| December 16, 2007 - One of the challenges of shooting cityscapes at night is to know and understand your light source. Your scene will either be lit by the sun reflecting off the atmosphere, artificial light, moon light or any combination. The problem arises when we want our cameras to cope with combinations of light. Digital cameras have a white balance setting that adjusts the white color depending on the temperature of light it’s capturing. For example: take an image that is partially lit by flood light, atmospheric light, and tungsten. The camera can only record one temperature of light correctly and will leave the other areas of the image with unnatural color casts. The key is to shoot when you have a dominant light source. I find that 15-45 minutes after sunset is perfect just as long as there is still some blue in the sky. A full moon light is also excellent. The image to the right was lit by various light sources and consequently didn’t work very well in color. But in black and white… it’s fantastic. |
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Canary Wharf from Canada Water |
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| December 12, 2007 - Sure the days might be short and the weather miserable but that makes it all the better to show off London's beautiful lights. Lights, lights and more lights seem to be the theme around every square, circus, or centre. It's simply lovely! The best part is that you can take a stroll around town, see the sunset and be home in time for dinner. So for this week it's a classic photo of London's Big Ben (that's the name of the bell guys) and Parliament taken from the London Eye. See you all next week. |
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Classic London Parliament |
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December 1, 2007 - Here's a photo of an old Routemaster Bus taken this past weekend by Trafalgar Square in London. These buses were designed by Transport For London in the 1950's and were the first open platform bus to come into service. Only 2876 were produced and today only about 800 exist in the U.K.. In December 9th, 2005 and after almost 50 years of service, the Routemaster was officially retired and replaced by the modern "bendy bus". Luckily today you can stall "hop on" one of these old Routemasters on TFL's Heritage Route 9 or 15. The Routemaster is and will always be on of the iconic symbols of the great city of London. |
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An old Routemaster Bus, London |
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| November 18, 2007 - It's been really cold here in London. Autumn is over and the nice days are getting fewer and farther in-between. This was going to be a weekend to get some great images but unfortunately the weather isn't complying. So, for the photo of the week I dusted off an image taken back in 2005, ran it through Photoshop again and came up with this, rather satisfying version of St. Paul's and the Millennium Bridge. Revisiting old photo sessions with new skills and techniques is always a joy. The key is knowing when enough is enough. If you’re the obsessive type, you could easily waste hours, days or your whole life constantly tweaking images as your skills improve and taste changes. I'd rather be outside shooting great images any day. Let's hope for some better light. |
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The Millenium Bridge and St. Paul's |
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| November 5, 2007 - The nice thing about the fall and winter seasons in England is that you don't have to wake at some ridicules time to get the morning light. Here in London the sun rises at 7:05 AM and sets at 4:20 PM leaving only a nine hour day. This is certainly not good for my seasonal affective disorder but plays well with my photography habit not to mention sleep patterns. So those sweet sunrise shots are obtainable on your way to work and pretty soon you will be able to shoot sunset on your lunch break. Love that! This weekend I took full advantage of these short days and rolled out of bed at civilized 7AM and walked across the street to Walpole Park for a photo shoot. The trees are just about perfect now with half fullness on the branches and a nice carpet of color below. I actually had to wait around for about until about 7:45 for the sun to come over the tree line to cast some light on the tree trunk. Enjoy! |
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Autumn in Wapole Park, Ealing |
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| October 28, 2007 - Autumn is my favorite season. I love the crisp, cool air and the need to bundle up a bit and bring out my sweaters and hats. I enjoy watching the trees change as they drop their leaves leaving a carpet of crimsons, yellows and brown that crunch under your feet. It’s all about waking to a frosted garden and brewing coffee to start your day of pumpkin carving and harvest festivals. It's the season that hosts Halloween and Thanksgiving! I figured what better signifies the season than a glowing jack-o-lantern nestled in some London foliage? Oddly, Halloween isn't quite the craze as it is in America (or maybe I'm just getting old). If you really want to experience autumn at it's very best try any small town in New England! The foliage tours are stunning, the farmer's markets are great (huge pumpkins!) and the home made apple pies are in a league of their own. Happy Halloween to you all! |
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My Jack-O-Lantern |
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| October 18, 2007 - I've just returned from an intensive photography tour of the beautiful peak district in England with a company called Peak District Photography Centre. It was a great tour and a pleasure to be around like minded people for the sole purpose of capturing images. Thank you to Fran, Karen and the rest of the crew for the great tips, sites and great time. This week’s photo was taken on the first day of the tour just off the road from Surprise View in Sheffield. I find silhouettes fun and technically easy images to make. All you need (as if!) is the right combination of contrasting lines (say a perfect tree) behind a dynamic background and... Voilà !, you've got one impacting image! |
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Perfect Sunset in the Peak District |
