Squirrel in the Garden

6 June 2013

It sometimes seems that I have an obsession with photographing squirrels. If you’re a frequenter of The Daily Photo then you’ll know I often post shots of squirrels (in fact, I think about 3% of the 500+ posts on that blog are squirrel-related). There’s even a few squirrel posts on this blog, and that’s assuming I’ve remembered to tag them properly.

This post is in a very similar vein to Dave the Angry Bee from last week. Whilst I was sitting down editing photographs, I glanced out of the window in a procrastinated fashion and saw a squirrel running around in the grass, standing on its hind legs. This being spring (and shortly before the groundskeepers came round and mowed the lawn) there was a lot of daisies about adding a bit of detail to the image.

1/200sec, f/5.6, ISO 250, 300mm

Quick as a flash I grabbed my camera and my telephoto lens and starting firing off a few shots.

May

1 June 2013

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May has now been and gone, and we already quite unexpectedly five whole months into 2013. In six months’ time we’ll all be talking about Christmas and how really, winter is about as warm as summer is these days. Then we’ll have another snowy Easter, then a cold summer, and then start persecuting 4×4 drivers for ruining the climate. Maybe. I’m not a clairvoyant or anything (although I am as clairvoyant as anyone else who has ever existed).

May has been a bit of a lopsided month. In fact, entirely lopsided. It contained four posts – more in a single month since February – but none of these were published until the last week of May.

To be fair, everything has been a bit topsy-turvy over the last month or so, and things are finally beginning to settle down into the new normal. One of the key catalysts of this change is our new kittens, Zelda and Rambow. We adopted them the first week in May, and I had intended to take some pictures of them when they first arrived, and post them shortly thereafter. It didn’t quite work that way. It turns out, keeping track of two young inquisitive kittens as well as ingratiating them to our other cat was a wholly distracting endeavour, and I didn’t manage to complete the post until May 24th which, as you might have noticed, is over three weeks into May. Still, I got it completed less than a month after it was shot, which is a major improvement over my recent performance.

On a related note, the post that followed New Kittens, catchily titled Swanage, was six weeks past its shooting when it was published. Like New Kittens that wasn’t the original intention; I had planned on writing Swanage in April, but after I realised my parents didn’t know about our new car at the time I put it off until I’d seen them in May. I think that was because it might not be the sort of thing they’d appreciate.

Bluebell Forest

29 May 2013

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My sister-in-law Alice and her family have recently moved into a lovely cottage out in the sticks somewhere. It’s rural enough that when we visited there last week my satnav dumped me on a country road with just a few houses along it and said, ‘good luck’.

For me, as a photographer (or a rough approximation of one), the best bit about their new home is just on the other side of the road from them.

1/1250sec, f/5.6, ISO 2500, 64mm

The largest bluebell forest I’ve ever seen. Stretching as far as the eye could see in all directions (apart from the one from which we had entered) were thousands of bluebells. The last expanse of bluebells I’d seen was the so-called Bluebell Wood in the Waterhouse Plantation in Bushy Park, and that was little more than a large patch of them.

So right before lunch my wife, our niece and I took a stroll in this amazing forest.

Dave the Angry Bee

27 May 2013

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There I was, sitting at my desk writing a post, when a bee flew through the open window, swirled around me a bit, and then proceeded to show himself up a bit by failing to fly back out of the window. Like most insects, he wasn’t capable of grasping the concept of glass and seems to be getting a bit grumpy every time the window failed to get out of his way.

He did, however, stop on the window to regather before he had another go at flying his small, bee frame through double glazed glass. This gave me a small opportunity to slap on my macro lens and get a few shots of him.

1/1250sec, f/2.8, ISO 200, 100mm

Swanage

26 May 2013

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Last month my wife and I took an impromptu trip to Swanage. It was an accident, we were taking our new car out for a spin and we just ended up there. I love Swanage, I’ve visited there at least once a year for the last 25 years, so it was perhaps inevitable that we’d find ourselves there on one of the first sunny days of the year. There is plenty of great driving roads around there too, which I guess was part of the appeal.

Having visited Swanage many times, however, it was a little while before I felt inclined to get out my camera. I probably have photographs of the town dating back to the mid-nineties, back when I was using a handed-down point-and-shoot film camera. I should probably see if I can dig those out at some point – my parents must have them somewhere.

We were sitting on a bench on a large stone jetty letting our lunch settle when a seagull landed nearby, finally encouraging me to get my camera out.

1/1250sec, f/5.6, ISO 100, 120mm

At the end of the jetty (which, unfortunately, looks a bit like a penis when viewed on Google Maps) was the standard health and safety sign warning against jumping into the shallow sea in case you get hurt. Signs like this annoy me, it’s why humanity is getting so stupid because people stupid enough to dive into shallow water aren’t being given the freedom to do so and remove themselves from existence. Ultimately it’s the lawyers that are going to be responsible for the downfall of humanity.

I liked the look of the sign, however, but couldn’t decide how best to shoot it. In colour? In black and white? With just the sea behind it, or with some of the cliff visible? A wide shot, or closer to the sign? Should the sign be on the left or the right? I tried variations on all of the above, but as is often the case I’m not sure which one works best, and I know from experience that my opinion tends to be at odds with most other people’s. So, to hedge my bets a bit, here are most of them.

