Edward Bryan Photography

After being asked to look after my Niece and Nephew for the night on Friday we were praying for good weather on the Saturday! (please excuse the repeated picture, the small one above displays properly on the RSS feed)

Luckily it didn't disappoint and Chichester pulled out the sun for us for our day out with the kids on Saturday. It was a great opportunity to try taking a few outdoor portraits as well so I was really pleased that we could head of into the West Sussex countryside and visit the Weald and Downland open air Museum.

It's a great place if you haven't visited before, they have a selection of houses and buildings from early medieval times to the mid-nineteenth century and all have been restored faithfully and built into a hamlet/farm you can have a walk around. What's really fantastic is that there are very few roped of areas, you feel able to stroll anywhere and ask any of the volunteers as many stupid questions as you can think of, which is what we did.

This is their website;

http://www.wealddown.co.uk/

With the duck pond, old buildings, horses and fantastic April sunshine, we weren't short on photo opportunities for the day and I could see what the Sony Alpha 200 with the Sigma 24-70 EX DG was capable of.

For an entry level camera, I think the Sony is an excellent camera. The focus seems to be a little off at times, you can see in the picture above that it's not quite sharp on the girl running and I have always have had a bit of a fight with a little front/back focusing. The Sigma 24-70 EX DG was a gigantic improvement over the kit lens in terms of sharpness but I'm hoping an upgrade to the Alpha 700 will help. The next tricky step is convincing my wife that it's essential!

It's almost a compulsion amongst people with cameras, but if an animal stands still long enough, it has a photo taken. I watched it happen to a peacock at a friend's wedding and the poor thing ended up mobbed by men armed with Nikons. Anyway, I like the duck above, the colours are good and it's on it's own having a good pose.

This photo I much prefer, they had chased the poor things around for a bit trying to get them to eat some seeds and I'm not sure this one was hungry at all.

Eventually we found some that were hungry and didn't mind being fussed about with a bit which allowed the children to get a bit closer and me to get a couple of feeding-action shots! A wider aperture might have been a bit nicer to look at but it's sometimes safer to stop down a little, this one was taken at f4.5 and 1/1000.

This chicken was giving me a brilliant death-stare and I felt compelled to take a picture. It also shows why I use RAW, I left the camera on the wrong setting after coming out from inside and it looked very over-exposed. I don't think a jpg would be have usable but a quick tweak in lightroom rescued it. I'm also well aware of what sort of bird it is, so jokes on a postcards please.

Seeing the horse was a very exciting moment, his name was Neville and he was the dustbin lorry for the morning. The children kept asking if they could have a ride either on the horse, or in the trailer. We weren't sure that bouncing around next to bin-bags would have been an experience to remember and I don't think I could have reached to get one on his back. He was a HUGE horse!

I really like the little details they put out in the houses, a wider aperture would have separated the pot from the background better but I still like the photo, it doesn't really look like a museum here.