Wowee! I made it as a nominee in the 5th Annual Spider B&W Awards!!

I was dumbfounded to find out I made it to nominee status in the 5th Annual Spider B&W Awards!!

Haystack and Tracks

I'm over the moon about it because the winners get chosen from the "nominees". Here is the image, it got chosen for the Nature category:

Haystack and Tracks

...and here is the Spider Awards page it's on.

I didn't get chosen as a winner though :( so that means I just got pipped at the post! but who cares? A nominee! Woohoo!!

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

Stumble It!

During the melt on Dartmoor

Here's another one that worked out ok from my outing onto Dartmoor the other day... what do you think?

Merrivale Tor

Just up the road from Princetown I spotted this opportunity. I was looking for shots that captured a bit of the winter character of Dartmoor and so I had my "shot radar" working overtime. I spotted this scene developing as I drove, luckily their was a stopping place just round the corner from where my radar first started "pinging".

Merrivale Tor on Dartmoor, near Princetown

I tried a few different points of view and this is one that worked out well, I thought. How about you?

When I saw how it combined the tor, open moor and granite walls, snowy in their lee, I thought this was the one to go for. Dartmoor in winter can be so harsh—and that's when the weather's pleasant! So "harsh" is what I wanted to emphasise with the shot, which I hope I've achieved.

And typical of the real, non-postcardy view of the world that I prefer, it was good to see some jury rigged fencing, together with some nameless metal-tubing thingy, carelessly cast off to one side—being "stored outside" in farmer parlance!

It was quite a difficult shot to tame in the digital darkroom and I had a couple of false starts. Finally I hit on a method that brought out the image with the impact and visual qualities that first grabbed my attention.
What do you think?

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Introspective ...Hay303 Stacks

Hay303 Stacks

A shot of the fields alongside the A303 near Stonehenge,
just after hay making. Wiltshire, 2008.

Composing and making the capture

I had seen the landscape dotted with these obelisk-like haystacks over a regular journey I make. On this particular occasion the light was right, so I kept on diving off the road down farm tracks and entrances to fields, whenever it looked like there was half a chance of a shot.

I'd not long passed Stonehenge, heading west, when I got lucky with this and another shot. [Hint: note how you "make" your own luck by giving the good lady chance to smile on your efforts!]

Placing the horizon low for airiness

The rolling hills and low clouds with the clear sky above made the scene light and airy, and I knew to capture that feeling, I'd need to put the horizon low in the frame. The rule of thirds suggests that the horizon line should go about one third of the way up in a shot like this, but I wanted more emphasis, so placed it even lower.

Three's the charm

The eye tends automatically to "zone in" to odd-numbered groups, giving them power in a shot. The scene in front of me wouldn't play ball and insisted on four haystacks, but again I was lucky in that three went nicely on the skyline with one below it.

Exposure, ISO etc.

I always keep my Canon EFS 17-85mm IS USM mounted on the camera and again it was perfect for the shot. The day was beautifully bright, so I checked the ISO was set to 100. For maximum depth of field, I set to f9, giving a shutter speed of 1/320s. As I was shooting across the road with the view often blocked by the frequent lorries that were passing, the fast shutter speed would only help. I focus- / exposure-locked around a third of the way in to ensure front-to-back sharpness before recomposing and dropping the shot into the box.

In the digital darkroom

HDR

I never have the camera set to anything other than RAW, a pre-requisite for the sort of HDR treatment I intended for this shot. I went overboard and, using RAWShooter Essentials 2006 (now a part of PhotoShop LightRoom), made 12 separate exposures from the one shot. I did this, anxious to get as much texture in the clouds and razed crops as possible. I brought them together using Dynamic-Photo HDR before moving to PhotoShop.

PhotoShop

Again, fairly standard for my workflow, I applied a bit of TLR capture sharpening first, converted to mono using the black and white filter and judicial use of the channel mixer sliders. While adjusting the sliders, I kept an eye on the interplay between sky and ground but couldn't quite achieve a conversion that convinced me. I ended up treating the sky as a separate conversion on another layer.

A tweak on the curves to increase the contrast and a slight adjustment to the levels to deepen the shadows and lift the highlights a bit and that was it.

Any comments or questions, fire away :)

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Haystack and Tracks

A sister shot to the Hay303 Stacks. I tried to get a point of view that showed the Haystack plumb in the centre of the tracks but it looked a little strange to me. This one was better, with the tracks seeming to lead to the side of the haystack.
Overall I'm pleased with the results, with the short stumps of hay in the mown field glistening in the bright sun and the haystack cresting the hill against a good sky.

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Hay303 Stacks

Taken on a section of the A303 (not that far west of Salisbury), hence the pun...

[I wonder if that will amuse me in a few years - here's a note to that future me - did it amuse? If so, leave the answer here... Now that does amaze me - a sort of time travel! Here's me talking to a future me - and much later, that future me will come back here and reply. Weird!]

Anyway, back to the shot. I think this is another one of those "standard" shots that every photographer has in their portfolio - almost like a sampler that people learning needle-work do.

A few times recently I've travelled along the A303 route on my way back to Plymouth from Staines and I've seen rolls of hay, bales of hay and stacks like these, just itching to be captured through my camera lens.

On my most recent journey, I took a short detour close to West Knoyle to try and avoid some heavy congestion and where I rejoined the A303, this faced me in the field opposite. Perfect happenstance - I just had to grab my camera...

I guess, having not long passed by Stonehenge on the way back from my weekly commute, this particular viewpoint gave me echoes of those famous standing stones.

Stumble It!