My first released portfolio of lockdown flower close-ups

Finding a positive experience in lockdown, finding new creative inspiration.

Finally deciding it was time to move on from my obsession with Holme Fell I tried a new area for the first time. Driving north alongside Coniston Water in the Lake District I had several times thought it was worth a look and today was the day. Just to have a look. The weather wasn’t promising and I didn’t know the area well. Initially I wasn’t hooked and the day was very grey. I put the camera (the Olympus, with its electronic viewfinder) into one of its art/scene modes – “Ge

Every thursday I go to the Museum of Science and Technology in Manchester to volunteer as a demonstator on the SSEM replica, also known as the “Manchester Baby” – the world’s first stored program computer. In 1948 this machine has only 128 bytes of non-permanent storage. Soon after they added a hard drive that had about 10 kilobytes of storage, a useful amount in 1948. My current laptop, on which I’m writing this and which I use for all my photo processing and storage, has a

Some considerable while back I read an article about Alfred Stieglitz. The photographs that were included were quite beautiful and I was much impressed by the range and quality of the monochrome tones. So I gathered together some of my own shots and put them into a Lightroom folder which I called “Stieglitz”. The intention was to process them based on the Stieglitz look that had inspired me. The shots were chosen especially as being suitable for that treatment. I then forgot

There is a geologic period called the Devonian. One characteristic of it was the formation of extensive forests, with ferns being one of the early forms of vegetation. If you wander round the woods of Exmoor on the north Devon coast you can imagine that time. This particular shot caught my eye partly because of the play of light and the slender zig-zagging sapling in the centre of the scene. However, I think it is only fully successful when you see it in a large reproduction.

These three shots are not new but I’ve revisited the processing for two of them. I wrote a few weeks ago about how I found how effective it can be to stretch the whites and blacks sliders in Lightroom. Since then it’s been part of my standard workflow. This has prompted me to take a fresh look at some older pictures and that’s what I’ve tried with the two left hand shots above. I’ve shown them with the shot on the right because I think they make a great triptych. To carry on

I talked a few posts ago about our perceptions of image sharpness. I illustrated that post with an example of extreme sharpness – showing the amazing level of detail available even hand-held from my Olympus OMD-EM10 and its tiny and cheap kit lens. A view of Skiddaw shot using the Olympus OMD-EM10 “high grain with pin-hole” scene mode. This time I want to go to the other extreme. The shot above was a result of constraining myself to shoot JPEG only on a day of uninspiring bri

I did a walk on wednesday starting at Castlerigg Stone Circle, near Keswick in the Lake District. The weather was perfect for walking – blue skies and sunshine – but completely uninspiring for photography, especially with hazy air. I gave up any idea of taking good shots so thought I’d try something different. I set the camera to record JPEG only and tried a variety of art effects that the Olympus provides. The idea was to constrain my choices and live with the results, good