Ferric Birds

On a busy weekend Alys and I popped up to Wales to see a couple of friends and for me to have a go at running in the annual Race The Train 14 mile race they hold there.

http://www.racethetrain.com/

It was a bit of a giggle, being Wales it rained obviously but it stayed warm enough and I slogged through the mud to a "not all that bad" finish time of two hours and eighteen minutes. The train itself finished in one hour and forty eight minutes so there's a bit of training to do for next year but they sent out a few trains while we were running so there was a bit of banter between the runners and trains to keep you going.

Apart from the race, we also saw Fergus and Rick who are hard at work making a series of sculptures from copper wire and mesh. There was a element of concern amongst their friends that a self-imposed exile to Snowdonia would send them both a little bit strange, and it probably has to be honest. But they have produced these incredible and amazingly life-like bird sculptures so it's more than worth it.

The two of them have already had a piece commissioned and now in place at the Manchester Eye Hospital. There are pictures somewhere in the ether and I pinched this one from Fergus' facebook page to upload here. They have a blog and website on the way but being a busy pair of welders it's not all quite up and running just yet.

The deer really are brilliant and watching their development was very interesting, to get the animal's structure and stance correct took them a very long time to perfect and it involved a lot of research, books on anatomy and even a stuffed deer's head.

This crow was finished a few weeks ago but illustrates their attention to detail, the poor thing's been stripped right back after they discovered a better way of making the feathers look realistic so it's all being done again. It's hard to see on this picture but it's all getting put back on again, starting at the back the feathers are going along with all of the little downy feathers under the wings and above the legs.

Here we have their collection of Wrens made so far, they are just a fraction bigger than life size and utterly charming! They are going to be cleaned and polished up to finish them and will look incredible once done.

The branch is all created from copper wire as well and it's brilliant to see them as a set, they all have a slightly different pose and that gives them each a little bit of personality.

A bit closer up and you can see a little bit of the construction and work that goes into even these smaller birds.

All of these pictures were taken in Wales on the Sony Alpha 700 with the Sigma 24-70 EX DG lens. The two slightly more reddish birds are due to taking the photos using a copper sheet for a reflector, it looked great at the time after a few beers but didn't help the white balance one bit.

www.edwardbryan.co.uk

I've had the chance to assist at a few weddings since the summer started and the Alpha 700 has proved very useful, and more dependable than the Alpha 200. As camera's go, they're a world apart. It's still very useful practise to assist another photographer and I'm putting the hours in, ready for my solo wedding coming at the end of this week! I'm feeling confident in the camera and have now visited the venue twice to make sure it's been scouted sufficiently!

I had a bit of time spare today and thought that I would visit the very lovely village of West Ashling near Funtington, and not all that far from Chichester to photograph some swans that have taken up residence.

http://www.westsussex.info/west-ashling.shtml

It's a black swan that's living there and it's recently had some Signets (or Swanlings, which I think is a lot cuter). The pond's very close to the road and all of the resident wild life is clearly very used to people floating about. I got mobbed by some Geese for a short while until they realised that I had no bread on me. I was surprised at how vocal the Geese were about it and even felt a tiny bit intimidated for a short while.

But, as loud as the Geese were I wasn't there for them and after getting a few shots of them squawking past I went looking for the swan. It's on Alys' commute to work so I knew it was there somewhere but was a bit worried that it might on the other side of the pond, which looks to be part of someone's garden. I had fitted a Minolta 70-210 "beercan" zoom lens to the Alpha which hasn't got the range to get the photos I wanted on the other side of the pond.

Luckily, the swan and signets had decided to have a nibble at the bank on the side of the pond closest to me, they seemed extremely used to people and I was able to get really close. The lens worked well, it's always had very good reviews and with the Sony A700 seems to peform really quickly.

This is a review of the lens, worth reading if you're interested in it.

http://reviews.ebay.ca/Maxxum-70-210mm-f-4-Telephoto-Lens-quot-The-Beercan-quot_W0QQugidZ10000000000751723

The swan and family eventually became a little bored of me taking endless photos and swam of together, the photo above shows of the red beak very well and I was trying to keep the focus on the swan rather than the signets. I'm not sure why one of the signets kept it's leg up like that but it kept it's leg on it's back the whole time.

