On a freezing day in October we all went for a play in Hillsborough Park in Sheffield, the weather was perfect for a good stomp through the leaves and once the wee man had chosen a few good leaves to march about with we took the chance to get a few Autumnal pictures.

 The Sony A77 proved itself again and we even managed to get a half decent video of him walking about in the leaves. I've invested in a new lens excitingly; the Tamron 17-50 f2.8 which is turning out to be brilliant, and here it is on Amazon...
http://www.amazon.com/Tamron-17-50mm-Vibration-Compensation-Digital/dp/B002LVUIXA
It's sharp right from the get-go and the 17mm wide end is more than enough for a good landscape when it's called for, I find 50mm isn't quite enough length at times but the quality more than makes up for it.

 I was keen to capture the colours of Autumn in the leaves and the dry weather helped a great deal.  Wet or mouldy leaves would have been a bit sad looking and a lot less fun for him.  We could have put him in brighter colours to contrast against the leaves; and next time, or if I shoot this with other children then that would be a proper consideration.

 On the whole, I'm really happy with these.  He was beginning to get a little tired (might be better to do this on the way to the swings next time!) and didn't want to walk about very much but he pulled out some lovely smiles for us.

On a sunny day in August we wandered over to the Arundel Wetland Centre for a day out with some friends and the wee one.  It's a great place with a huge variety of bird life and if you're in to twitching there are some pretty rare species to be found there. 

http://www.wwt.org.uk/visit/arundel/

 This was an accidental shot of a bird (small, enjoyed eating nuts) at a bird feeder.  The light was pretty poor under the trees and as I had the camera on aperture priority it chose a really slow shutter speed.  I normally have the camera on manual but the clouds were moving fast and the light was changing a lot so I popped it on aperture for convenience. The bird feeder's blurred a little but the movement of the bird has really been picked up!

 There were a lot of swans there and clearly used to being fed, we made sure the little one was out of reach while they wandered over.

 The Minolta beercan (70-210) wasn't quite long enough to capture anything too far away so I distracted myself by trying some insect shots.  The autofocus struggled a little here but the depth of field is really tight and we're venturing into macro territory so I'm not surprised.  The Sony A77 has a funky 'focus peaking' function for manual focus though which is brilliant.

 As long as you're fairly quick and the bee/wasp/insect of sorts is content to hang around it can give better results when you use the manual focus than rely on the auto focus.  The focus peaking highlights in red the areas of the image in focus so you can see the focus plane move around the image.  Really handy for these shots.

 I think the last one here is my favourite insect shot.  If you view it large you can see the pollen that's already been picked up.  Click on the picture to view a slideshow.

It's always pretty cute when they follow their mother around, there were a few ducklings and similar (no idea of the species, sorry) and I managed to get close enough to photograph a few.

 I liked this little fellow bobbing around on his own, he looked like he had a plan of action.

It's worth a visit if you're near Arundel, we even saw a watervole having a nibble but they're really shy and he vanished before I could get anything like a decent picture.

Lordington Lavender

During a twenty minute lull in the summer's rain we piled into the car, grabbed a few props and joined friends already at Lordington Lavender...

http://www.lordingtonlavender.co.uk/

Due to the fairly miserable weather we've had this summer the lavender wasn't as thoroughly in bloom as it has been in previous years but we were very keen to take a few nice pictures of the wee one.

We had a vintage suitcase, a home-made quilt and a few balloons from a party as props; so it would be a little bit staged but a great opportunity to try out some family portrait ideas.

We had time to take a few for our friends as well, the balloon worked very well as a fun prop to play around with and both of the boys really enjoyed themselves.

It was lots of fun and although they both insisted on eating a fair bit of lavender I took a good few photos that I'm happy with.

 After a short while it really turned into an 'eat the lavender' competition and although no one is looking at me I like the two pictures above.  It's relaxed and almost looks like a sunny day!

 I contemplated a speedy lens-swap as the girls went for a walk but shot this with the sigma 24-70 and cropped in a bit.  The Sony Alpha 77 has such a loopy resolution (24mp) it allows me to crop in a fair bit before loosing resolution.

 It was all very relaxed and we managed to get a fair few pictures shot before the clouds began to threaten again.

 The suitcase worked very well, he could almost be about to catch the train and head of on his holidays here :)

 When they weren't industriously munching on lavender flowers (he's also pretty fond of clover) they both pulled out the smiles and generally made it all lovely and easy. 

 There was a little hedgerow of wild flowers next to the field so for variety we took a few of our props (and a child) of for a few pictures.

