Crabwood Clearings

Logpile

There are virtually no unmanaged spaces in this country today, and this is just as true for nature reserves as it is for farmland and commercial forests. I've often mentioned Crabwood in posts, a small area of woodland that serves as a nature reserve a couple of miles west of Winchester. I've been visiting this area for the best part of three decades now, and in that time I've seen many clearings. Large trees are felled, coppices trimmed and new growth either in the form of plants or saplings take their place as the canopy of trees is removed or grows back.

Quatrefoil Stump

It is hard to see the steady growth of the woodland; the rides are cleared on eight or sixteen year cycles and so one becomes accustomed to the layout of the trees. When an area is cleared it is very noticeable and sudden, and to my eyes, a very interesting place to explore. One particular ride has been extensively cleared of its small trees this winter. There has been a lot of activity by the foresters in recent weeks, and now, as spring starts, it is the turn of nature as new flowers and sapling start to shoot upwards. Soon the logs, stakes and trimmings will be removed and nature will be left to its own devices once again. As it does so, there will be plenty to reward the visitor who spends time to look.

Caught in the Trimmings

Virtually all of these pictures were taken on the G3 with the 20mm lens. My camera bag is becoming lighter these days. I usually only carry the 20mm and 45mm lenses and try make sure I'm not carrying anything that won't be used. If it is sunny I will carry a small reflector. If the light is not so good I will take flash and diffusers in a separate large bag, but in general I’m happier when I carry less equipment.

Coppicing

Quiet Morning in Crabwood

With the house now devoid of the Christmas decorations and the skies filled with endless grey, it’s all feeling quite wintry and ‘January’ this weekend. I decided to head off to Crabwood, a small nature reserve and managed woodland near Winchester yesterday morning. A heavy mist hung around the woods muffling sound and softening the light; it felt as though the countryside was asleep.

Quiet Morning in Crabwood 1

There is always something to look at if you have the time and the right frame of mind, and it was not long before I found a few subjects that would act as suitable motifs to capture the experience of being out among the trees. I had taken along my new flashgun plus brolly & lighting stand to add some light to energise the pictures. The biggest problem on flat dull days is one of poor lighting on key subjects. Just a small touch of light from a flash is needed to draw attention to the subject, to lift it from its surroundings. It took the brolly along so that I could give my subjects diffuse soft lighting.

Quiet Morning in Crabwood 2

I was using my new Metz 52 AF-1 flashgun that I’ve just got to supplement the Lumix G3. The primary reason for getting this model was the high speed synchronisation feature, which allows me to use shutter speeds in excess of the normal X-sync of the camera. In this way I can use large lens apertures to give me the shallow depth of field that I want for pictorial reasons and still be able to add light to the pictures. On most camera systems you need both camera and flashgun to have this synchronisation (also known as Focal Plane or FP mode). Fortunately all micro four thirds cameras are equipped for this, but you still need to get a fairly high end flash unit to offer this functionality. I’ll write more about the Metz over the coming weeks, but for now I’m pleased that the new unit is opening up creative opportunities in the way that I hoped it would.

Focussing on Details

Along the Oxdrove, #1

We are being treated to some fine, bright and mild weather at the moment. This Sunday just past dawned bright and fine, so I took off towards the Oxdrove near Northington to the east of Winchester to take some pictures. In visual terms is not a particularly interesting place to visit; long vistas of gentling rolling countryside, and fairly nondescript paths, but it is relatively high and bright, and I felt in need of a good dose of sunshine.

Along the Oxdrove, #2

The most appealing features on the walk were the bleached leafless branches of some of the younger saplings. Once again I concentrated on using the 20mm prime for my G3, separating various planes of interest in the images by using the shallow focus possible from this lens. I scarcely need to say that it is always important to pay attention to the background on any picture, and it was my intention with these pictures to have softly drawn stems that echoed crisply focussed elements in the foreground. 

I was reminded how far modern cameras have developed of the past few years. It is so much easier, more interactive, using digital cameras for this type of work. Even with depth of field preview levers, it was largely a game of luck trying to work on shallow focus images using film cameras. I’m now wondering how I might extend narrow depth of field working to the creation of joiners.

Along the Oxdrove, #3

I had always found it difficult to control the focussing on small details when using the 20mm Lumix lens, finding that the camera would usually focus on the background when my intention was the thin near-field detail, such as branches and leaves. In the past month I’ve given a couple of lectures, and in one discussion during the interval a member of the audience told me of how useful he had found the pin-point focus mode on his G3. This has proven to be a very useful tip, and I now find that by using this mode I can now quickly get the focus I wish when using this lens. On Sunday I was using it all the time.  

