Photography Thread

Just cos stating the bleeding obvious is what I do best, 😉, manual focus and burst shooting?

One of my traditional "I'm home!" shots to stop the middle-aged French female fans from worrying that I've been kidnapped or fallen off my bike. Good use of the 'hand held low light' mode, which takes four photos and blends them, with a fair bit of error correction from movement, I guess.

Forgot the camera today for a trip to Cape Cornwall in proper Cornish weather and had to make do with the phone. So much better and less touristy than Land’s End.

I love Bottallack. A close friend used to work for the National Trust and I've stayed in the cottage just up the lane from the Count House. The ruin at the base of the chimney with the winding tunnel (arsenic labyrinth) is designed to condense out arsenic from flue gases. Must have been a grim place to work. Difficult to imagine that the nearby Kenidjack valley was completely industrialised at one point.

Have also walked up to the Sennen Cove Coastguard lookout point in a storm, which is recommended. (Very basic photo from 2007)

Was reading more about the arsenic labyrinth. They calcined tin ore in a furnace and ran the flue gases through the tunnels and up the chimney. The furnace would be periodically extinguished to remove the ore and then men had to manually scrape the condensed arsenic off the walls of the labyrinth.

Glad I didn't have to write a risk assessment for that.

Ah! The good old days. 😈

Mine owners were worse: after one explosion, they docked the victims pay because they didn't complete the shift on account of being buried under tonnes of rock.

No our resident Tory.

You're just used to Severn mud 😁

I've had an idea for a composition to capture whilst down here for a few months but the weather has been frustrating. A week in advance it was showing clear skies but the closer we got the worse it was and it has been mainly cloudy nights other than that one unexpected hour last Sunday. Last night was looking to be a better chance so I went back to Botallack with the aim of capturing the Milky Way looking like it was smoke rising from one of the chimneys. Unfortunately there was stubborn cloud lingering plus the half moon was adjacent to the Milky Way and didn't set until after the Galactic Core had gone below the horizon but I waited until just after it set and managed to get something close to what I was aiming for. Image is a 5 x 3 panel panorama with each panel being a stack of 6 x 10" images (with all the work then being undone to get soething that can be uploaded on here).

I took around 450 photos when I was there. Most of them on my new (second hand) 50mm lens. Unfortunately those all got dumped as the moonlight was too bright and I’d somehow managed to knock it out of focus (probably when putting the lens cap back on after setting up). It’s really relaxing being in the dark on your own other than some wildlife plus, in this case, the sound of the waves. Saw a barn owl as I was walking back to my car, it flew in front of me then stopped on one of the ruins watching me before taking off again.

I edited it on the laptop which I think has the screen settings too dark. My normal setup has the laptop connected to a proper monitor and that always looks much brighter. As soon as I sent it to my phone it looked much lighter. I could have done with doing the foreground on a longer exposure and blending that with the sky as it was too dark on the originals.

Off topic but having forgotten to bring my mouse away I really struggle to understand how people work solely on a laptop with the touchpad. I should probably have saved my editing until I got home and had a proper setup.

That makes sense, and why I calibrate my screen. But then you are relying on everyone's screen being close. I guess there is some comfort in knowing that your screen is correct and can calibrate comments accordingly. 😉

Just in case you are unaware, Soft Proofing is what you need to do. Yet another rabbit hole to go down/research.