Coastal path - 2 ships

Click on the images for a larger version.  All images copyright Leslie Ashe.

The North Down Coastal path has been a regular walk for me during lockdown.  25 minutes from home gets me to the seafront in Bangor and depending on how far along the path I go, walks will range from 4 miles to almost 10 when I include the walk home.  

A day last week I decided to take a camera with me, not with anything in particular in mind but to see if there was anything interesting along the way.  I was approaching where I was due to leave the path to make my way back home along roads when I realised I hadn't seen anything I hadn't already photographed and the dull, overcast day didn't provide any light that might inspire me.  

I said to myself "You come along here for the exercise but today you carried the dead weight of the camera all this way for nothing.  Go down to the rocks and see if there is anything."  (It was the Fuji XT20 with the 18-55 kit lens so the reality was that it didn't weigh that much, but it was the principle!)

The following are a small selection of what I took.  These aren't great but you will be glad you didn't see the rest!  They have a common factor apart from the fact that they were taken close to the coastal path - in each of them there are the same 2 ships at anchor on the horizon.  You may have to look at the images larger to see them.

Back to the woods

 Click on the images for a larger version.  All images copyright Leslie Ashe.

With a forecast of overcast conditions I decided I would return to some woodland.   However, the weather gods were not playing ball and I had a morning of soft sunlight instead.

Undaunted I went ahead anyway hoping that the forecast cloud cover would materialise.  The sunlight limited the photographic opportunities somewhat but I needed to get in some practice for the time when lockdown restrictions are eased.  Also, I needed to spend some time dealing with the weight of my camera bag and tripod so that I wouldn’t be completely out of shape when I can get back to the mountains.

My first port of call was to a tree that I had photographed several times.  The first must have been about 30 years ago.   Great disappointment - it has fallen.  Just for the record I photographed its remains.

Then

Now

I then wandered of into an area I hadn’t visited before and while I shot a few frames they were really just to get some practice and were quickly deleted.   I spotted an old stump of a tree which had split and parts of it seemed to be embracing the rest of the remains.  There was dappled light on it  and I used my shadow to ensure more even light across it.

After a bit of a walk to get back on the beaten track I visited another tree which I had photographed before.  I think it’s a beech but it is an unusual shape and stands out because it’s on it’s own and everything behind it is such a tangle of interlocking branches and brambles.

I though that was me finished but on the walk out I happened to glance up the hill and saw some splashes of green on a tree.  I went up to investigate to discover new buds on a chestnut tree just opening - the first I have seen this year. The branches were well spread out and the new leaves so small that the tree itself would not have made an image.  I resorted to concentrating on a couple of buds in the throes of opening.  I wanted the background out of focus and to ensure I had as much of the subject in focus as I could I resorted to focus stacking.  The other issue was that the breeze had got up and so everything was moving.  I had to increase the ISO to 800 and at f5.6 I had a shutter speed of 1/400th and hoped that would be sufficient to deal with the movement.

The result was this image from a 4 image stack and which was cropped to 4 x 5 to remove another bud which I thought looked OK on the back of the camera but didn’t really work.  It's not great as I needed another image for the stack - the leaf nearest the camera isn't sharp!

A good morning's walk and an image to represent the new beginnings of spring.  Hopefully a harbinger of better times ahead.

Strangford Lough Grey day part 2 - Six posts

Click on the images for a larger version.  All images copyright Leslie Ashe

How did I arrive at this composition?

At first glance this doesn’t look like the most inspiring subject.

I walked around a bit along the shore and trying different viewpoints, focal lengths and shutter speeds.  For a clean image it was important not to have any of the posts overlapping - either the posts themselves or their reflections.  The tide was rising and eventually lots of the untidy seaweed in the foreground of the earlier shots became submerged.

I eventually came up with the composition in the first image, settling on 6 of the posts with good separation.  I had originally planned it to be in black and white but seeing it on screen I was attracted to the colour of the seaweed attached to the posts and how the reflections of the posts allow a view of the submerged stones.  

Strangford Lough - grey day

 Click on the images for a larger version.  All images copyright Leslie Ashe.

I had been down at Mount Stewart yesterday for a walk with my other half and because it was a dull grey day I decided not to take a camera.  Mistake.  When we returned to the carpark there was a pale shaft of sunlight over a couple of the islands in Strangford Lough which made them stand out vividly against the misty background on the other side of the Lough.

They are a long way out and the camera on my phone would have been a waste of time.  With a similar weather forecast today I returned with the camera gear but the weather gods didn’t smile and all I got was dull grey haze.

This called for black and white.  The first image is of the island that caught the light yesterday and the second is a part of the Mount Stewart Estate which is separated by the road from the rest.  For a time the wind was very light and allowed some reflections.

Processing these revealed a number of dust spots on the sensor.  I hate dust spots and of course they can be removed in processing but I prefer to have a clean sensor to start with so part of this evening was spent doing a clean,  first of all with the Arctic Butterfly which removed some, but it took repeated wet cleanings before I was happy with the result.