Along the Oxdrove, #4

Focussing was one of the main issues for me when I decided to move away from a DSLR to a mirrorless system camera. DSLRs, with their separate AF sensor are always prone to alignment tolerances, and there were many times when I could not focus accurate at close distances with my previous camera. Apparently this is still a problem even on some very expensive new full-frame cameras. Because the autofocus works directly from the image sensor on mirrorless cameras, the focus is always correct. Added to that, the whole process of touching anywhere on the monitor to set the focus is so intuitive and so quick on the G3. The focus modes, such as pin-point, subject tracking and face recognition are not gimmicks, but useful practical tools that work to help you get the picture much more reliably than was possible just a few years ago. Some progress is real progress.

Prime Numbers

In my camera bag, 20 and 45 are prime numbers. Or to be more precise, I have two fixed focal length prime lenses of 20mm and 45mm. These are my prime lenses in terms of use and choice too; I use these two lenses in preference to the standard zoom that came with the camera. I also know that any new lens I might buy in the future will not get the same level of use as these two lenses, which helps me resist doing further damage to the bank account.

New hedge near Corhampton, #1

The two lenses I’m talking about are the Panasonic Lumix 20mm/f1.7 standard lens and the Olympus 45mm/f1.8 short telephoto. When I bought my Lumix G3, one of the big attractions of the m43 system was the availability of these highly praised lenses. You can find plenty of reviews on the web about how excellent these lenses are and they are all true. Both are very sharp, very bright and very light, and fortunately, reasonably priced. And they both share the same trump card; they are both excellent when used at full aperture.  It is this quality, which allows one to create sharply drawn detail against a softly rendered background that makes these lenses so appealing.

New hedge near Corhampton, #2 © Graham Dew 2012

The 20 was the first lens that I got. A pancake lens, much wider than it is long, it gives the camera a very low profile which just about allows one the opportunity to put the camera into a pouch. It weighs next to nothing, and allows you to tuck the camera under your arm discretely. Optically it is very clear and sharp, no visible distortion. The great appeal of this lens is that it can truly be used wide open, with pleasing depth of field drop depending on the closeness of the subject. If you need more depth of field, commonly when focussing on nearby object, you can always dial in more depth by setting the aperture smaller. Optically, the lens is very good indeed. The tonality, sharpness, and transition from sharp to blurred is as good as you could wish for. The only thing I would really like to improve is the focussing. Many of my pictures are of objects close-up. If the object is small or thin, then the AF has trouble focussing. The lens will hunt from near to far, often passing through the chosen point of focus. As the focus is quite slow (slower than the kit zoom) this can take some time. When this happens I switch to using the pin-point mode of the G3, which usually helps to find the focus. Overall, it’s a great lens and one I grow to enjoy more and more. It is now my normal lens, the one lens I'll take if I'm limiting myself to the minimum gear.

New hedge near Corhampton, #3

The 45mm is the same but different. Again, it has very high image quality, can be used wide open too and is also very small and light. But the depth of field effects are even stronger as one would expect from a longer focal length. This Olympus lens is much faster at focussing than the Panasonic lens and always seems to lock onto the desired object quickly snapping into focus. Its shape is different too. The barrel of the lens is smaller than any other lens I have owned, even smaller than the lens mount. It just feels tiny in the hand and on the camera. Like the Lumix the barrel construction is plastic, but silver finished as opposed to the gunmetal colour of the Lumix.

New hedge near Corhampton, #4

The only control on either of the lenses is the manual focus ring; something I rarely use. For hand held close up work you really want to take the picture as soon as the focus is achieved, and this is best done with AF. Neither of the lenses have image stabilisation. When used at large apertures the shutter speed stays high in a wide range of uses so this is not often an issue, especially coupled with the clean images I get from the G3 at high ISOs.

New hedge near Corhampton, #5

As I mentioned in the first ever post on Joined Up Pictures, I’m really interested in depiction and the way we perceive things, how we turn three-dimensional space into a flat 2D image. When there is a lot to be seen, joiners have a special appeal, allowing an image to be built from multiple viewpoints and memories. But there are times when one looks with a focused gaze on a single object, usually something in the near-field, and these lenses do a good job in replicating that experience. When making near-field pictures control of the background is every bit as important as the main subject. Position, lighting and colour are all important aspects of making such an image, but the ability to soften the background through out-of-focus blur is probably one of the most effective ways to de-emphasise the surroundings.