I'm really proud of the last two photos, the picture above is framed well by the mother's neck. She was digging grass out of the bank and throwing it into the water for the signets to eat. I snapped this while she was leaning forwards. The photo below shows them all paddling off, although you can't see the beak, I'm fond of the shape that the signets are making behind the swan.

Well, it's been a while and as predicted, going back to school for the last term pretty much killed of any blog activity for a couple of months...shocking.

That's certainly not to say that it hasn't been exciting though! I've finally gone and acquired a Alpha 700 which has helped me step up a gear with the photography and matches up extremely well with the Sigma 24-70 i've had since Christmas. Getting it now has got me into a tiny bit of trouble (!) but does give me enough time before the upcoming wedding to get some practise in and become familiar with the new camera.

The series that follow weren't taken with the Sigma but with a Tamron 70-300 which I bought with the previous Alpha 200 and is a bit of a cheap zoom but works well enough and has a macro setting which is a nice bonus.

Stopped out to f8 it works well enough and the a700 helps it focus a little closer, making the pictures a little sharper. These are pictures of the wildlife pond at school http://www.oakwoodschool.co.uk/ which was looking pretty fantastic in the sunshine.

The bee is a bit soft for my liking but I'm a big fan of the weeds around it and like the way the patterns contrast between the pond weed and bee's (or wasp?) body. The ever so slightly lazy photoshopping brings out the colour of the bee quite well I think.

One from the archives here and these photos were taken on a walk around Chichester, it was a bit of a dull day but definitely felt a bit more like spring so I thought I'd have a go at getting some pictures of spring on it's way.

Always keen to try out the macro settings on the Sigma 24-70 EX DG it seemed like a good chance to get up close and personal with the moss and try and get some of the different colours and textures it has. There's a little bit of post-processing in lightroom going on there, I've boosted the vibrance because it was a bit of a grey day and turned up the yellow and green a teeny bit to give it a little bit more colour.

This one represents a bit of a crazy moment seeing how far I can go making a black and white image, it's a bit too saturated and the contrast slider's pretty much gone to 11 but it started out as a so-so picture of a leaf so at least it's got a bit more interest now.

This picture was more about the out of focus areas than the railings themselves, I wanted the spring colours to pop out a bit from the blurred areas. As above, I've boosted the yellows and greens and upped the vibrance a little to enhance the colours. Next time, I could find a bit more interest on another railing, maybe a sign, or bit of different coloured moss to give the picture a bit more drama.

These flowers were just starting to peek through, a little bit of tweaking in lightroom has made the flower heads glow a little, I could have added a bit of diffuse glow but that sometimes looks a little bit Disney for me.

It's a bit of a backwards blog here, in that I bought the flash and first of all took THESE pictures, before the dripping tap and squirrels. More for a bit of fun than anything else and to see if the Wotan Servo SC-18 actually worked at all! I decided it was worth putting them on the blog after looking through the memory card and deciding they weren't all that bad.

They do illustrate a point I made when talking about the photos I took of Alys' squirrels, and in the dripping tap blog as well. It was hard at first to try and get the flash looking natural, these all have VERY harsh shadows. There's something to like about that though, it's easy to spend your time worrying about getting light 'soft' when a few harsh shadows can help a photo.

There's been an ongoing series of photos with this poor frog, when I first got the Sigma EX DG 24-70 I spent a while practising semi-macro photos and trying to get a good focus separation using the lens at f2.8. The above photo is f3.5, occasionally I find that the Sony a200 and the lens are a little soft at f2.8.

It's unlikely that i'll use the flash like this for weddings, most people prefer softer and more romantic lighting for the detail shots. In all honesty, it would be something of a faff to lug around a second flash by myself as well as spending the time making sure it was at the right distance and bouncing of the right bit of wall. It's normally very possible to use natural light or bounce the main flash of the ceiling to get the right look. As you can see in the photos of the squirrels though, it will be a very useful tool for studio photos, either portraits or product photography.

