To kick-start this site, we’re taking a look back to the beginning of this year, to give a baseline of my work and something of a comparison for future growth.
I had a very quick start to my photography year, finding myself at the Imperial War Museum’s Duxford site on the 2nd of January. It was an impromptu visit, with nothing particular planned, but I got a fair few shots out of it nonetheless. They’re mainly centred on a historic Piper Cub, G-BKHG ‘479766’, whose pilot I chatted to briefly as he was pulling the light aircraft out of the hangar. A veteran of World War Two, it felt very much at home in front of Duxford’s hangars, and created some nice scenes.
Whilst the pilot performed his pre-flight checks, I played about with my manual settings to achieve the sought-after prop disk, turning two blades into a glossy, aesthetically-pleasing circle, but unfortunately my efforts weren’t entirely successful.
Left: The view that made me think of the prop-disk. 1/320s, f/5.8, ISO 160.
Below left: A first attempt, with limited success; the disk is there, but now we’re over-exposed. 1/60s, f/22, ISO 1250; unedited.
Below right: Correction- the wrong way. 1/15s, f/22, ISO 1250; unedited.
A last handful of atmospheric shots came as the Cub made its departure, particularly as it flew off into an apparent sunset. However, I must have not reset my settings, as the metadata tells me it was in fact only quarter to two.
My next outing was taken long after sunset: a quick jaunt to the edge of Norwich, where I stood for an hour in the freezing midnight air teaching myself about long exposures. The footbridge over Grapes Hill was my classroom, where I aimed to emulate the typical lines of red and white using the B road below. The first attempts gave me a glimpse of what to do, but it wasn’t until I fiddled further with the settings that the real aim began to emerge.
Below left: my first image of the evening. 1s, f/5, ISO 1250; unedited. Below right: the first moment where I felt like I knew what I was doing. 3s, f/16, ISO 1250. The lesson was in the f stop and shutter speed: a smaller aperture to avoid overexposure during the longer shutter speed necessary to get the characteristic light trails.
After some tripod gymnastics, made easy by my Benro travel tripod, I managed to get my lens lower to the floor of the bridge and slightly through the bars, avoiding the accidental frame seen at the bottom of the first two images. This also meant that I had to operate my camera upside-down, but that didn’t take long to get used to.
Half of the job, I discovered, was deciding how much traffic was enough to get a good set of lines, and as the roads were fairly quiet at half-past midnight, such a situation wasn’t altogether as abundant as I had imagined it would be. However, I did eventually remember that my Fujifilm X-T30 has a built-in multiple exposure function, found on the drive dial, which essentially layers two images on top of each other as they are taken. This allowed me to wait for sufficient traffic on one side of the road, take that picture, then wait until traffic filled the other side, and take another picture. Such a technique created images such as those below, much closer to the initial vision I had in mind.
An interesting observation was that changes in settings also changed the colour temperature of the images, something I hadn’t consciously noticed before. The difference is quite obvious in the two images below, the first being on automatic settings (1/13s, f/2.8, ISO 3200, unedited) and fairly warm-toned, the second being on the manual settings I had used on some previous successful long exposures (10s, f/22, ISO 1250; unedited), and notably cooler, particularly when looking at the road surface.
My final ‘level up’ was to wait for a bus to come along, as their trails added another layer of height and interest on top of the cars and vans. Of course, buses at that time of night are even more scarce than usual, but I did manage to catch the last (first?) few of the day, and even two in one picture, a minor miracle.
My final outing of January was a train journey through Head Fen, which had turned into a winter wonderland after a heavy frost. Overall, it was less successful than I had hoped, but there was definite improvement in both my skill and my understanding.
The aim was to manipulate aperture and shutter speed to get a well-exposed but entirely crisp photo through the dirty window of my moving train, as I couldn’t let the frost-covered trees and frozen fields go uncaptured.
This was my baseline, on auto settings, with the majority of the image being in focus, but the bushes closest to me showing their motion blur. 1/200s, f/5, ISO 160.
What’s notably, and thankfully, missing from this image is the smudges and marks on the glass, which become very apparent in the next two progress images.
Finally, I had some success with the balance between the settings, and began to get decent images of the scenery. The magic settings were f stop in the region of 3.6-4, shutter speed at 1/4000, and ISO at 1250. Enough light to get all the detail and colours of the views, but a quick enough shutter speed to avoid the blur and dirt marks. The contrails also look nicer, an added bonus.
To round out the month, I’ll leave you with a handful of sundry images which didn’t come from larger projects, but which I am pleased with nonetheless.
Below: Another experiment in long exposures, this time capturing a late-night walk. Right: Morning at the train station, where I was struck by the colours and contrast. Bottom left: A pair of ruffled pigeons trying to sun themselves. Bottom right: An escaped dog hanging out in my garden.