Joiners might be considered to be a quite radical manipulation of images, but other than making joiners and performing tonal adjustments, I really don’t like modifying images in software. I prefer to make the image in-camera, using the lens and shutter for control of blur. The camera lens behaves like our eye, so focus and blurring only have believable three-dimensionality when done in camera. In fact, the Lumix 20mm has a focal length and field of view that almost exactly matches the human eye, perhaps making it the most natural of any lens available today.

New hedge near Corhampton, #6

I’m really pleased with both of these lenses and recommend them to anyone using m43 camera. The 20 is a very nice lens for photographing things, the 45 for people. The other day I came across a brochure from the late 80s for the Leica M6, a camera that I would have loved to own at the time. At the back of the brochure it suggested a few kits of bodies and lenses for a number of purposes. The small kit recommended for travel and street shooting was an M6 body with a 35mm & a 90mm lens. A quarter of a century later I still can’t afford a Leica, but have arrived at their recommendation of focal lengths.

End of Autumn

Autumn Colour 1, November 2012

Day break this morning was greeted by clear skies and a fair frost. Only a few trees now have their leaves, so I made an effort to get out and photograph the last remaining foliage before it is all gone. Usually the trees are bare by the end of November and then the land is bald and beached until early March.  

Autumn Colour 2, November 2012

I guess I should have tried to make a joiner of two but I have not been feeling too well recently so it was just a question of trying a few ideas out and concentrating on some near-field pictures. So sticking to familiar techniques and compositions, taken in relatively new locations (for me) around town.

Autumn Colour 3, November 2012

Quite a few of the pictures were taken on the Olympus 45/1.8lens, which is a real joy to use with my G3. I bought this lens to use wide open which is what I do most of the time, the only exceptions being when the light is very bright and I need to get the shutter below 1/4000, or when I know I’m going to need a bit more depth when used close up.

Autumn Colour 4, November 2012

Making Joiners in Lightroom

In my Mother’s Garden, Autumn 2011

I’ve recently had some unexpected time at home which has given me the opportunity to catch up on a few joiners that I had shot in the past but never found the time to finish off as completed images. Up until this summer I used Photoshop to build my joiners which has worked well enough, but does place rather heavy demands on the computer in terms of disk, RAM & processor performance. But increasingly, I’ve been experimenting with Lightroom, and now have a pretty reliable alternative way of building still movies. This newer method centres around the use of the Print module, which allows me to build and re-edit multi-cell images with very little in the way of computer resources. Lightroom is a parametric, metadata driven editing system unlike most others including Photoshop, which work on pixel by pixel editing. The upshot of this is that the final size of the completed joiner does not have to be considered until the very end of the project. Very high resolution, very large print size images can be prepared as easily as small web based output; they just take a little longer to be processed. 

Crucially, since the arrival of Lightroom 4 I can now save my print layouts and revisit them at any time, unlike in Lightroom 3. There are some weaknesses in the method; I would dearly love to be able to zoom into the display in the print module, and it would be great if I could use the Develop module functionality whilst still displaying the Print module view. But overall, using Lightroom is a much quicker and freer way of constructing joiners than using Photoshop.

Lightroom became my editor of choice about a year ago. Prior to that I was using Photoshop but rarely left Camera Raw when editing my pictures, so the transition to Lightroom was fairly easy and obvious.

The picture above is made up of photos taken a year ago on my LX3 compact. I wish I had found time to put it together sooner as I’m quite pleased with the result. The individual cells were taken with the lens set at a focal length equivalent to 60mm in 35mm film terms.  If I were to reshoot in the future I would probably use the G3/Olympus 45 combination which would give small cell sizes, but I think the picture holds together well with only four cells height. It reminds me that pictures can be made whatever the weather; blue skies and bright sunshine are not a pre-requisite for a a successful image.

In my Mother’s Garden, as Seen Through the Bathroom Window, Autumn 2011

Postcard from Brittany

En Vacances, en Bretagne, 2012

Farmers and those in the tourist trade will see it differently, but August is a quiet time of the year as many of us take our summer vacations. For me, the run up to the annual break is always quite manic; covering for people missing from work, making arrangements for the family and a host of things that need to be sorted before the holiday. This year was no exception added to which we had the unique opportunity of visiting and following the Olympics first hand, and I have had very little time for Joined Up Pictures and photography in general. So I’m rather disappointed that I’ve not been able, or had anything worthwhile, to post over the last three weeks. I’m hoping that I will be able to get back to posting a couple of times each week now that September is almost here.

