The use of a long exposure means that were the water was meeting the there was this cloudy/streaky effect, which helped to emphasise the leading lines.  The problem I was having was that the sky was grey and this was reflecting on the stream.  To get around this I bought out my circular polariser for the first time in a while (although I have found myself using it more and more).  By applying about half of the full polarisation you can see the orange start to appear in the bottom of the stream, because a polariser cuts out the reflection (or quite a lot of it at least).  Here is a comparison between polarised (left) and normal (right):

Changing subjects to the wildlife subjects now, Bissoe gave me a great opportunity at the end of summer to improve my dragonfly and damselfly photography.  For the first time, I managed to capture a Dragonfly in flight!  It isn't an amazing image, but I'll still post it as it was quite an achievement for me (click on it to see it larger).

To start explaining the settings for this image above of a Golden Ringed Dragonfly, you need to understand what I wanted to capture.  I love environmental shots of wildlife, these are images that show the habitat or at least give some clarity as to the scenery that the subject was photographed in.  Some amazing examples of this can be found on Ben Hall's website (www.benhallphoto.com).  Therefore to show some of the background I would want to use a slightly smaller aperture than usual, after some experiment exposures, I settled at F/8.  Then, as I was hand-holding, I needed a suitable shutter speed.  I got 1/160th of a second by using ISO-320.  I didn't mind increasing the ISO as I was on a full frame camera (D800e) and so there wasn't going to be any compromise of image quality.  

The final image to talk about is of a subject type that I have probably spent the least amount of time with - flowers.  There are a couple more images from Bissoe that I could be talking about, however I chose to do this one as, firstly I really like the image, and secondly because the subject isn't going to run away and the light was pretty constant on this day, I had loads of time to use a few techniques which would make the picture as sharp as possible.  So firstly, I came to have these have settings as I needed a depth-of-field that would include most of the flowers (F/8), a low ISO to remove noise and a shutter speed that would take most of the slight movement from the breeze out.  I now had to ensure that there was as little movement as possible in camera.  To do this I used live view, because this means that the mirror is already up when you take the picture and so you don't have the shake from that movement.  I also used a remote shutter release to avoid my own movement shaking the camera.  In the end I had an image which was the sharpest I could get it and in good lighting, giving me the best chance of a strong image after post-production!

I hope that this blog has given you some useful tips that you can use in your own work, thanks for reading and if you missed the first part of this two part blog then follow this link (Part One) and have a read.

Thanks for any likes, shares and comments!

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.
​
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!  

So here's part 2 of my blogs about my trip to Botallack and Land's End.  This second part is about the time we spent at Land's End.  I thought I would start with my favourite landscape shot from the sunset. 

This was photographed on a Hasselblad H3D and is the result of only 1 image with no ND graduated filter.  To those who are reading this and often shoot landscapes and/or sunsets, you are probably surprised that I chose not to use any technique to balance the exposure between the sky and land.  Well, as you probably know digital Hasselblads have extremely good retention of detail in both shadows and highlights.  Well, I had already photographed a couple other scenes as the sun was setting and this was the last and as a test (knowing that I had a couple others to fall back on if this hadn't worked) I only shot the one exposure that was taken for the sky to be about half a stop under-exposed.  Therefore, on looking back at this image in post, it was very dark to start with. Working in Camera Raw, I brought the shadows up to close to 100 and the highlights down quite a lot to give the starts of an okay looking image.  I then used two ND grads to finish the edit.  The lower filter increased the exposure by 3 stops and the top filter decreased the exposure by about 1 stop.  Now all I had to deal with was colour boosting certain aspects.  I warmed the image and introduced a magenta hue to the whole image,  then using the HSL panel (which if you don't use already, you should certainly have a look at) to increase the yellow saturation, which affected both the sky and the gorse, so that was a balancing game too.  Finally I opened the file in Photoshop and created a duplicate layer and used a curves adjustment to brighten everything.  I inverted the mask and painted the brightness into the path that led through the gorse bushes toward the sunset, as I wanted to make this line quite prominent.

