Status-Q

A tree in Grantchester Meadows this afternoon.

Can you guess what this is?

It’s a display. Rather a big one, from Palami, and these are a few of the pixels. If you stand up close to it, I found, your eyes go squiffy.

Here it is from a bit further away, with Michael and Sarah being the squiffy ones:

Quite cool.

Amsterdam Central Station last night.

I met this splendid chap on a walk today. From the look of his hooves he must be at least part Shire (I’m no expert). Very friendly, very gentle, and very tall. He looked down upon me from a great height. I’m about 6ft and I didn’t crouch down at all to take this one.

Staying at my in-laws’ over Christmas, there weren’t enough computers to go round, so I had to share my laptop with other members of the family.

It was a bit milder today, with glorious winter sunshine.

More photos from around Great Chishill, Crishall and Heydon here.

For several years I have avoided the use of flash in my photography. In the past I have totally failed to get any flash-based photos with which I was even remotely satisfied, and so had relied on high-ISO settings and various cunning camera-steadying techniques to allow me to shoot with ambient light alone. Some of my cameras have built-in flashes which I’ve never used. Light sources so close to the lens are bound to make things look flat, and they don’t generally have enough oomph to illuminate much beyond the subject’s nose…

But I knew that flash photography is not bad in and of itself. I’ve been shot a few times by professional photographers who get great results (given the limitations of the subject matter) with extensive use of flash, so it had to be my use of it that was the problem. Fortunately, the state of the US economy means that photographic equipment there is almost half the price of the UK, so I treated myself to a decent flashgun (a Canon 580EX) for Christmas, and started experimenting on various friends and family.

I’m still learning, but my flash photos are starting to look a bit less like those earlier momentos of undergraduate parties, where once-pretty girls became all-white zombies against a dark background.

I’ve given these a fairly natural light, but because I’m shooting RAW it’s easy to tweak the white-balance if wanted in post-processing.

Today, John also got a new toy, so he played with his, while I played with mine:

All of the above were indoor December-evening shots, lit primarily by flash. The number one rule, I’ve found, is always to bounce the flash off something. There are relatively few occasions where you want the flashgun pointing directly at your subject. If your flashgun won’t twist or tilt, use a shoe adaptor or cable that will allow it to do so. You may lose some of the auto-metering features of your flash and have to do more manual tweaking, but it will be worth it.

I have a lot to learn yet, but there are plenty of resources out there to help. In particular, there’s several pages of good tutorial on Neil van Niekerk’s site. He does a great deal of wedding photography, almost all of it with flash, and has some splendid pictures and many useful tips for amateurs like me.

We arrived at Gatwick yesterday and spent the night in a delightful hotel in deepest Sussex. Glorious sunshine this morning, so we visited the nearest National Trust property, Wakehurst Place, which was absolutely wonderful and deserved much more than the couple of hours we gave it. It’s the ‘country cousin’ of Kew Gardens, with valleys, lakes, flowers, even in mid-winter. Highly recommended.

Now, children, today we’re going to paint a tree. What colour are trees?

More Wakehurst pictures on my Flickr space…

My brother-in-law’s delightful German Shepherd in mid-catch.

We were at the Henry Ford museum in Michigan today, somewhere I haven’t been for a few years, and I was impressed again at the sheer size of some of the trains which form one section of the exhibits. This, for example, is no ordinary snowplough:

It has extra gill-like flaps on the side which can open up allowing it to plough a path 16 feet wide. It was normally pushed by two locomotives. The gaping jaws are almost scary if you’re standing beside them.

But the most-photographed exhibit in the museum is the Allegheny locomotive. These were the most powerful engines ever made and are very big and very black. It feels more like part of a Gotham City set than something from my normal experience of railways.

It’s actually rather difficult to photograph in a restricted space, so I switched my little camera into movie mode.