For our break this year we visited Brittany in north west France, and had a very nice holiday,  thank you. I’m afraid that I have little to share photographically; other than these few observations – 

1. Never take anything bigger than a compact camera when doing any activity like walking or cycling. Carrying a camera bag and lenses is a pain, apart from when specifically taking pictures.
2. I see the world with shallow depth of field, especially when I am really looking.
3. I much prefer to photograph the world with shallow depth of field.
4. I just love that articulated LCD on the back of the G3. It's rare that I want to take a picture at eye level.
5. Why can’t we have bigger monitors on our camera – as standard or as a plug in extra? Most smartphones are much better in this respect than any cameras.
6. I really can’t focus that well any more on the LCD of my camera when wearing contact lenses – I must get my eyes checked.
7. Why can’t we have standardised batteries and chargers? We brought four cameras with us, with four different, incompatible chargers.
8. The greater the tourist attraction, the less I want to photograph it.
9. Everyone is a photographer these days.
10. There are a lot of people out there using very big, very expensive cameras. Bigger than I want, more expensive than I can afford, and that's OK.

Back to Joined Up Pictures

After the Harvest, Barton Farm, version 2.3

It has been some while since I last published any joiners. The problem, as ever, is one of time. To take the photos for a joiner can take a good hour or so, and the managing, editing and composing of the completed image can take an hour or two further. I have a couple of picture sets that have been waiting to be assembled since January. After a tiring day at work I rarely have inclination to spend another couple of hours in front of a computer monitor, and so this work remains unfinished.

I have taken this week off work and had some time to get out and back to what I enjoy doing. A few days ago I cycled over to nearby Barton Farm to take some specifically to make joiner. For some while now I have wanted to make a joiner about the harvest. The wet weather this summer has meant that it has been delayed by some three or four weeks compared to normal years. This gave me some hope that I could photograph a full field, but as I rode up the farm track a tractor and trailer came charging towards me and I know that I was too late. Never mind; it was a lovely warm evening and so time to change plan and see what I could make of the cropped field.

In these pictures I initially wanted to show a few remaining stalks of barley and some wild flowers in a simple still movie type grid, and shot accordingly. All of the constituent cells were taken on my Olympus 45/f1.8 micro fourth thirds lens, at pretty much full aperture. For me, joiners are all about the experience of looking, the sensation of seeing individual components that make up the picture. It seems perfectly natural for some of this to be in focus and other parts not when viewing and this is why I want to photograph with shallow depth of field to reproduce this effect. 

After the Harvest, Barton Farm, version 2.1

When it came to editing, the transition from remaining plants and cropped stalks looked too severe, so I think the first picture presented here probably works the best. The second and third pictures are included to give you some idea of how the editing process works. These joiners were edited and composited in Lightroom4, which is an efficient and simple way to build a regular joiner, even if it does have some deficiencies. More about that technique in a future post.

After the Harvest, Barton Farm, version 2.2

It felt good to be out making pictures again, and quickly turning them into finished edits. There has been too much thinking, reading and organising around photography recently, and not enough doing. It’s the pictures that matter.

Mad March Hares

A few more pictures from the weekend. I think the speed sign is a warning. March is an incredibly busy month for many reasons, and I’m looking forward to getting the next couple of days out of the way so that I can slow down to walking pace. At the moment I'm rushing around like a Mad March Hare.

Arrival of Spring

Spring arrived suddenly this past week. All at once, warm weather, bright sunshine and light evenings appeared all at the same time and it feels quite intoxicating. It’s a bit like the shock you can get travelling to southern France in the early months of the year, noticing the signs of growth and feeling the sun on the back of your neck.

With weather this nice I headed around to our local allotments as I had promised myself a few weeks ago. The warm weather meant that all the trees and bushes were just showing the first signs of leaf and blossom, but the only produce visible above ground were rather tired winter vegetables. But there is always plenty to see, and many of the fixtures, supports and nettings made for some interesting pictures. I love finding old rakes, spades, forks & other implements in these places. They have a lovely patina of rust, sun-bleaching and wear that speaks of years of hard use. Very wabi-sabi, to use the Japanese term.

One of the main reasons I recently moved over to using a mirrorless camera was because I wanted to use shallow depth of field at close distances. It became clear to me last year that my DSLR was not capable of focussing accurately when using my standard lens wide open at close distances, and that this was a problem inherent to all cameras of this type that use a dedicated focus sensor. The beauty of mirrorless cameras is that the focus and exposure data is taken directly from the image sensor, thus guaranteeing accurate focus.