Alys had made some of her fantastic door-stop squirrels to exhibit (and hopefully sell) at the Midcentury Modern fair in Dulwich and it was the perfect opportunity to try out the main and slave flashes for product photography.

This is the link to the Midcentury fair, there are always some fantastic pieces there and it's well worth a look.

http://www.modernshows.com/docs/shows/midmod/index.html

It took a while to get the lighting to look right, as I said in an earlier post when photographing dripping water, it's very easy to get harsh shadows. These look fine for the moody shots I was going for last time but wouldn't look right for these little guys.

It was a good chance to try out some (nearly) macro photography and the Sigma 24-70 EX DG lens really pulled out the stops for me. I had a bit of a problem at first getting the focus in the right place, but a lot of that was due to me trying to take these pictures while lying across the lounge floor. It's not completely happy wide open but seems to behave very well stopped down to about f4 although, saying that, shots at f2.8 are always usable.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with these photos. It was a really basic set-up, I used a roll of paper table cloth for the backdrop (you can see a bit of texture in the paper at the bottom of the squirrels and pincushions) and a jessops 360AFD flash on the sony alpha 200 to trigger the venerable Wotan SC 18 servo flash.
To soften the light I pointed the on-camera Jessops flash at the wall on one side and the Wotan at the wall and ceiling on the other. A reflector and/or soft box probably would have meant that I had a little more control but the white (and fairly low) ceiling meant that it worked out ok.
The jessops flash was a bit more powerful so I dialled it down a fair bit to match the Wotan's output. It's worked out quite well though and shows of Alys' latest creations very well I think.

In fact, I think it shows that an entry-level Sony Alpha 200 camera with some pretty basic equipment can take some very usable pictures. I'm happy with these and the full-size images (these have been compressed by me and probably by blog spot as well) would look good printed to A3 at least.

I picked up a VERY cheap slave flash a while back, it doesn't have anything really in the way of controls unless you count the "computer" that apparently meters the flash. It's brilliant, an SC 18 Wotan Servo flash, and even came in the original packaging, all for a tenner from Arundel Photographica.

http://www.arundel-photographica.co.uk/

It's a brilliant shop if you've never been and great fun to visit and browse through some really rare and unusual photographic equipment.

The best part of the package is the fact that it was designed as an 'off-camera' flash and has a screw fitting on the bottom to attach to a plate screwed to the bottom of your camera. This fits the standard tripod screw thread so I've stuck it on my gorilla pod tripod where it looks a bit war of the world-ish and fits anywhere where I need a spare flash.

Anyway, I gave it a whirl and decided to photograph water dripping from a tap. It took a little while to get the flash and light levels right, I used an on-camera flash as a trigger for the Wotan because the pop-up flash can't be convinced not to do a pre-flash. The second problem was balancing the light output from the Wotan through a combination of aperture and moving it further away. As far as I can tell the light metering computer on the Wotan doesn't do anything so I left it covered, the instruction manual would have you believe it's an amazing next step in flash technology which is charming, but it doesn't really do a lot.

It was more of an opportunity to play than anything else, but lots of fun and I tried a slow shutter speed of 1/6 s, a narrow aperture of 32 and iso 100 to see if the flash could freeze the action and leave a little bit of blur.

The first few pictures I tried (some earlier pictures of flowers not shown here) had fairly harsh shadows so I bounced the on camera flash (a jessops 360afds) of a nearby white wall and this filled out those shadows quite nicely. I later bounced both flashguns of the ceilings and walls and while a bit soft for these water photos it will be handy for product photography and possible weddings.

This picture shows the benefit of using a slow shutter with flash, you can see the trail from the water drips as well as a couple of frozen drips in mid-air. It took more than a few shots to get the splash as well as the drips but it was a fun experiment and it's good to see a couple of bits of 'water shrapnel' flying away from the splash.

Finally I turned of both flashes to see what a fast shutter speed could do and although the Sony a200 and Sigma 24-70 struggled to find a focus point on the water I liked the result. I've given it a LOT of contrast in photoshop and it's not as sharp as I would like but it's a decent black and white.

Some of these pictures will be appearing soon on my website;

www.edwardbryan.co.uk