New Kittens

24 May 2013

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Seems to be that whenever I get something new, I take photos of it, and then post them on here in the guise of saying ‘look at my pictures, aren’t they nice? Oh, the thing? Yeah, I guess that’s nice too’. Honestly, I don’t do it to humble brag - I only post the pictures if whatever I’ve bought is relevant to this blog or if the pictures I’ve taken are worth sharing.

This is one such occasion. A couple of weeks ago my wife and I adopted a couple of kittens. This is why it’s been so quiet on Creative Splurges for the last few weeks – it turns out, herding cats is a full time job. Like all kittens, they are the cutest things in the entire world, and me being me, I’ve photographed the hell out of them.

1/320sec, f/5, ISO 2000, 42mm

1/40sec, f/5.6, ISO 800, exposure bias +0.67, 85mm

The top one is a little girl called Zelda, the bottom her brother Rambow. They are tiny and boisterous and lots of fun to watch playing. From time to time, however, they slowed down enough for me to get some photographs of them.

April

1 May 2013

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Another month, another four weeks with only a couple of posts. This is not how I want things to be, but life seems to be full of lots of stupid little distractions lately. The struggle is trying to figure out how to get things back on track.

The two posts in April were two polar opposites. The first was a big project over a year in the making, the other the sort of ‘easy’ post that doesn’t take much to throw together.

Some More Portraits was technically started in April 2012 when I began to compile a new list of portrait images after being quite pleased with my first portraits post (and its short follow-up). My portraits posts are a departure from my normal post format for this blog. Most of my posts are connected by virtue of them being taken on the same day; sometimes a single trip is spun out into two (or more) posts, but usually the theory is, single trip = single post. My portraits posts, however, are different. Their connection is purely thematic.

Instagram #16

19 April 2013

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It’s time once again for me to try and figure out a way of starting one of my regular Instagram posts without using a variation of the phrase ‘it’s once again time’. Looks like I’ve failed again.

That’s presumably because it is once again time for me to show off another small selection of my Instagram photographs.

The backlog I have for my Instagram shots is nowhere as voluminous as for the rest of my photography, but there’s still a few I feel the need to share with you. In this set we have a few shots from the snow that hit the UK a month or so ago, and some random shots of various bits of London, including a pub, an Ikea, and Waterloo Station.

If you like these, then check out my other Instagram posts, or check me out on Instagram directly.

Snow by the NFT

Snowy Church

Ikea Smoke Stacks

Pub Glasses

Train

Wood Pallettes

Tracks

M&Ms

Station #2

Some More Portraits

14 April 2013

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It seems like I’ve been talking about a new portraits post for ages. As it turns out, it has in fact been almost exactly just over a year since I started working on this second portraits post. I have never claimed to be punctual.

My last portraits post contained only a handful of images, which I believed, at the time, to be the sum total of the portraits I had taken up to that point. That post contained a dozen images, all of which I was very proud of. Only a day or so after publishing that post, I discovered a few more images on my computer which were too good to leave be, so they got a quick followup post of their own. My thinking was, it had taken years to build up that many images that could be considered portraits, so it might be a while until I had enough to be able to publish another ‘portraits’ post; I’d better get them out whilst the proverbial iron was warm.

Since then, I’ve been sifting any portrait-like images from sets, holding them over and compiling another portrait set. As I procrastinated over writing the post, the shortlist of images got longer and longer. After building confidence photographing my niece and family (and to an extent, it becoming expected that I would occasionally photograph people as well as things) I began shooting more and more people. The shortlist continued to grow. Always writing more traditional posts, but quietly putting any portraits aside for later.

Eventually, the levees were going to break. So here we are, finally, finally looking at the portraits post I’ve been talking about for over a year. So let’s take a look at what I’ve got. I’m going to go through these in chronological order so that, hopefully, the learning curve can be apparent.

The first few images actually predate my first portraits post, images I overlooked or simply forgot whilst compiling the first compendium.

1/15sec, f/3.5, ISO 100, exposure bias -0.33, 18mm (cropped)

Although to be fair, this image of my friend Lewis was probably missed the first time round because the original in-camera image looked like this.

This next image is from just before the Bournemouth Air Festival in 2011; in fact, it’s a shot of my wife taken on the journey.

March

1 April 2013

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I should probably start off this month’s review with an apology. It’s not been a good month here, with only three posts of moderate quality, none of which were as popular as February’s monthly review, which is for reasons I will never be able to fathom one of the most popular posts ever on this site.

My head has not really been in the right gear for a lot of the month; I’ve found myself unable to concentrate for any length of time and given the massive pile of images I have to edit and post not much is getting achieved. Although I’ve only been on a few shoots this month one of them was another theatre show so that backlog is no shorter than it was a month ago (on the bright side, I achieved my goal of getting an image out quickly enough for the theatre to use it on a promo post).

Being unable to concentrate, it’s been difficult to pick out sets of images to start working on. As a result, this month’s posts have been a bit of an eclectic set, from a theatre show to a cloudy pre-Olympic London via a Christmas market, and… nothing in between, because those were the only three posts in the month.

Creative Splurges

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

Tag Archives: Photography

Squirrel in the Garden

May

Bluebell Forest

Dave the Angry Bee

Swanage

New Kittens

April

Instagram #16

Some More Portraits

March

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