When I bought the G3 I also purchased the Lumix 20mm/f1.7 lens specifically to take full aperture, close-up detail pictures. This weekend’s pictures were the first where I really started to explore the capabilities of the camera and the lens. The lens is very sharp, even wide open, and the camera allows accurate focus wherever I choose in the image – no more focus and recompose. But best of all, the wide aperture allows great control over the de-emphasis of the background. It’s a very powerful creative tool, and one that I will use quite a lot, I suspect.

Our Allotted Time

This weekend brought two together two things that we have not seen for some time: warmth and sunshine. This Sunday morning I found myself with a spare hour and a half free between dropping off and picking up my son at hockey training.

So with the prospect of having some quality time taking pictures I made the classic mistake. I got into the car to go to find somewhere to photograph. I don’t know how often I have done this. The trouble with getting in the car is that instead of taking time out to walk, look and photograph, I end up driving around, looking for something interesting and looking for somewhere to park. This never works. Most of my images are usually of details shot near-to. You can’t see these sort of things close up whilst driving. In fact, you can’t see much at all other than the road and other traffic when you’re driving.

I ended up stopping in the car park of a local beauty spot, a place famed for its big open skies and wide vistas of huge fields. I’ve been here many times before to take pictures, usually in evening light and often when the fields are ripe and abundant. At this time of year, there’s not much in the way of close details to be seen – most of the fields are currently under the plough and the hawthorn is not yet out. There’s not that much to hold one’s interest or make a compelling image. So if there are pictures to be had, they do not present themselves very often, or have been seen at other times. I spent three quarters of an hour on a short walk before abandoning the location and headed back to hang around at the sports ground and wait for my son.

One way I prepare to make my precious spare time more effective is to prepare a ‘projects’  file where I note down different projects that I want to photograph, with notes on different subjects, locations, techniques and equipment that I might need. I often use this, and it helps me to have a clear goal so I can quickly channel my thoughts and preparations when going out to take pictures. But it’s been a while since I last looked at this file, and had forgotten what a useful aide memoire it can be.

On the way back I remembered that I had promised myself to go and visit local allotments, and I made detour to a rather fine one just half a mile from the sports ground. Allotments are such wonderful places. I love the enterprise that goes on in these places, the way that people will tend to their plots to grow the most wonderful vegetables and fruit, construct wonderful frames and nets to protect and support their produce. I like the mix of human ingenuity and construction, working in conjunction with the natural cycle. They are places where people have invested a lot of their time, energy and love into their plots. Places that have a purpose, places that interesting to look at, places that are visibly rich.

I quickly found all sorts of things to photograph, an almost dizzying richness of subjects jam packed together. And before I knew, I had run out of time. But next time I have an hour or so to spare, there will be one place I know that I can fall back on, if I’m short on ideas or I can't find my projects file.

Sennen

Sennen Tufts - Orange

Despite a week away in the farthest point west in the country, I had little opportunity to have some time to think about my pictures. Until literally the last, fading light at the end of the holiday. With a setting sun, an encroaching bank of cloud, I found myself on Sennen beach in Cornwall with a few minutes to grab some pictures. 

Sennen Tufts - Cyan

What to do? Play with reflections to maximise the fading light, make the most of the small amount of colour in the sky. Look for interesting shapes. Shallow depth of field to show the shapes more clearly. Subject? What to say? Look, little tufts of rope, discarded on the beach but still vibrantly coloured, still interesting, alien shapes under a grey sky and grey sands. Lower still until my knuckles touch the damp sand, closer still, make the subject clear and large, closer until the lens cannot get focus any more. Fire the shutter as focus locks. Check the image. Fail; try again, fail better. Try again and again until I’m happy or have exhausted the opportunity.

Within a few minutes I had the small set of pictures shown here, and felt satisfied that I had some pictures I would want to look at again.

Sennen Tufts - Black

I must admit that I’m really enjoying using the new G3. It’s focussing is so fast and accurate, much better than the old Nikon. It is a real advance to be able to touch the screen and pick the key point of focus for the image, rather than the focus and recompose method that I have used since my first days of photography. I sometimes use focus tracking or the new pinpoint focussing, but most times I use the basic one point touch of the screen.

The other major reason for buying the G3 is the articulated monitor on the back of the camera. With this, I can put the camera into positions and still check the composition that would be difficult or impossible without. Such as low down, on wet cold sand at the end of a grey day in February.