A Bumper Crop Of Project 365

Since I was suffering from the lurgy last week, there wasn’t a Project 365 update. To make up for that, here is a two for one special edition that will go through the images of the past two weeks…

On the Easter bank holiday Monday, since the weather was nice, we went to New Brighton for a walk along the prom and also to visit the old fort. Perch Rock Fort is currently being renovated as a museum and already has a number of exhibitions on show, mostly from the second world war. From the top of the fort you also get a good view of New Brighton Lighthouse. I took a number of photos on our way round, but this one of the lighthouse was my favourite of the day. The sun was starting to get lower in the sky and was coming in at a good angle to define some shape on the lighthouse.

On the Tuesday I had to go into Liverpool City Centre for an opticians appointment. I took my camera with me to grab this image that I had noticed the last time I had been in the area. As part of the Liverpool One project a new Costa Coffee has opened near to my opticians. On the upper floor of the new building is a series of coloured pipes that wrap around one side of the building. The pipes have gaps between them but I wanted the effect of just seeing coloured stripes. I used my 70-200mm lens to isolate a series of stripes that had a good mix of colours and shot it from a narrow angle to hide the gaps. Shooting from the angle also has the effect of making the stripes appear narrower as you go across the image.

On the Wednesday we had Becky’s Sister’s children for the afternoon. We took them along to Farmer Ted’s which is an activity centre based on a working farm, near Formby. There was plenty for the kids to see and do but, as a special event for the Easter holidays, Lancashire Hawks and Owls were doing exhibitions on the day.

The exhibition consisted of a talk to educate the children and parents about the different types of owls and birds of prey that they had reared or rescued. Whilst this was going on, we got the opportunity to see the owls up close as they were brought round the audience in turn. The most impressive owl was Jammu, a Eurasian Eagle Owl, who was about two feet tall with a huge wingspan that we got to see as he silently flew over us during the talk. I got this shot of Jammu between shows.

I went for an abstract shot on the Thursday. This is painted wooden bowl that we use for keeping fruit in. The scooped pattern reminds me a little of a tortoise shell or a cratered landscape. I wanted to emphasise the shape of the bowl and the gloss of the surface so I lit it with a shoot through umbrella at a low angle to the bowl. The soft light prevented getting harsh reflections on the surface and the low angle highlighted the surface texture. I shot in manual to keep the darkness of the bowl, the camera’s internal meter would tend to overexpose a shot like this. I upped the contrast in processing to make the black look a bit more glossy for the final image.

We had my cousin’s little lad for the day on Friday, in the afternoon we took him to Tam O’ Shanter Urban Farm on the Wirral. It’s a good place to take kids during the holidays, there are plenty of animals to see and it’s free to get in, which is always a bonus. At this time of year there are new lambs and kids running about the place, though never straying too far from their mothers. I got this shot of one of the mum’s who was keeping a close eye on what the visitors were doing. I originally thought it was a goat but have since found out it is a Manx Loaghtan sheep, a primitive breed that originally hail from the Isle Of Man. The male adult sheep can have as many as six horns, although four is more usual.

For Saturday’s image I wanted to try and capture the texture in the bricks of the coal shed in our back yard. The coal shed is built onto the back of the house, along side where the outside loo used to be. The coal shed still has coal in it since we have an open fire in the living room that gets plenty of use during the winter months. The bricks around the back of the house are old and weathered, many having cracks on the surface, all of which adds to an interesting texture. The sun comes around to the back of the house in the late afternoon, so I waited until it was side lighting the bricks to highlight the texture. I went for a high contrast black and white image to emphasise this further.

It was a lovely spring day on Sunday so I wanted to get a shot that would go with this theme. Most of the trees in the park are getting their leaves now and looking very green but there was one which was still covered in pink blossom. I noticed through the living room window that the afternoon light was just catching this tree, filtering between the other trees nearby. I grabbed the camera and went over to grab a few shots. I tried a few different compositions such as framing against the blue sky, picking out individual flowers or filling the frame with blossom. In the end I settled for this shot because of the pink in the bokeh, which is visible without detracting from the main subject.