It was a brilliant afternoon and well worth re-visiting next year.  There are already a few families booking similar shoots so drop me a line and we'll book in a day!  www.edwardbryan.co.uk

After getting a bike fixed I decided to take the camera on a short pedal along Salterns Way..

http://www.conservancy.co.uk/page/cycling/346/

... which is a pleasant and flatish route from Chichester to the Witterings.  It's a decent length at about 18km and ends up on West Wittering beach so perfect for a summer pedal and picnic. (It's where I proposed a few years back :).  It's in no way a demanding ride (I took a road bike on it once) but very pleasant.

Blogger seems to have changed how images are displayed, so if you're keen to see the pictures larger than they are here just click on one and you'll get a nice slide-show to click through.

I didn't get as far as West Wittering on this pedal, it was beginning to get a bit dark by the time I got to Itchenor so that was as far as I went.  

The crows obviously knew what to do when someone pointed a black tubular thing in their direction, I wanted a shot closer to them but they all flew away almost the second I stopped.

 The house boats by the sailing club are always lovely, and I realised that the last time I was here it was hours prior to Milo being born and we were on a medically-advised stroll to ease the contractions.  This trip was a little less tense and I was glad I didn't bump into the petrified biker who offered to help last time.

 It was pretty windy so there were a few people out sailing the clouds scudded past quickly which led to rapidly changing light and what I thought were good conditions to use the Sony A77 with the Tamron 70-300.  I took a Sigma 10-20 with me as well but found that I didn't really use it on this trip.

 I quite like the yellow tint that the camera has given these pictures, I was shooting straight into the sun and I think it upset the auto-white balance.  This is never a problem anyway as I shoot in RAW but when I fixed them to have a more 'natural' colour I found that I preferred the originals.

 I hoped for a dramatic sunset but unfortunately this is as good as it got, clouds obscured the sun shortly after this shot and it clearly wasn't going to happen.  On the upside, I made it back from Itchenor in half an hour. That's nine miles on a mountain bike at an average speed of 18 mph, not shabby!

www.edwardbryan.co.uk

A short few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be asked to photograph for Louise and Mark at their wedding.  The weather was FOUL all through the week before and really hideous the week after, but they had a near-flawless day of gorgeous sunshine, the lucky things.

The details had been picked out incredibly well and really added something special to the wedding.  This gave me a lot to photograph and helped to create a 'story' of the day, I always like it when the bride and groom have selected and thought about details, it adds a lot more to the look and feel of the day than you might expect!

The flowers above were hand-picked and arranged by the bride and added a lovely and fantastically rustic feel to the day.  The bouquets for the bride however were stunning and very much created by a talented florist, they rightly drew a lot of compliments on the day (as well as a few jealous glances!).

http://www.traditionalflower.co.uk/

I was keen to get a photo of the bridesmaid's dress on the hanger, it turned out less technical to do this than try to get a photo of the bride's dress on the hanger and I was really happy with how this photo came out.

I think it's important to photograph the bride getting ready, it's all part of building the 'story' of the day and it's very popular to have a photo book printed to remember your day and these images will form a big part of it.

Arguably one of the best bits of a wedding (for the groom perhaps) is the car!  I really like this image just before the bride left for the church, after all the rushing around in the morning you need to unwind a little before heading of.

Approaching the church and I'm loving the bridesmaids with their last-minute flower rearranging, it was a very pretty (and tiny!) church.

After the ceremony we relaxed a bit and I love this shot of the newly weds with their wee one.  It's often the candid and informal shots that capture how a wedding felt and this one really does show how relaxed and enjoyable the day was.

After drinks on the lawn we were back to the barn for food, more drink and even some morris dancing from the local morris men (who all lined up for a kiss afterwards).

The Fleece Inn...
http://www.thefleeceinn.co.uk/
...is a fantastic venue, I couldn't fault the food and the service was very good.  They had a very healthy collection of cask ales on the go as well which is always appreciated!

I had invested in a new flash for the wedding and enjoyed using the wireless feature, it turned out to be very handy indeed for the first dance.  There was no white ceiling to bounce a flash from and any attempt to light directly wouldn't have looked right so I gave the flash to an assistant to hold and used it off camera.

  

A trip to Japan!

Over Easter our long-awaited trip to Japan finally happened!  It's been booked and decided upon since early in the year and we were both very excited about it.  The wee one was fine on the flight and all of our worries about take-off and landing were put to bed.  The flight was pretty long but he was either sleeping, being fed or getting flirted at by stewardesses so he was pretty happy.

Our first day was a long one but we managed a bit of sleep and relaxed in Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo which is very pretty and there was a bit of cherry blossom already popping out.  There are luggage lockers at the station so at least we could spend the day just lugging a pram and rucksack around rather than all of our heavy holiday bags.

http://www.gojapango.com/tokyo/shinjuku_gyoen.htm

It's a very pretty park and we had our first taste of the national enthusiasm for cherry blossom (Sakura) which is a big deal out there and they were gearing up for it in Tokyo.  We missed the main festivities in Tokyo but as we moved around we saw the celebrations going on elsewhere.  The 'blossom season' moves up Japan with the warm weather and is, it has to be said, very pretty.

