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travel bits pieces dave s other site dave s 500px my flickr about post navigation older posts lynmouth weekend 1 posted on march 28 2016 by bananabatman 2 this is another image from our weekend with the family in lynmouth north devon we arrived first on a rather grey late february afternoon the light was going but we just had time for a very quick walk down from our rented cottage into lynmouth this first image from a lynmouth series is looking up the river lyn from the road bridge since the light was going and the colour image was a bit flat i thought it would be good to try another b w image it was another chance to play with the newly acquired nik collection this time i picked a b w preset from the hdr efex pro 2 tool and applied it to a single exposure apart from the halo between the sky and the treeline i was quite pleased with the result after i had made some fine adjustments i should have taken time to remove the halo but time is in short supply at the moment our cottage was a couple of zig zags up the road on the left hand side of the picture we needed to do 3 point turns to get around the corners i hope to continue posting images from lynmouth but maybe not as a continuous series posted in bits pieces holidays and travel landscape musings photography tagged landscape lynmouth photography river lyn 2 replies groyne at blue anchor bay posted on march 26 2016 by bananabatman 6 about a month ago we were lucky enough to spend a weekend with our eldest son and family at a cottage in lynmouth north devon on the way there we took a scenic route along the coast of north somerset and i snapped this groyne at blue anchor bay initial thoughts on the image were not promising but today i was looking for something to try out silver efex pro 2 now that google have kindly made it a free download i stumbled on this one and found the program pretty user friendly i chose one of the presets which gave this grainy look boosted the contrast a little more and arrived at this i think it is much more pleasing to my eye that the original colour image groyne at blue anchor bay groyne at blue anchor bay maybe it is an overly simple shot being no more than a row of old wooden posts leading off to the water and eventually to the coast of wales in the distance there are a few gulls on the shoreline and the grainy processing has done them no favours but i still quite like the final result there would have been many alternative ways to present this shot that would have proved more attractive to some eyes perhaps on a different day to my eyes but this is today s effort posted in bits pieces holidays and travel landscape musings photography tagged blue anchor england groyne landscape photography sea sky somerset travel 6 replies grey heron posted on march 17 2016 by bananabatman 4 one from a stroll at shapwick heath today the weather was beautiful grey heron ardea cinerea also saw a beautiful kingfisher but it was much faster than this heron so missed it i do like big birds posted in bits pieces musings photography tagged bird bird in flight grey heron heron nature photography shapwick heath 4 replies river thames walk a new start to my photo musings posted on march 4 2016 by bananabatman 13 i ve been away for a very long time many of my images have been held on flickr but i am reviewing whether i can continue to afford my subscription i have therefore been investigating alternatives i ve republished this post using one of those alternatives being away from wordpress for so long hasn t helped and nor has being poorly for a bit it s been a long time since my last post a very long time at nearly a full year now much more it seems to have been difficult to find the time to be fair we have been quite busy with other priorities and this state will continue for a while i have however always enjoyed blogging and intend to carry on i can only hope that some of my blogging friends are still out there and spot my attempt at a restart i m not going to spend too long on this post otherwise i may not get going again this is just a few of the shots that i took along the south bank of the thames when dee and i visited our youngest son back in january i won t on this occasion write about the images i m just trying to remember how to produce a blog post and wordpress have changed things a bit under tower bridge standing multi tasking walking the dog sharp building the way to st paul s across the river across the river b w home sweet home pilgrim father london skyline bridging the thames lines grids this was just for practice i will blog again soon posted in holidays and travel landscape musings photography tagged london river thames 13 replies the solar eclipse 2015 posted on march 21 2015 by bananabatman reply i didn t really have any intentions to photograph the recent solar eclipse and as it turned out this was just as well our home town was fairly densely covered with cloud and mist throughout the period when the eclipse should have been visible there were however a few opportunities to glimpse this event through very brief gaps in the cloud and mist and here are a couple of shots just to prove it i d already decided that i needed a 10 stop nd on the camera for safety and i didn t really want to use my e m1 just in case the sun was bright and might damage the sensor for this reason my first shot was with only a 12 60 mm lens which nd filter fitted much too heavy a crop was required but it was only a minute or two before the maximum eclipse here so i thought it worth keeping after that the fog settled in until about 10 15 minutes before the eclipse was completely over there was then a very brief opportunity by which time i had fitted a longer lens and held the nd filter in front of it not good photos but at least they remind me that i did see the solar eclipse posted in bits pieces musings photography tagged cloud eclipse moon sky solar eclipse somerset sun leave a reply attempts at street photography 1 posted on march 3 2015 by bananabatman 4 frankly street photography terrifies me that s why i haven t posted much which could be considered of this genre last night was the judging of the 4th of this seasons camera club competitions and the topic for prints was street photography oh happiness or perhaps more accurately oh hell i didn t have much expectation of success particularly because i hadn t been able to take any street photos especially for the competition this had left me rummaging around in my archives for some images to use and there wasn t much there i had some which i really classed as travel so i dismissed them only to find that an image which i would have put in that category earned a place in the results live and learn it was a great image anyway in the end i entered a couple of images which i had taken at the bemondsey street festival a while back one of which has been seen on this blog i wasn t hopeful the one which i had published in a previous post in colour i printed in black and