CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

Eau Rouge is probably the most famous corner on any race circuit in the world.  The run down from the first corner at Belgium's Spa-Francorchamp circuit means that race cars are flat out as they travel through Eau Rouge and then face the steep climb up through the right and left at Raidillon in the distance.  The combination of Eau Rouge and Raidillon is the stuff of motorsport legend, where the greats have won and lost races on the 7km circuit through the Ardennes Forest. The climb is very steep and it is very difficult to convey this in a photograph.  I used the Fujifilm X-T1 and the XF10-24mm f4 at 10mm.  Placing the camera on the group I framed the shot with the painted kerbs and the white line as a lead in to the image and the track just trails off into the distance.  By getting down low I have managed to show some of the steep climb that the drivers face. The final stroke of luck was the light and the clouds.  The sun lit the scene perfectly a...

Six months ago I bought the ultra wide XF10-24mm f4 Fujinon (15-36mm equivalent), the sixth lens in my Fuji line up.   I have always had an ultra wide angle lens in my photographic arsenal and while the Fujinon 14mm f2.8 (21mm) is an excellent wide angle lens, there were times when I missed the extra field of view offered by my old full frame 17-35mm f2.8 Nikon.   So I decided to add the newly launched Fujinon wide angle zoom to my inventory in May of this year. The zoom range of 10mm to 24mm is very flexible making this lens a good all rounder. Here is an image at 10mm and here is the same scene at 24mm So six months on, what do I think? Well I have to be honest, while I enjoy using the lens, it hasn't been used as much as I thought it would be.  The build and optical quality is fantastic and it is a joy to use, but it is a big lens.  I find myself reaching for the 14mm and 18mm primes a lot more times than I thought I would. ...

The beauty of shooting landscapes in the winter is the fact that the sun never gets very high from the horizon, allowing you to shoot longer than you could in the summer months. When we visited the Peak District last week we were given a fantastic light show by Mother Nature (see this BLOG POST ) as the wind pushed the clouds across the landscape at an incredible rate of speed.   When we arrived at Curbar Edge the scene was very different, with bright sunshine over the Peak District.  I took this shot from the top looking towards the West using a Nikon D800, Nikon 17-35mm f2.8 AF-S lens at 17mm, fitted with a Lee 0.6 and a 0.9 soft ND grad filters, to balance the exposure between the sky and the land, and all sitting on my trusty Slik tripod. Within 20 minutes of this shot being taken, the next weather front had closed in producing the dramatic pictures seen in the previous blog post. Image taken on a Nikon D800 with 17-35mm f2.8 AF-S Micro lens -----------...