Tokyo was a great place to visit, REALLY busy at rush hour but so big and full of areas to visit and experience that we barely scratched the surface.  Around every corner there seemed to be something new happening and each area had it's own personality.

Our first trip was on the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Sendai and Matsushima Bay which is very lovely. Sendai was a much bigger city than I expected and there's little to no sign of any damage from the earthquake last year.  We didn't go close enough to the coast to see where the Tsunami had hit although there was some evidence of damage in Matsushima Bay.

We stayed at a traditional Japanese Ryokan hotel before reaching Sendai which was brilliant, the food was served in the room after which we sat in a natural hot spring and returned to sleeping mats laid out on the Tatami.  It's very hard not to sleep well after great food and a hot bath (although the little one did his best).  The picture above is Shiroshi castle.

The Sushi was brilliant!

 In Sendai was the Tomizawa Site Museum which looks a lot like a Tadao Ando building but apparently wasn't.  The museum houses a petrified forest from 20,000 years ago containing some of the first evidence of human activity in Japan, it's pretty cool but apparently not visited very much at all.

http://www.city.sendai.jp/kyouiku/iseki/index-e.html

The website doesn't really do it justice, it's worth a visit.

Our trip around Matsushima Bay was plagued by seagulls which have strangely turned into a tourist attraction, people bought crisps just to feed the gulls so attempting to take a picture without a gull blocking the view was tricky.  I stuck at it though!

The blossom was everywhere and very photogenic, the parks and riverbanks looked incredible as it was gradually coming out.

Our second stop was Kyoto, this was an exciting and ever so slightly nerve-wracking section of the trip.  So far we had been helped along by Japanese speaking relatives and this was the first section of our trip that we managed on our own.  It turns out that very few people speak very much English in Japan and our Japanese was flaky at best so there was some resorting to the ancient art of mime and we did our best to avoid talking LOUDLY AND SLOWLY IN A FRENCH ACCENT which is the traditional resort of any good Englishman on holiday.

  We coped well enough and despite a scary bus journey managed to find Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavillion) which is really amazing, although like a lot of temples and historical structures it was re-built in the last century after burning down.

Kyoto is definitely worth a visit, once we had visited Kinkaku-ji we found a complex of temples and amongst them the Daitokusi temple which contains Japan's smallest Zen Garden.  It's lovely and we could have spent a long time there.

This was taken during our day out to the Shisen-Do temple, it rained but that just meant that less people were there at the same time and we almost had the temple to ourselves.

We visited Hiroshima whilst moving around and spent a few days there.  I really enjoyed the city, there was a relaxed atmosphere there with a few art galleries, decent museums and a brilliant old-world tram.  We also sampled Okonomiyaki (above) which is a savoury pancake fried on a hot plate in front of you.

They preserved the Hiroshima Prefectural Promotion Hall after the atomic bomb detonated almost directly above it and it's been called the Genbaku (a-bomb) Dome or the Hiroshima Peace Memorial ever since.  The Peace museum is nearby and an essential part of a trip to Hiroshima, although fairly harrowing in places it paints a reasonably balanced picture of incidents leading up to the bomb.

http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/top_e.html

Miyajima is a short train ride away from Hiroshima and easily formed a highlight of the whole trip.  The weather helped, but it was a beautiful island in a very pretty bay with one of the most amazing shrines we saw on the trip.  Itsukushima shrine stretches onto the water at high tide and the gate is enormous and a fair way out to sea.

The photo further up was taken from Mt.Misen which is the highest point on Miyajima and we nearly didn't bother heading up the Miyajima ropeway.  Needless to say it comes extremely highly reccomended.

http://miyajima-ropeway.info/en/

 We moved onto Osaka after this and found ourselves thrown into a pretty hyperactive city, we visited the Minami area of Osaka to see the famous Glico running man.  It's all a bit Bladerunner and a bit like a huge Japanese Camdem.

After Osaka we ended up back in Tokyo and realised that we weren't far from the end of our holiday, we hadn't seen the Imperial Palace on our last visit to Tokyo so had a walk around it.  It's in one of the nicer parts of Tokyo and surrounded by a really nice park.  We couldn't go in (although you can make an appointment to have a tour) but the general area is definitely worth a visit.

The new camera obviously made the trip with me and did a sterling job, I would have bought it out there but the exchange rate is terrible so it's no cheaper.  Teamed up with the Sigma 10-20 I can nearly take a full 360 on the sweep panorama setting and there are a lot more functions still to be played with on the Alpha 77.

Our trip finished up with a visit to Yokohama Bay and a look a the famous ferris wheel there, as well as a little shopping trip around the Red Brick Warehouse.  It's a pretty funky area of Tokyo and I could have spent a lot longer there!