I am currently in the process of creating a magazine article based on the Bissoe Valley, as part of my university course.  The purpose of the article is to focus on the nature within the area and instructing readers on how, where and when to take the images.  I am writing in this way as this is the form of text I am planning on using in my final third year project - instructional and informative book on the travelling and photographing the landscapes and nature of the UK.

I thought that I would make this post to show you the species that I have captured in only a couple of mornings and some information on the settings and techniques used to form each image.
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The first image to talk about is the sunrise landscape above.  The photograph was taken on a Nikon D810 with a 14-24mm F/2.8 but at 18mm.  I made a conscious effort on this morning to not shoot at the widest angle that I had available.  As I often find that on arrival at a location I will go straight to the widest angle and make the composition work, however there was some dead plant material in the foreground that wasn't adding anything to the image and so I zoomed in a little - only 4mm can make a big difference.  I chose to give the sky one third and the foreground had the remaining two.  I could have easily given the majority of the composition to the sky, as it was such a nice sunrise; however I knew that I was writing the article on the plant and animal species of Bissoe and so I need the heather and pond to be the main focus.  As I said in the caption of the image, the final photograph is 5 exposures - two pictures either side of the 'correct' exposure that increase/decrease by 1-stop each time.  The blending is all manually completed; working with the +1 exposure for the base layer (background), the +2 exposure for the middle ground and foreground materal and finally the -2 exposure for the sky.

This Beautiful Yellow Underwing Caterpillar image is a stack of two photographs as I couldn't get the depth of field that I wanted whilst keeping the background soft. Taken just after I shot the sunrise image, these caterpillars were littering the heather, this species eats common heather and I believe that as night came they froze and were yet to 'defrost' (for lack of a better word) in the morning sun.  Both of the images are the same settings (shown in the image caption) and I just changed the focus; the first image is focussed on the head and the second image is focused on the water droplets on the front of the body.  Photoshop has excellent stacking software in-built however I did this manually with a paintbrush and my graphics tablet.  Using the 'difference' blending mode to get the closest alignment - they needed lining up because, although I shot them only a second apart and with the same settings, the wind moved the subject a little.  I tried shooting this with a smaller aperture (i.e. F/32) but you then introduce the background as an element instead of the colourful gradient that it is in the image you can see here.

The image below is the last image that I'll be talking about in this segment of the blog.  This is the same butterfly caterpillar as the photograph above, yet was photographed on a different trip to Bissoe.  This day was sunny with some clouds and a little bit more windy.  You may notice that the settings are different and possibly reflect these conditions.  There are no 'complicated' aspects to this image, no stacking or blending (for a change)!  But as the day was a little windy I needed to get around this by using a couple of techniques.  Firstly I could see that the caterpillar was not straight and so I wouldn't get the whole subject in focus.  This led me to compose the image with the back end of the caterpillar falling out of focus and to rotate the camera in order to get the heather on a diagonal slope.  When rotated to normal the caterpillar was facing the bottom left of the frame and I didn't like it as much.  Next I needed to get the settings right, first off was the aperture - F/11 gave a nice fall off of focus on the tail end of the caterpillar and had quite a lot of the heather in focus.  To account for the smaller aperture I had to raise the ISO to 320 and therefore obtained a shutter speed of 1/160th.  Still not quick enough to freeze the movement that the wind was causing.  I borrowed some wire from another photographer in order to stabilise the heather by rooting it to the ground.

So there we go, even with the images that are not complicated in their post-processing there is a lot of thought that goes into the on-site production of any image.  

Does it bother you that the caterpillar was actually facing down and that you cant see any movement blur even though it was a slightly windy day?  Well then I guess I've got another idea to blog about soon!

​Thanks for any likes, shares and comments!  

After shooting a time-lapse of the sun rising over St. Ives a couple of days ago, I realised that I had an opportunity to experiment with a new blending mode.  This blending mode is called 'lighten' and as you may expect from the name, it takes the lightest parts of one image and overlays it onto the other.  I'll take you through how I made the image you can see above.

The two images that I chose to use were; one as the sun rose (to get the most colour in the sky) and one whilst the sun had not risen (meaning that all of the street and house lights were on).  Usually when editing two images to be blended together I concentrate one image on the sky and the other on the foreground.  However this time, the second image was only being used for the lights and so for that one I pushed the highlights to +100 and bought the shadows up a little.  The image taken at sunrise was edited as though it was just the one exposure that was going to be the final image.  The two starting images can be seen below:

The next stage is to layer the two files.  I did this by selecting the whole canvas (ctrl-A) of the darker image (bottom right) and copying then pasting it onto the other file.  You will now have a second layer on the first image, click on this layer in the layer panel and then change the blending mode to 'lighten' (shown below):

Photoshop will now take all the parts of 'layer 1' that are lighter than the background layer and place them on top.  When I did this with these files, other parts other than the lights shone through (as you can see below) and so I had to do some clearing up. 

Thanks for any likes, shares and comments!