CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

It may be a bit of a photography cliche but I love Robins ( Erithacus rubecula)  foraging for food in the snow. It is the stuff of Christmas cards! We have a bird table in the garden which we have kept stock up with seed over the winter.  With the recent winter storms lashing the UK we have had plenty of our feathered friends in the garden looking for something to eat. I set up the camera in the house over looking the garden and waited for a Robin to appear in the right spot and I didn't have to wait for long.  I used the Fujifilm X-H1 fitted with the XF100-400mm f4.5/5.6 plus the 1.4x converter to give me some extra pulling power. For more information on the Robin  ( Erithacus rubecula)   CLICK HERE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BLOG BY VISITING THE ADVERTISERS ON THIS PAGE By clicking on the adverts you are hel...

For the past two days much of the UK has been gripped in a severe snow storm, including the South East of Scotland.  In fact the Met Office issued the first ever 'RED' weather warning for snow in the central belt of Scotland.  The high winds and low temperatures have produced blizzard conditions and dumped a fair amount of snow across the country.   While Dunbar hasn't been as severely hit as other parts further inland, the weather has forced the trains to be cancelled, the schools to be shut and made roads hazardous to drive on and even impassable for a while. Today I walked with my wife to the school where she works and then headed down to the harbour with the Fujifilm X-Pro2 and Xf16mm f1.4 lens to capture some images of the wintery conditions. I also took along my GoPro Hero5 Black and the Karma stabiliser grip to capture some video of the conditions.  I didn't fly the DJI Mavic Pro drone because the wind conditions were too strong to safely fly. ...

Yesterday I posted five images in black and white from my recent trip down to the Scottish Borders.  Today I am posting nine more from the same trip but this time in colour. These images were all taken in the afternoon after the cloud cover had started to break up and the low sun provided a very contrasty light over the snow covered landscape.  At low levels where the snow had melted the bright ruddy colours of the bracken and the grass contrasted nicely the snow on the higher ground. Here are the images I took on the Fujifilm X-T2 using with the XF10-24mm f4, XF16-55mm f2.8 or the XF100-400mm f4.5/5.6 lenses. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BLOG BY VISITING THE ADVERTISERS ON THIS PAGE By clicking on the adverts you are helping support this blog - thank you. ---------------------------------------------...

Fujifilm X-T2 + XF100-400mm f4.5/5.6 - 1/800 @ f8 ISO200 On Wednesday I spent the day in the Scottish Borders, primarily to recce the area for the up coming Borders Rally on the 18th March and to also meet with a workshop client who wanted some advice.  It also gave me an opportunity to stop and take in the beauty of this area of Scotland. Fujifilm X-T2 + XF16-55mm f2.8 - 1/1600 @ f8 ISO200 Unlike on my recent trips to the Highlands, the Scottish Borders had received a covering of snow, especially on the higher ground, which made this wonderful landscape even more beautiful.  The Borders are not as dramatic as the Scottish mountain further north, but the high, rolling hills provide a different perspective for a landscape photographer to focus their lens on. Fujifilm X-T2 + XF16-55mm f2.8 - 1/250 @ f5.6 ISO200 With cloudy, grey skies, with some breaks forming to give a bit of texture, I decided to switch the Fujifilm X-T2 to ACROS fil...

Snow has been in short supply in East Lothian this winter and it has also been pretty scarce during three landscape photography trips into the Highlands as well, but yesterday there was plenty of snow around during a trip into the Scottish Borders for a couple of meetings. As well as snowy landscapes I love taking close up shots of icy pools where the cracks and trapped bubbles of air make fantastic patterns. These images were taken of frozen pools of water formed into the deep wheel tracks on forestry commission land near Walkerburn.  The images were shot on the X-T2 and 16-55mm f2.8 with the camera set to ACROS (R) film simulation. I then processed the images through Silver EFEX Pro2 using a custom filter I have set up to give the images a extreme contrast to enhance the patterns in the ice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BLOG BY VISITING...

As anyone living in the UK for the past week the weather has been, to put it mildly, flipping awful!  People in the North of England and up here in parts of Scotland have been flooded out of their homes and others have had their power and other services disrupted.  And not just once in a lot of cases.   Luckily for me the only inconvenience has been I haven't been able to venture out with the camera this week and had to cancel the first photographic trip into the Highlands of 2016.  However compared to the thousands of people I mentioned earlier this is absolutely nothing. To show how bad the weather has been I was going to go and watch the North Berwick v Murrayfield Wanderers rugby match this afternoon but even this game was called off due to a waterlogged pitch and for rugby to be called off due to the bad weather conditions it has to be really bad. Anyway when I was leaving North Berwick I saw the clouds breaking over the Lammermuir Hills so I decided ...

I have been delving into the archives once again and re editing some of the shots from previous photoshoots on the new Apple iMac. This shot was taken two years ago on 14 February 2013.  The image is of a farm house up in the Peak District with a dusting of snow on the fields. a quick edit in Photoshop CS and then converted to mono in Silvers Efex Pro2 software and this high contrast image is the result. The image was taken on a Nikon D800 and Sigma 50-500mm f3.5/f6.3 lens, with the zoom set at 230mm.

This was the wintry scene on a recent trip into Edinburgh looking west along Princes Street Gardens with Edinburgh Castle in the distance on the hill with the Scottish National Gallery in the middle distance. While Dunbar in East Lothian has had very little snow, Edinburgh and Mid Lothian have had a fair dusting and walking around with the X100 while I was waiting for my train back to Dunbar I captured this image from the Waverley Bridge. I will be in the centre of Edinburgh again tomorrow when I head out to the airport to catch a plane to Paris. This will be the first trip to Europe of 2015 and it is for the Press Conference on Thursday to unveil the entry list for this year's FIA World Endurance Championship, the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the European Le Mans Series. More on this later this week. Image taken on a Fujifilm Finepix X100 with a Fujinon 23mm f2 lens.  Image converted to mono using Silver Efex Pro2. -------------------------------------------------------...

'The best lens for landscapes is a wide angle', how many times has this advice been given?  I give it myself and on the whole I agree with this, but this is not a hard fact.  Any lens is good for landscapes and a medium to long telephoto lens is also very useful and I use my 55-200mm (80-300mm equivalent) on almost every photography trip.  A telephoto lens isolates elements of the landscape and it also compresses the perspective, bringing items in the composition closer together.  For example in the shot at the top of this page of Barns Ness lighthouse, Bass Rock can be seen to the left of the lighthouse.  In this shot it looks like The Bass is just beyond the headland when in fact it is a few miles away out in the Firth of Forth.   This 'stacking' of the different elements is highlighted when the light is slightly behind the subject as in the shot below of Lismore Lighthouse in the Sound of Mull. The lighthouse is dark, the shoreline in the middle ...

Looking down Glen Coe towards The Three Sisters The final destination on our Highland photo trip was the depths of Glen Coe.  We hadn't planned to stop in the Glen, instead we were heading back to Rannoch Moor, but the light hitting the Three Sisters as we traveled up the A82 between the steep sides of the mountains had us changing our plans quite rapidly. The main problem we had was trying to find somewhere to park the car near where we wanted to be as the Glen was very busy with walkers, people sledging and, of course, other photographers.  We lucked in when we spotted a parking space near to a good spot. The view was back down the Glen towards The Three Sisters with some foreground interest provided by some snow covered boulders and an old stone bridge.  The Three Sisters Trying to find a suitable location to set up the tripod proved to be interesting as the snow was very deep, up to 24 inches / 60cm in places, which made walking very tiring. Skis or s...