The two images above are of the same flower and fly, simply two different perspectives.  The first I took to exploit the strong sunset light and create a silhouette of the fly, without losing the context of the environment. The image on the right has not had a huge edit done, just contrast to increase the haloing effect of back-lighting and then I brightened the shadows, as I like to see some detail in the back of the flower.
The second image on the right was taken mostly for the fly.  I had to use a smaller aperture than I usually would at this level of light, as it meant sacrificing shutter speed, which I then had to compensate for by increasing the ISO.  Looking back at it I would have preferred to find an angle in which I could have got less of the flower in focus and more (or the same) amount of the fly in focus.

I have only included one bird photograph from the day, this male Stonechat sat atop this bush backlit by the warm sunset and the gorse also lit provided a colourful backdrop.  As the background was quite far off I chose an aperture which would get all of the bird in focus (F/5.6). The edit for this one was not so easy and I cannot fully remember the process, so I won't bore you with that this time.  Instead, I'll just mention how good a photographic spot Land's End.  Not only for the landscape that it is so popular for, but also the wildlife.  Starlings and Jackdaws are all around the grounds and there are also a lot of Rabbits hopping about which I didn't get any amazing photographs of this time.  The two best species for me however were the Stonechats (male pictured above) and Wheatears.  I have some images of the Wheaters, but I am not putting them in this post, just because I much prefer this backlit Stonechat.

Thanks to everyone who read this and feel free to share, like and comment!  It's all really appreciated.

The first stop on our trip was Botallack mines.  We headed here first for the landscapes and flower and then finished the trip photographing the sunset at Land's End.  You may recognise the mines as the setting for some of the new (remade) T.V. show 'Poldark'.  The problem with doing a couple of locations in a day, is that you have to be at one of them at mid-day, meaning that you have to photograph in the harsh sunlight - of course though it is still nice to visit the location and you can get some really nice shots.  I would like to return to Botallack and sunset to photograph this same landscape again.  In a couple of weeks it may be better though, as that is when the flowers will be in full bloom.  In the picture above, you can see Sea Campion (Silene uniflora) and Thrift (Armeria maritima).  If I was to take this again, I would go slightly lower down the slope and have more of the flowers in the frame than in this shot - although I do also like the waves around the rocks in the lower left corner.  

I think that this post would be too long to have as a single post and so I am splitting it into two parts, this is the end of part 1, but I will be posting images over on Facebook (click here - Alex Greene Natural History Photography) for the next few days and then I will return to write part 2...

Thanks for reading, I hope you like the pictures and I encourage you to get down to see these wonderful landscapes if you get the chance. 

 As it is nearly all over Cornwall, Gorse is prominent around the reservoir and I looked lovely as the sun was setting.  Therefore I decided to set up by the Gorse and wait in hope for something to land.  Luckily this Robin did!  After just over half an hour waiting, this robin sat very close to me and sang away.  After I had fired off a few shots that I knew were sharp and properly exposed, I started to film - which if you've ever tried it, is fairly difficult on a monopod!  I used a fence to lean the top of the monopod onto and then supported the bottom with my foot.  This worked fairly well and here's a short piece of footage of the Robin cleaning its beak and then eating a midge that was flying past.

I went on a walk yesterday evening through College Reservoir.  It has been a while since I last visited the lake and so I wanted to see if anything much had changed, since it is my habitat project and I now have two weeks to document the changes that we have seen since Spring started.  Although I wasn't expecting to get many photographs, I still lugged around any equipment that could come in handy!  The main camera that I had over my shoulder was my Nikon D7100 and thanks to 'Rosie Dutton Photography' (follow the link to find her Facebook page),  a 600mm F/4 - this was mounted on my Manfrotto 680B monopod.  Once we reached the end of the path around the lake, the other carried on walking over to Argal Reservoir but I decided to stay back and try to get some images of the wildlife I had just spotted.  There was actually quite a lot around; rabbits were emerging into the fields, I saw my first Swallows of the year soaring over the fields surrounding the lake, a couple of Buzzards and a whole collection of small song birds - including the Robin above, but I will come to that in a minute.

Once I had got this shot, the sun went behind some trees and so I ran over to Argal (which has less tree cover) to get any photographs in the last of the evening light.  There is a bridge across the dam at Argal and at the end of the day Pied Wagtail sit on the walls of this dam.  I walked past them and then turned back to get them in the best light.  I used an aperture of F/4 as this one was running around, so I needed a quick shutter speed to freeze the motion.  Some movement has been maintained in the legs and so overall I am really happy with how this turned out.

