five

Look to the West across Mercia to the Marches.  What do you see? A sunset? My Nikon saw three contrasting colours. White, some umber and black. I saw something very different. Indigo, amethyst, violet, magenta.  I saw honey, emerald and chartreuse. No lens, flashcard or any other device for that matter made by man can ever come near the tonal range achieved by the human eye. But, with the wonder of modern digital imaging and a careful use of software, it is possible to relive the moment. The image you see here is as close as it gets to what I saw on top of Adams Hill on a chilly October evening. Trekking back a mile to the car in total darkness through a beech wood was a different matter.

four

I love texture. A lot of my post processing has texture added for a subtle touch of interest, its just great for adding focal points to flat areas of colour.  On this lovely, balmy, breeze free Sunday afternoon the rape flowers were perfectly still, bringing their own unique texture to the image and a fantastic paradox against the soft silken sky as the little hunter returns from his foray in the yellow fonds.

three

The Orton Effect. And one of my cherished areas of Rural England. I love the freedom of taking a mundane grabshot and using creative expression to bring about a warm, soft,  pleasing result. I remember as a kid, the old Dubonnet adverts on TV.  Supersoft lighting and an amber bias towards the saturation. The Orton Effect gets you very close to that dreamy type of cinematic effect.  All credit to Michael Orton who invented the technique in the mid 80's using differing transparencies sandwiched together, although I digitally create mine now in Photoshop.

two

It is so easy to allow a thing of beauty to slip by unrecorded. Daybreak in December, and its -12c, feet frozen, hands so cold that they sting with pain and shivering to the core. A half mile walk to recover a car abandoned the night before in drifting snow, and yet still, habitually I carry the camera, raise the finder to my eye and make a new image, working quickly to get back on the move and mobilise against the anger of the cold.

one

One. The beginning. The start. Will there be 500 frames on this blog? Yes.  And probably more. But there may be gaps in the posts, because the world of money earning can be a slog. Even when you make money from taking pictures, things can get to be robotic. five hundred frames is my playground, my experiment. A visionboard. This is where I can go-to-town on my creativity, and experiment.  There will be the unusual, the bizarre probably, the controversial. This  inaugural shot may well be contentious to the purists out there. It is HDR my way. from a single RAW file, with multiple adjustment  layers in Photoshop and a bit of imagination. No specialist HDR software, just a representation of what I saw in my own head when I froze the frame.