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.

Greyabbey sunset

Friday afternoon I was otherwise engaged and as a result missed a spectacular sunset - I was told the sky was ablaze with colour!  Yesterday was fairly miserable with high winds and rain but today the rain had cleared and although the wind was still quite strong I decided, after consulting the tide tables, to take a quick run down to Greyabbey in the hope of a sunset.  Unfortunately there was a band of cloud low on the horizon with the result that colours were more subtle than I would have liked.

However, the tide had just turned when I arrived and after about 20 minutes the mud flats were starting to emerge just around sunset.  This meant that there was still sufficient water lying on the mud to give a reflection.  I took a number of shots immediately after the sun went down and hung around hoping for the high cloud to be illuminated from below.  Didn't happen because a rain cloud drifted in.  The joys of landscape photography - there's always another day! 

Back to landscape

The last couple of posts have made this look like a rallying blog so I thought I should get back to landscape and include a scanned picture from a hillwalking trip to the Stubai Alps in Austria in 1998.  This was part of the collection of pictures I showed to my colleagues as part of our weekend marking 25 years of hillwalking together. The mountain in the background (left of centre) with the glacier leading to the summit is the Wilder Freiger (3418m - 11214ft) which we climbed the day before.