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| October 8, 2007 - This weekend we went to Camden Town for a bit of shopping and photo shooting. To change things up a bit, I took only my 80-200mm f/2.8 telephoto lens for the day. I wanted to force myself out of the wide angle cityscape mode and focus (or rather crop in) on the grittier parts of London. This was an excellent session as it forced me to think about the images I was capturing in a totally different way. Instead of shooting sweeping views I cropped in on the cool and interesting and tried to think about depth of field, focus, color, and composition with each exposure. We had an overcast gray day which was perfect for this kind of photography due to the even lighting. Just crop in and don't include the dull gray sky. That huge Dr. Marten boot is one of the many weird and interesting sites you'll see while taking a stroll down Camden High Street. |
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One Big Boot in Camden Market |
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| October 2, 2007 - A photograph can mean different things to different people at different times in their lives. What may evoke great interest and emotion to one may do or mean nothing to another. This is one of the most interesting things about photography and all other forms of art. I’m always intrigued by what people comment on, like and dislike about this site and am sometimes quite surprised in the requests that I receive. This week’s photo is a snap shot of a sea wall in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. To most, this image is nothing more than an uninteresting wall of stone but to many it may spark a feeling of homecoming, holiday, or much more than that. |
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Martha's Vineyard |
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| September 19th, 2007 - Ahh, Boothbay Harbor, Maine. There is something wonderfuly blissful about aimlessly walking around an old seaside town such as this with no agenda or plan. Taking time to taste the freshness of the air and enjoying the stars that light up the sky is something that we forget in our modern lives and techno world. Sometimes you need to detox from society. This is cooling. |
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Boothbay Harbor, Maine |
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| September 9, 2007 - New England is a wonderful place and it seems the older I get the more time I want to spend there. My holiday was great. It was restful but also useful in scoring some great images of the city of Boston, Martha’s Vineyard, and Maine. As always, I dedicated a day checking on my favorite sites in Boston which included the Freedom Trail, riding the "T", and visiting my favorite pizza places and by the end found myself (trust me it was planned) walking up Memorial Drive along the Charles River while a huge full moon emerged from behind the city. Lucky for me I had my camera.... and tripod, and cable release. So the photo of the week is (drum roll) what was directly behind me. Sorry, no cityscape this week but instead Building 10 (that's what they call it) at MIT lit perfectly by the moon and gracefully waiting for someone to stop for a second and take a look or maybe even a photograph. |
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
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August 20, 2007 - For this week, a classic image of the London Underground sign and Big Ben make its impression. I cranked up the contrast on this one and loved the result. Sometime photographs work better for different reasons. In this case the sky was a perfect blue and the sun light illuminates and accentuates the underground sign and face of St. Stephen's tower brilliantly. Due to the angle of the light, strong shadows were cast behind each structure helping to keep focus on the main subject. I've learned that sometimes by changing your particular style an image that you may have disregarded can turn into something quite striking. So play with that contrast setting, add some noise, or de-saturate the image and see what happens. |
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The London Underground and Big Ben |
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Auguest 12, 2007 - Tippy the dog is our photo of the week for his friendly smile and charming charisma. Here he is with this attention on full has he waits for me to throw him his ball while never breaking Border Collie form. Tip: When taking out door portrait photographs try turning on your cameras flash. Seriously. Direct over head sunlight is harsh, strong and creates dark shadows and blinding whites. In many instances the contrast in the image is beyond the dynamic range of the camera which results in blow out highlights and lack of detail. By adding a bit of flash fill you are brightening up the shadows and darker areas of the image therefore brining down the total contrast and helping your image sensor or film capture as much detail as possible. Adding flash also brightens up faces and most importantly brings out the eyes which would be black voids if light only by direct sunlight only. As for Tippy, I used a flash but as you can see he has a bit of a fur issue covering his eyes. |
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August 5, 2007 - Although the weather has been brilliant here in London, I decided to make the photo of the week in doors with the classic water droplet assignment. I've been seeing these sorts of shots everywhere on the web and decided that it was time to give it a go. The first thing you need is a very colorful bowl or you can improvise as I did with a dish filled with coins for texture and color. Then add water, light, tripod, camera, and start with the drops. It's all about trial and error and I soon found that getting everything perfect was quite difficult. For lighting I used direct light from the sun, off set strobe flash and a white cutting board as a reflector. The more light bouncing into the water and droplet creates a better more vivid image and also help keep the shutter speed up. This was shot at f/5 for 1/100 sec. ISO 100 at 55mm (DX format). This was my favorite of the bunch because of its clarity and vividness. |
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Water Drop |
