St Margarets Railway Bridge

29 August 2012

1/250sec, f/8, ISO 160, 18mm

Continuing my journey through my backlog of pre-Olympic trips and sets, we come to a post that was actually completed and ready to go before the Olympics started, but fell by the wayside when the Games got into full swing. And unfortunately, as the original opening alluded to the Games in an expectant way, it needed a little bit of rewriting before it was ready to post. Still, it’s here now, and only a month after it was finished.

I keep an active list of things I’d like to shoot (well, okay, I keep two active lists of things I’d like to shoot, but one of them is technically unrelated to photography). Every working day on the train I pass an old-style railway bridge at St Margarets station. It’s the classic style of metal railway bridge – in fact, I had one just like it, only made of plastic, in the train set I had as a kid. This bridge has been on my shooting list for months.

What kept me from shooting the bridge for so long wasn’t distraction, or lack of motivation. I was waiting for the right conditions. Because I’d been eying it up for so long, I had a specific sort of shot in mind, and had ample time to prepare (I even used Google Street View to examine the angles) and, more importantly, wait. Simply put, I wanted cloud porn. Fortunately, the weather in the UK lately has given near perfect conditions for cloud porn. That is, lots of rain. We had a bit of a bright spell around the Olympics, and occasionally since then, but ultimately this summer has been a dull, grey washout.

Wanting cloud porn, as well as wanting to capture the texture of the structure, I realised before I arrived I’d need to use HDR. As I mentioned in my last post, the HDR plugin I’m currently using is still in trial mode, so please excuse the watermarks.

Twickenham Jubilee Festival

27 August 2012

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When the Olympics started just over a month ago, I pretty much dropped everything to photograph it; starting with the Torch Relay and running through four events and some random images, all but one of the last ten posts on this blog have been Olympics-related.

With the posting of my last Olympics post almost two weeks ago, I set about going over the non-Olympic photos I hadn’t yet gotten around to posting, and discovered, slightly alarmingly, that my unposted photos date back to the start of June. I’ve been shooting pretty excessively over summer, but I’ve not always found the time to process them, especially as I have the habit of postponing some posts in favour of the ones I find more interesting. I’ll often shoot some images, transfer them to my computer, then go out and shoot more a few days later, and get sidetracked with processing the new images and forget about the old ones.

The reason, in fact, why I’ve not posted much at all over the last two weeks is simply because I discovered hundreds of unprocessed and unposted images when returning to my pre-Olympic work, and got deeply engrossed in sorting through them all.

It should give you an indication of how far back some of my images go that I’m back to talking about Jubilee festivals. With all that has happened since the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations it seems like a distant memory. The Twickenham Jubilee Festival was actually opened by the tug of war I covered closer to the time, and the day after I headed down to the riverside with my wife, brother-and sisters-in-law, and niece. That was part of the problem – I’d processed the images of them like I normally do, and never finished off the other images.

Another problem, save for my rusty segueing skills, was that the tide was quite far in when we arrived. Although obviously that had little to do with me not getting round to processing the images. Look, I’m a bit out of practise, okay?

1/250sec, f/5, ISO 640, 60mm

London 2012: Women’s Road Race

29 July 2012

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1/4000sec, f/3.5, ISO 2500, 18mm

It’s Day 2 of the London Olympics. Yesterday, the men’s cycling road race ended with Kazakhstan’s Alexandre Vinokourov winning gold and disappointment for the Team GB hopefuls who had high hopes for medals (last year’s test event was won by a Brit; sadly not this year).

Today it was the turn of the women to take to the London 2012 road race route. It’s essentially the same, but with less laps of Box Hill. Now a virtual veteran of shooting this circuit, my wife and I headed out to Twickenham to shoot the women riders. And cheer them on, of course.

London 2012: Men’s Road Race

29 July 2012

8 Comments

1/500sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, exposure bias -0.33, 300mm

Day 1 of the Games of the XXXth Olympiad – by which I mean the London 2012 Olympics – has just completed. There’s all sorts going on, most of which in the Olympic Park. However, there are a few events which are spread a little around London, notably the football which is as far flung as Cardiff and Manchester, and the sailing which is is down in my much-loved Weymouth & Portland.

The road cycling events too are pan-London; they start in the centre of the city on Pall Mall and head out through South West London to Box Hill, doing nine laps there and heading back.

They prepared for this one almost a year ago with the London-Surrey Cycle Classic, an Olympic test event designed for the organisers to learn how to deal with the execution of the competition. The bonus is it also gave me the opportunity to practise how I’d shoot such an event, so this time there were few surprises. Also like last time, I was keen on trying to get images of the spectators, because this being the London Olympics, this is as much about them.

Instagram #11

18 June 2012

2 Comments

Before I’d even published Instagram #10, I had already built up enough images for another Instagram post. For those of you not familiar with my method of dealing with Instagram images, it’s simple: I can sometimes take quite a lot of pictures with the app, so whenever I build up a batch of nine great images, ones worth sharing, I wrap them up here for all to see.

It doesn’t always work out that way, of course. Instagram #3 contained a bumper set of twenty-seven images because I’d allowed a batch of pictures to build up, and Instagram #9 had six new photos appended to it just before publishing because I’d taken a few extra good ones between the time I collated the nine for the post and the time the post was ready to publish. But I’m now trying to be a little more strict on the whole ‘nine images to a post’ rule.

This set contains some of my favourite Instagram images – I’m sure I’ve said that on previous posts, but sometimes the best images I take are ones where I’m not distracted by having a full DSLR. My favourites from this set are the last two: a sunrise near the station at Twickenham, and an angled shot of the London Studios at the South Bank.

