours contrast very well with some of the flowers.

Quite proud of this one!   Very lucky/skillful freezing that one like that!

Unoriginal, I know, but i like it anyway.  :)

Doesn't quite captue how cool these flowers were!   They looked like black silk!

I have tried capturing montbrecia so many times and have never quite been happy with the results.   I have found capturing their fire to be surprisingly difficult.   Full sunlight definitely helped, as did getting right in among the flowers, rather than shooting from above, and also finding a plant to photograph with lots more in the background.


Things that worked during this shoot:
- The hoverflies.   They were great!   Loads of them about and not at all camera shy!
- The staff at the Botanics being very relaxed about guests getting up close and personal with the flowers.   I imagine this is far from the case in plenty of places.
- The weather.   It was worth waiting for a sunny day!

What I learned from this shoot:
- I'm never shooting in JPEG again!   I was quite shy about RAW up until then because of lack of hard drive space, but now with my shiny new computer I am a total convert!   There were so many photos I took that day that would not have been salvageable if they had been JPEG.   They would have just looked washed out.   RAW rocks!
- Wind is the enemy when taking macros.   WHY is so hard to get away from in Scotland??
- There is a very good reason why people recommend using a small aperture when shooting macros.  Sometimes very shallow depth of field works really well with macros, as it blurs the background, removing distractions, but it can also be very frustrating to take a photo and finding that only a small part of a flower or insect is in focus.


I'm so excited that Spring is now here once more!   I can't wait to use what I learned last year to get even better photos this year!