Just shows that we need to get out and explore more!  And always have a camera by your side, it helps if you have a 600mm attached too :P

Any likes, shares and comments are much appreciated!

Me and 'Stephanie Foote Photography' took a fairly quick stop at Truro Cathedral on the way to Tehidy Country Park yesterday to photograph the fantastic architecture. I had this shot planned for when we arrived, it is a stitch of around 7 images.  The problem with this cathedral is that it wasn't built straight, this means that you cant get a symmetrical shot (like the one to the right) from the very back of the cathedral.  In a way this worked quite well for me as the vertical panorama allowed me to get the best parts of the of the building into the frame, without any unwanted details.  The seating in the cathedral was not what I was expecting at all.  Roughly the first 10 rows of seating were small plastic seats, like the type we all used to sit on at primary school, so I decided to cut these out of the frame.

We actually only got around half an hour to photograph because of an unexpected ordeal to get a permit.  It turns out that you need a permit if you are going to use a tripod inside the Cathedral, so bear that in mind if you are planning on doing anything like this.  It cost a fiver to get the permit and by the time we were done with that, we didn't have as long of we wanted to photograph.  Another thing to take into account if you go here is that you cannot take any images if there is a service, you can't use flash and you cant go to any parts where there is currently a private service taking place.  To the bottom right of the image, there was a small chapel which had a christening happening and so we couldn't go over to that area of the building.

Here's another image from the morning.  Actually, this is the first image that I took.  The hardest part of this was finding the very centre on the floor and as you can see from the slight difference between the upper triangles on the very left and right and the lower ones.  However I don't think anybody would actually notice this, as most people aren't as picky as me!  So what is probably the first thing we do when we walk into a building like this... look up!  And I found myself doing exactly that, therefore I decided to take this photograph. With some slight cropping and perspective warping I have got it as close to symmetrical as I think I possibly could. 

Hope you like the images and feel free to share the post!

This days trip was to St. Michaels Mount in Marazion Cornwall.  
The fauna of the area consists – but is not limited to – Curlew (Numenius arquata), Rock Pipits (Anthus petrosus), Pied Wagtails (Motacilla alba yarrellii), Oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus), Little Egrets (Egretta garzetta), Turnstones (Arenaria interpres) and Ringed Plovers (Charadrius hiaticula).

Oystercatchers are interesting birds, they are generally associated with the coastline, however they also thrive in some inland areas.  They have beaks which will give you a good idea of what their diet is.  If they are breaking shells or if they prise apart muscle shells then they will have a blunter end to their beak as can been in the image above and on the next page.  Whereas, if they have a diet of mostly soft foods such as worms then they will have a pointy beak. I have included two Oystercatcher pictures here as they both have their merits. 

The weather on the day was intermittently cloudy and so I was waiting for the sun to shine through the clouds before taking pictures in order to have a light on the eye.  This shot may have actually been stronger if I had taken it when the cloud was over and therefore there would have been less contrast between the white and blacks and less dynamic range between the shadows on the underneath of the head.  The image of the Oystercatcher looking directly into the sun has two thirds of empty space and a quite simple two tone background.  This is technically very strong and does make a nice image, but again the strong sun means that there is a deep shadow behind the bird and I am not too keen on it.  Also there is a shadow in front of the eye which I find distracting, however other people have not found the same thing.

I spent roughly an hour before sunset photographing the small birds that feed in the seaweed build up at the edge of the water.  There were probably 10 Rock Pipits in the area whilst I was photographing, but I worked on getting close to one and letting it get confortable with me before trying to take its shot.  This meant that I could get much closer. 

I wanted to get the majority of the bird in focus and not just the area immediately around the eye and so I chose to sacrifice a stop of light, drop to F/5.6 and then take the ISO up.  The D300s does handle ISO fairly well and with some slight noise removal after the image has come out fine.  By this time in the day the sun was low and there was a thin cloud covering which blocked some of the light, however there was still enough sunlight to get a nice halo around the bird.  That was the reason I chose to shoot from this side of the bird, usually I would shoot from the other side and have nice evenly lit shot, yet seaweed looks really nice when backlit due to it being translucent.


I hope you like the images!