If you like these, you can follow me on Instagram – @CousinDirk – or follow my Tumblr page, where I post most of my Instagram images.

Tug o’ War

17 June 2012

The Shack by the Track

16 April 2012

4 Comments

Every day, on my commute home (with the exception of days like today, where a fatality at Richmond Station sent me home a very long way round that took an extra hour and a half), on the final approach to Twickenham Station, I see an old, dilapidated hut by the railway.

Every day I see it, usually whilst I’m standing up ready to get off the train, rarely ready with my phone, even rarely with my DSLR on me.

Not yesterday.

Yesterday I was coming back from London having spent the afternoon with some friends and family (as you’d expect, taking some pictures – those will be along in a post soon), and as we were approaching Twickenham for once I had the wherewithal to have my camera ready.

It wasn’t quite that easy; I had only one chance to get this right, or I’d have to wait until another day. So, I had to set the zoom, focus and shutter speed to ensure a clean shot, all without actually seeing what I was trying to photograph.

So, all in all, I’m pleased that it turned out pretty well, and near enough exactly how I envisioned it.

1/1000sec, f/4.5, ISO 2000, exposure bias -0.33 (+0.49), 28mm

If I have any complaints, it’s that I would have preferred the camera to be pointing slightly lower, so there is a bit less sky and a bit more ground. I think the shot would have been slightly better framed that way. Not bad, though, for a photograph taken from a moving train.

One thing I really like: there is a vaguely human shape in the window. A hermit? A railway worker? A ghost? A discarded jacket? You decide.

~~~

Just the one photo from me today. I’ve got a bit of a backlog of posts to work my way through at the minute but I’m getting there; I am currently tending to move shorter posts up the queue a bit to get them out ahead of the posts that will take longer to write.

In marginally related news, I’m heading inexorably towards my 100th post here on Creative Splurges. And to mark this occasion, I want YOU to pick your best photo from the first hundred posts. I’ll be shortlisting some in time for a poll in Post #100, but if you have any suggestions for the shortlist, drop me a line on Twitter, in the comments below, or using the ‘Contact‘ page above.

Cheers for now,
Rob

England v Wales Women’s Rugby

9 March 2012

6 Comments

I never seem to concentrate on a single type of photography. A last week it was portraits, a few days ago wildlife photography, the other day food photography, and now sports. I’m sure one day I’ll settle down and find my niche, but until then I’m happy to play around in any genre and learn whatever I can. Sooner or later I should really start concentrating on strengthening a particular style but I’m not at that point yet.

Last week, after the England rugby team had lost to Wales in the Six Nations at Twickenham, the stadium opened its doors for anyone to come in and see the England Womens’ Rugby team take on the Welsh Ladies in the Womens’ Six Nations.

As it was a free event, and we live a stone’s throw from the stadium, we figured it would be a nice way to spend the evening, and give me the chance to try some sports shooting, which I’ve not really ever done before (the closest equivalent is the marine commando display from the Bournemouth Air Festival last year).

Slightly annoyingly, they only had one side of the stadium open, so all of my pictures have empty seats in the background. Still, as it was a free-for-all, sit anywhere you like sort of event, I was able to find my way to some seats near the touchline in the hope of getting some interesting images.

1/6sec, f/5, ISO 100, exposure bias -0.67, 18mm

We arrived a little late – the match was already five minutes in – but England were by then 5-0 up. The first thing we noted was that the women’s game is just as aggressive as the men’s. Perhaps more so – there was at least one almost-punchup.

Birds in Motion

4 March 2012

5 Comments

A couple of weekends ago my father-in-law showed me his new bridge camera. Although I can see the point of them for someone who likes to take pictures but isn’t all that interested in the finer workings of a camera, I think most people who are used to the quality and flexibility of a true digital SLR would quickly become frustrated with one (the model my father in law showed me also gets very, very noisy at high ISO levels, to the point that I’m not really sure why they bothered to allow such sensitivity).

Still, the results my father-in-law has achieved with it are pretty good. One of the shots he was quite pleased with was one in which some seagulls had been captured static in flight as they fought for some bread.

Flash forward a week, and my wife and I were sitting on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham enjoying a lovely warm spring day, albeit in what I believe was technically still winter.

Surrounding us were birds of many shapes and sizes (within reason, of course; they were all still bird-shaped and sized), fighting beak and claw for some of the bread that the inhabitants of my corner of London now felt brave enough to go outside and feed to them. Inspired by the shot my father-in-law showed me the previous week, I decided to try to get some shots of the birds frozen in time.

Fortunately, many of the birds were willing to cooperate.

1/640sec, f/7.1, ISO 400, exposure bias -1.0 (-1.45), 87mm (cropped)

Playing with Macro

26 January 2012

7 Comments

Whilst wandering around York House Gardens a couple of weeks ago, I had a great opportunity to have a play with my new macro lens. Although I had headed down to Hampton Court Palace the day prior with the express intention of photographing flowers, there wasn’t much there. However, in the gardens on the Twickenham riverfront, there was quite an array of interesting things to capture.

Exposure 1/500sec, f/2.8, ISO 250, exposure bias -0.67, 100mm focal length

I really need to invest in a tape measure or something, because it’s so difficult to get across a sense of scale in these extreme closeup images.

Creative Splurges

“Creativity is a natural extension of our enthusiasm.” – Earl Nightingale

Category Archives: Twickenham

St Margarets Railway Bridge

Twickenham Jubilee Festival

London 2012: Women’s Road Race

London 2012: Men’s Road Race

Instagram #11

Tug o’ War

The Shack by the Track

England v Wales Women’s Rugby

Birds in Motion

Playing with Macro

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