Onto the next week and it was a blast from the past for Monday’s image. This is a Canon Powershot A40, which was my very first digital camera, bought in 2002. Actually, it is the only other digital camera I’ve owned apart from the current SLR (which I got in 2005). The A40 was a 2 megapixel camera, which was a pretty good resolution for the time in a compact. The camera got loads of use and was responsible for me getting the photography bug, before that I just took identical family pictures at birthdays and Christmas. The camera still works fine. This shot was taken with the camera on a piece of glass and lit with a shoot through umbrella.

Tuesday’s image was three of the arrows that I use for archery. I have eight of these arrows in a red and black colour scheme to match my bow (black riser with a red bow string). The arrows are Easton XX75, which are an aluminium shaft, normally used when shooting indoors. They are also a good beginners arrow since they are relatively cheap when compared to the carbon arrows, so it’s not such a problem if you lose or break one. For this shot I stood the arrows up in the foam lining of my bow case and lit them from a narrow angle with a bare flash. The light was aimed to just skim the black fletches and light the red ones as well as highlighting the arrow shaft. I zoomed the flash to keep the beam tight so the light would fall off as you go down the arrows.

The wooden figurines in Wednesday’s image are originally from Cuba, Becky’s dad brought them back for us when he went there on holiday. I’d wanted to shoot an image with them for a while but didn’t just want to do a straight on shot like I was selling them on ebay. The male and female figures are both carrying goods of some sort, as if they had been or were going to a market. I used this to try and tell a story with the image, as if they had bumped into each other on their journeys and were having a conversation. I positioned the figures at a slight angle so you could see the face of one of them, the person doing the talking, and used a shallow focus to really bring the attention to this figure.

Another subject I had been meaning to shoot was this set of smokey coloured wine glasses. As with the figures, I wanted to do something that was a bit more interesting than a regular product style shot. When shooting glasses like this, it is usually a good idea to backlight them if possible. This will define the shape of the glasses without having a lot of reflections on the surface of the glass. The backlighting also helps to show up the smokey colour of the glass. I arranged the glasses like the front six pins in ten pin bowling so that I would get some overlap of the glass, when viewed from the front, which would give a variation in tones. The glasses are backed up against one panel of the shoot through umbrella that is providing the light. I lined up the shot so that the rear centre wine glass can only be seen through the front glass. I chose this composition, showing just the middle section of the glasses, because I liked the transition between the clear and smokey glass.

The backlighting theme continued onto Friday’s image with this shot of dried pasta twirls. I like the shape and texture of the dried pasta shapes but wanted an interesting way to shoot it. Holding a couple of shapes up to the light showed me that a backlit image could work. I poured some pasta into a flat bottomed glass dish and tried to arrange it so most of the surface was covered. I sat the glass dish on a diffuser panel so I would get a white background for any gaps in the pasta. I raised the diffuser up so I could fit my flash underneath, pointing back at the camera. Then it was just a case of trying a few test shots to see how the light was coming through and re-arranging the pasta to get an image that I liked.

We went to Becky’s cousin’s for tea on Saturday afternoon. I took the camera along as I wanted to take some photos of their youngest child. He is fast approaching his first birthday and I’d not had a chance to do some pictures of him yet. Whilst food was being prepared we went out into the garden so I could get some shots of him playing. He enjoys running around the garden, holding onto a wheeled walker toy for support. I got a few shots of him going around the garden, which proved trickier than I thought since he moves pretty quickly for his age. I got the shot for today’s image by stopping his walker with my foot, which made him look up into the camera to see who’d stopped his progress.

For the final image of the week, and this roundup, I went for this abstract picture, which is actually the inside of our washing machine drum. I thought that the curved nature of the surface and the pattern of all the holes would make for an interesting shot. I pointed the camera in through the door of the washing machine and fired my flash inside the drum. I put a light blue gel onto the flash to get the colour, which I preferred to just the plain stainless steel. I could have added the colour during processing but I like to get as much done in-camera as I can to save on editing time afterwards. This was my favourite of the shots because I like the way the light and the size of the holes falls away across the frame.

More next week!