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July 29, 2007 - This week’s photo is of team Red Bull's Peter Besenyei as he takes his plane through the course over the Thames and places 2nd in the qualifying rounds at the Red Bull Air Race in London. See it for yourself direct from the cockpit Here. This was my first air show and my first time photographing objects moving with such speeds (up to 400km/hr). For the show I matched my D200 with an 80-200mm, f/2.8 giving an equivalent reach of 300mm in 35mm format. I would have loved to experiment with a 300-500mm lens to tighten up on the planes a bit more although this could prove tricky to minimize blur due to the perpendicular crossing angle and speed of the planes. I shot wide open at f/2.8, ISO 200 and was getting shutter speeds from 1/3000-1/5000 of a second. As you can see, there were no problems freezing these planes and stopping their propellers. The D200 and 80-200mm f/2.8 proved to be a good combo although another 100mm of reach would have been perfect. I did find the D200’s blistering fast exposure speed (5 frames per second) to be quite an advantage for nailing the perfect shot. Can’t wait for the next one! |
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Red Bull Air Race, London |
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July 22, 2007 - Last week I said I would post some cool HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos of London and I don't like to disappoint so Here you go. Sorry it's just one but as anyone who has worked with these images knows; they are seriously time consuming to say the least. The image would be improved if some clouds were present but I picked the only day so far this year with no clouds in the sky. I'm a bit conservative with the tone mapping and have tried to minimize any halos and keep the image looking real and from this planet. Check out Flickr.com and search HDR for some real wonderful examples of what this medium can do... if done well. As for the photo of the week... It's London's Gherkin building from the south bank of the Thames. I took this at low tide on the river bed at about 9 pm. No HDR here as its one exposure (almost seems too easy!). I love London a dusk. |
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The Gherkin from the Thames, London |
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July 15, 2007 - I hope to have some cool HDR photos of London posted soon. HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography is the blending of multiple images of different exposures together to increase the dynamic range. When done correctly, images look crisp, detailed and almost leap off the screen. They can also look cartoon like or as a colleague of mine said "look like a cheap Chinese painting". The image to the right of the Cambridge punting boats is an HDR of 5 exposures, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2. The original image is 32 bit, 3872x2149px with a file size of 32M. The version you would see here is a chopped down jpg at 8 bit, 800x444px and weighs in at only 186kb. It’s amazing to think that the image optimized for the web has lost 99.4% of the information of the original. It's truly just a representation of the real image. |
 Cambridge Punting Boats |
July 8th, 2007 - London is a city that screams to be photographed. The flood light buildings, architecture, gardens and Thames make London quite a special place. As I am based in London, my London gallery section is quite large and I especially enjoy photographing this wonderful city, especially at dusk or night. I've recently been stopped in Canary Wharf for photographing a building while on public property for no reason given. Let's keep street photography in London and all public places in the U.K. unrestricted (as it should be!). Citizens should be allowed to photograph in public spaces as the city of London certainly reserves this right. There is CCTV absolutely everywhere in London.. up in trees, on every bus (x 8), off every building, in mobile vans. It's pretty insane. CONSIDER SIGNING THIS GOVERNMENT PETITION AGAINST RESTRICTIONS ON STREET PHOTOGRAPHY. |
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Canary Wharf by Night |
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July 1st, 2007 - Oxford is nice but Cambridge is truly a gem. Oxford boasts England's oldest library at Merton College, Harry Potter's Hogwarts library ( Duke Humphreys) and Hogwart's schoolroom, the Divinity School (great for the Harry Potter fans). To choose between the two can be a toss up but I'd say that if the day was nice, go to Cambridge as it is more picturesque (and every time I've been to Oxford it's rained) We took a short train ride to Cambridge this past weekend and I was simply stunned. Kings College, Trinity College, and the Backs were amazing places. The town had that college laidback appeal with bike filled racks, book shops and pubs sprinkled around the winding streets. I loved it. Cambridge has punt rentals, the oldest bookshop in Britain, a thriving outdoor market, and is home to one of the world's finest centers for higher learning. See my links page and check out Cambridge in Colour for some absolutely wonderful images of this great town and university. |
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Cambridge University |
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Friends from the U.S. came for a visit this week so, as usual the Thames walking tour was in order. I took this one on a walk through Green Park from Buckingham Palace to Piccadilly. There was just a touch of rain that day and the umbrellas were out.
Focal Length 70mm at f/4.4 for 1/30 sec. |
 Green Park, London |
Taken just out side Volterra was this lone tree begging to be photographed. Checkout my other photos of Tuscany located Here.
Focal Length 232mm at f2.8 for 1/640 sec. |
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Lone Tree in Tuscany |
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Five coastal villages nestled dramatically into the northern Italian coastline make up the Cinque Terre. It's easy to see why this area draws such tourism with its colorful towns, terraced hills, and vineyards that sweep steeply to the sea below. Checkout my other photos of Cinque Terre located Here. |
 Riomaggiore, Italy |
The London Eye spinning around seemingly fast with the moon in the background.
Exposure: 102 seconds at f25. |
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The London Eye Spinning |
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This is Leo, photo of the week. He is one beautiful dog! |
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