Ards Peninsula sunrise

Back from Iceland a week and have done an initial edit of the pictures.  I now want to leave them for a week of two and review them again once I have distanced myself from the enthusiasm for the trip.

Went out at sunrise yesterday along the Irish sea coast of the Ards peninsula and shot a few images - nothing spectacular - the sky was largely uninteresting and there was a lot of seaweed washed up making much of the beach look untidy - well, natural but still untidy!

Here are a couple of shots.  In the beach pool picture I like the contrast between the coolness of the sand and the promise of warmth in pale tones of the sky.  In the rock pool picture I like the reflections of the sky. Nothing special but good to get out again at home after a disappointing winter (from a photographic viewpoint).

Beach pool sunrise

Rock pool sunrise

Iceland winter landscapes but not the Northern Lights

Just back from a week in Iceland with Daniel Bergmann and 6 others.  Unfortunately the gods were against us  - despite a couple of clear sunny days, each night we had overcast conditions which hid the Northern Lights.  By way of compensation we spent a wet afternoon under cover (more or less) photographing an ice-cave in a glacier.  By day however, we lost only one day due to adverse weather and spent it travelling to Myvatn in the north of Iceland in the hope of getting clearer skies at night.  Sadly the Northern Lights continued to elude us.  Nevertheless we had lots of daytime photo opportunities in conditions ranging from bright sunshine to snow and probably everything in between!

Currently working on the pictures and will post in due course on the following link (which has images from my two earlier trips to Iceland):
www.lesashephotography.com

By way of a taster here is an image of a small frozen lake behind the moraine at Fjallsarlon complete with a "JCB":

New Website

Well I've been and gone and done it!  I have launched a new website.  The plan is to have 2 main sections - Landscape and Rallysport.  So far I have only included Rallysport pictures and over time as I work to scan my back catalogue I will include samples of pictures taken on events over the period 1972 to 1992. 


Landscape pictures from the back catalogue will start to be uploaded shortly.


Have a look
http://www.lesashephotography.com/


In the meantime here is the picture that initially generated interest when it was published on the Online Photographer last year and made me realise that many people are interested in old rally pictures  - Achim Warmbold  - Donegal Rally 1975:

Moneyscalp Wood

Approximately 14 hectares of  larch trees in Moneyscalp Wood County Down have been felled to prevent the spread of the fungus-like pathogen known as Phytophthora ramorum.


The Forest Service plans to replant the area following the completion of harvesting operation but because spores from the disease remain active in the soil for a period following the felling of trees this restricts the range of species suitable for planting.

Felled larch trees awaiting removal

Lightroom 4 beta

All my pictures are processed in Lightroom and I was interested to try out the recently released beta version of Lightroom 4.  The new tone controls were a bit strange at first but with a bit of practice they become intuitive.  The issue I do have is that it is slower than LR3, it likes to use lots of memory and sometimes grinds to a halt!  However, I see from various comments on the web that the speed is expected to improve once the final version is released.

The following shot has been processed in both for comparison purposes.  It has been heavily cropped from a Canon G10 image taken last week.

LR3

This shows that with some practice it is easy to replicate in LR4 a LR3 processed image.

Another example:

LR3

LR4

In this example (another G10 shot) LR4 handled the highlights much better while preserving greater detail in the shadow areas of the wooden carving.

So far I like the way it handles images and I hope Adobe can address the speed issue in the final release.

Back to scanning rally photographs

Been busy in the run up to Christmas and since then I have been suffering from a cold.  Apart from family stuff no pictures taken in the last couple of weeks. 

I took the opportunity to do some scans of my old rally pictures.  The first two are from the 1976 Circuit of Ireland Rally.  The one of Billy Coleman was the first I had published in a UK national magazine (Motoring News) and the one of Bengt Lundstrom won me a prize in a local competition - an 8 track cassette player - remember those? - I sold it and bought something photographic instead!

All shot with Pentax Spotmatic on Tri-X rated at ISO 800.
Click on the pictures to enlarge.

Billy Coleman/Dan O'Sullivan

Bengt Lundstrom/Fred Gallagher

And I couldn't resist this one - of a very young Ari Vatanen (later to become World Rally Champion and Finnish MEP) on the Donegal International Rally in 1975.

Ari Vatanen/David Richards

All pictures copyright Leslie Ashe.

See also posts for 13 and 20 November for more rally pictures.

See http://www.lesashephotography.com/ for more rally pictures.

Polariser - another comparison

In the course of reviewing some older pictures I came across these two.  My polariser was on the lens for both pictures but in the first one it was turned off and in the second it was almost fully on.  Everything else was identical - exposure and processing in Lightroom.  Which do you prefer?

Mourne Mountains 12 December 2010

A day's walking in the Mourne Mountains today with some friends .  On the way out I noticed a rock which I had photographed before (on 30 December 2010) and I decided to take another.  The thing which caught my eye from a distance is the patch of white lichen which stands out very starkly against the rest of the rock. 

It's interesting to compare the different treatments a year apart - 2010 is a bit underexposed to preserve the detail in the mist on the background.  Both shot with a Canon G10.

 30 December 2010

11 December 2011

Just walked round to the front of my house this evening to see this:

Canon G10

Scanning - SW USA

I decided to go back over some old transparencies of my trip to SW USA in 2005 to see how well they would scan. 

Pre-dawn- Grand Canyon

Sunset - Grand Canyon

Behind the waterfall - Zion National Park

Dawn - Bryce Canyon

What I noted was that however much I might complain about noise in digital capture ( too much time is spent pixel-peeing but that's another story), it's still less than the grain which shows up in these scans.