Misty Morning Bluebells…..or are they?

Bluebells flowering in English woods is a widely anticipated spectacle that many photographers look forward to.  For the last couple of years we’ve pitched up and taken our pictures and whilst some of them are pleasant images, it’s difficult to do anything outstanding or more creative than before.

So we hatched a plan!

Last seasons Photoshop fake!

As with most of our plans, it hatched at the pub, and went along the thought process of “how could we do it different”.  All sorts of ideas surfaced, but one developed from the recognition that pictures in woods where there is a mist in the air with sun behind the trees creates light shafts and dappled light on the ground.  Wouldn’t it be good if the ground were strewn with Bluebells! I’d faked one in Photoshop last year but wasn’t happy with it. 

Leaving it to our fickle weather was unlikely to deliver the right conditions when we had the time to go and take pictures.  Then someone said “I know a bloke with a smoke machine for his disco”……

Of course to run the smoke machine meant we also needed a generator, luckily we had access to one and off we went.

Sadly the Flowers are not fully out yet but we may try again when they are more fulsome.

You can see our setup in the pics below.  I’m not overly happy with my efforts 1 and 2 we could have done with the wind blowing the other way, so we’ll take an electric fan next time!

Generator in the distance,
waiting for smoke machine to charge up.

Instant mist!

Taking our pics as "mist" clears.

As always comments hints and tips welcome.

Peter.

Live View Macro tip

One of the great things for me about photography is the way you can experiment and get unexpected results.  I've recently been doing a bit more macro stuff see The Wasp here and have been playing around with extension tubes and extenders.

A boon to Macro shooting on my Canon 7D, is LiveView as it allows you to move the point of focus to exactly where you want it, and with some of the shallow DOF's Macro work has, this is essential and easier done in LiveView than peering through the viewfinder.

This is fine if you are working with continuous light (maybe LEDs), but using external Flash, the Liveview screen is black, even with the modelling lights on.  (see below).

However, I found accidentally that if you pop up the on camera flash whilst in LiveView, for some reason (not sure why, happy to hear from someone more knowledgeable why this works) the camera recalibrates and the subject is clearly visible.



















This means that you have access to the LiveView ability to zoom in tight and get focussed where you want to be, lock everything down, lower the flash, carefully put the external flash trigger into the hotshoe and start snapping.

Oh and if you'd like to see what I was snapping its Here.

Cheers, Peter.


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Last night was competition night at the Camera Club (SNDCC), I entered one image in the projected image section and amazingly it scored 10/10.

I didn't find out till my pals joined me down the pub as I don't go to the club on competition nights, too stressful having your picture ripped apart by the judge, I wanna get up and hit em sometimes.  Its nice to get a good score though.

What is especially amusing about this one though is that this is actually two pictures, the poppy's were shot the other side of Peterborough, and the sunset was shot 20 miles away at Grafham Water! but they work well together.