Old tricks...

I don't know why I have left it until the heat is at the levels it is in the south west - 27º C, today - but when the urge strikes there is not much point in fighting it, and I'm back to the river for another shoot. A favourite location for many years now, Throop Mill on the Dorset Stour can be both peaceful and photogenic. The mill itself has been out of action since the early 1970s - although all the milling gear apparently is still in situ - but the millpond is still there; host to any number of waterfowl at any time of year.

Unfortunately, the only thing of interest - a grey heron - is some forty yards off and feeding behind a bank of reeds in the late afternoon sunshine - so I have to make do with a couple of mute swans as a subject. To make things more interesting, I want to use the reflection of the mill's red brick walls to add colour to the shot, and simply wait until one floats into the right spot. This trick of using reflections that are not necessarily to be found in nature has been part of my technique for some years now. Simple, yet effective, and had I not given the game away the viewer would have been none the wiser.

300mm f/2.8 AF-S VR Nikkor with TC-14EII converter. 1/800 second at f/6.3.  - 0.67 EV compensation. Monopod

© 2014

A growing concern...

I have been using Adobe Lightroom since March of this year, and from my point of view it almost replaces Photoshop for all my post processing needs. I say almost as it still lacks a decent clone tool, but as soon as one is incorporated I feel I can move on and not look back.

Now, there are numerous tutorials available online - and for free - that pass on tips and techniques to anybody willing to learn, to master various software programs, and I am constantly in search of new tricks to get the best possible image from a file. Some are useful; others not so. Most, if not all, is sound advice, but as software becomes ever more powerful I am left wondering if it is such a good thing for all applications. Obviously discretion of the photographer is paramount, but it can be all too easy to apply the same processing techniques to every shot I take, and this is possibly a mistake.

The photograph of Throop millpond is an example of this (above). Exposing for the highlights, this rendered the foreground of the shot as a deep black in the RAW file, but I am able to control the shadow - and the resulting digital noise - by tweaking the relevant sliders in the Basic module in Lightroom. This greatly increases the dynamic range of the photograph and retrieves shadow detail, but to my mind it seems to be bordering on the overdone HDR (High Dynamic Range) treatments you can find littering portfolios and galleries on the internet these days.

Not that this image falls totally into that trap, but I shall have to keep a more watchful eye on what methods I use, I think.




12-24mm f/4D AF-S Nikkor. 1/500 second at f/14. - 1stop EV compensation. ISO 400



© 2013