white for this competition thinking that it might give more of a street feel the judge said that he wished that i had printed it in colour live and learn to be fair the image was a little lacking in street ambience and i did prefer it in colour myself the second image that i entered was of a girl singer performing in the street i d always liked the image but it did have a few too many distractions in it i have a very limited photoshop ability and was unable to get rid of the distractions properly in the time that i gave myself always last minute when producing for a competition in the end i cropped it heavily not appropriate for street photography and entered it anyway there were some particularly bright distractions in the background that i hadn t noticed until i had printed it they fell just in front of the singer s face and did spoil the picture having similar tones to her face the image would never have made it in this competition because of the tight crop and failed as i suspected that it would it spite of what i have just said the judge for this competition was excellent and made some very valid points about all of the images entered i certainly learned from the experience after all these words here is just one image for this post it is a further rework of the street singer and i still quite like it i have now managed to tone down the distractions a bit girl singer at the bermondsey street festival posted in bits pieces musings photography photography talk tagged bermondsey festival emotion performer singer street 4 replies the age of steam posted on february 20 2015 by bananabatman 4 i haven t posted anything for a month and i have also struggled to find time to visit the blogs that i follow so the first thing that i must do is apologise to all my blogging friends to be honest i suspect that the next few months will also find me with little time so any posts will be even more sporadic than usual keeping up with the reader may also be a challenge i did however get the chance to go out with the camera for a few hours this week and largely because i thought the weather would be better in that direction we popped down to corfe castle for a breath of fresh air as it happened the weather may have been better at home but at least the weather stayed dry but cold we hadn t been around the castle for many years so we took a quick look but being half term it was pretty crowded with kids swarming all over it so not much in the way of photos it was cold up in the castle so next stop was a warming cuppa after which we did a lap of the village ending up at the railway station we had never visited this before and were pleasantly surprised to find that there was one train running on the swanage railway because it was half term we had a wander around chatting to the station staff and waited for the 15 20 from swanage to come through here are a few photos best viewed by clicking on the first one and displaying a slide show thanks for taking a look i hope you will come back again when i post some more of my photos posted in bits pieces musings photography tagged corfe castle dorset photography steam railway swanage railway 4 replies pembrokeshire 4 posted on january 23 2015 by bananabatman 3 this was taken from the harbour wall at saundersfoot i m not sure what he was doing but i think that he was searching for molluscs of some type posted in bits pieces holidays and travel musings tagged beach monochrome pembrokeshire photography sand saundersfoot wales 3 replies sculpture by the lakes posted on january 21 2015 by bananabatman 4 sculpture by the lakes is a landscaped park in dorset owned by simon gudgeon who is a well known british contemporary sculptor this park provides a showcase for his work last saturday i was able to spend the afternoon there with dee and our friends susanne and ed i did of course try to take a few photographs the weather was cold and dry but i still found it quite difficult to produce the quality of photograph that i wanted i m going to put it down to the cold freezing my poor old brain still it was a useful opportunity to hopefully learn from my mistakes i haven t been able to find time to post or visit blogs recently i ve got a little time available today so i thought that i would post a few photos from that afternoon even though i wish they were better any artistic value in these images should of course be attributed to simon gudgeon and his wife monique who is responsible for the gardens in which the sculptures are set here is a gallery best viewed as a slide show by clicking on the first image and then using the carousel i hope that these images may inspire you to visit sculpture by the lakes a visit to the sculpture by the lakes site will provide details of this excellent sculpture park as well as some images which are much better than mine i m looking forward to revisiting the park soon to try to improve on these shots posted in bits pieces musings tagged dorset england landscape photography rural sculpture sculpture by the lakes sculpture park simon gudgeon 4 replies monochrome moments 5 more sand and a stick posted on december 13 2014 by bananabatman 8 this one continues from monochrome moments 4 it also having been taken in the dunes of fuerteventura this was a snapshot taken because of the potential appeal of the intersecting diagonals of the sand ripples and stick monochrome conversion was again made with topaz and i also chose to retain a warm look to the image because it seemed in keeping with the scene i did consider a more stark b w conversion but didn t like any of my results as much this is another of those rather minimalist images which when you look back you wonder whether it was really worth taking having played with it a bit i think it probably was just update i wasn t really happy with this image so i took some advice from adrian lewis i ve increased the contrast a bit quite a bit and the result is below i could probably go still further but think this may be enough i didn t do this before because i am always a little nervous of overprocessing any better posted in bits pieces holidays and travel images musings tagged fuerteventura monochrome photography sand travel 8 replies post navigation older posts archive archive select month march 2016 4 march 2015 2 february 2015 1 january 2015 2 december 2014 3 november 2014 14 october 2014 10 september 2014 2 july 2014 2 may 2014 1 april 2014 4 march 2014 7 february 2014 6 january 2014 10 december 2013 3 november 2013 2 october 2013 7 september 2013 1 august 2013 6 july 2013 10 june 2013 5 may 2013 5 april 2013 5 february 2013 3 january 2013 2 december 2012 2 november 2012 8 october 2012 8 september 2012 4 august 2012 4 july 2012 11 june 2012 9 march 2012 1 february 2012 7 january 2012 13 december 2011 15 november 2011 15 october 2011 14 september 2011 6 august 2011 10 july 2011 4 top posts weymouth speed week 2 email subscription enter your email address to subscribe to this blog 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