Cotswolds

Had a great few days away in the Cotswolds last week despite the weather which was, shall we say, changeable! You don't really expect to go away in England in the summer and not expect some rain.

Unlike the Lake District last year, I didn't take too many pictures as I was enjoying the riding / walking with some good company but here are a few of my shots from around the Cotswolds.



















As usual, click on the images to enlarge.

Oil Painting

Had an idea for a photo whilst cooking dinner last night....Mix some water with oil and see what patterns you can make.

I had some chilli oil laying around (as you do) so put some in to a glass and here are a few of the resulting pictures.





As usual, click on the images to enlarge.

Water Art

I hope that you all had an excellent Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year celebrations.

I have had a bit of time off work over the festive period and after watching this interesting video I thought I would have another go at photographing water droplets.

You can see my first attempt earlier in the year here.

I took so many photos so it has taken a while to trawl through them but here are the 3 that I think came out best.







If you fancy having a go at this then there is plenty of help at hand on the web. I found that this video was pretty helpful.

Making a Splash

I finally found some time to time to play around with my new flashgun. I wanted to test it out taking some water splash / drop shots.

Not a particularly fancy set up - just filled a pint glass with water, placed in the kitchen sink and got the tap to drip. I used a sheet of A4 paper behind the bowl for the background.

As you can see in the picture below, the result was ok but was not what I was aiming for as the background was all wrong.



So, I then reset the tripod to put the camera at the same height as the top of the glass and tried again. This was better (although the focusing was off) but still not what I was looking for.



So, I then added a blue Rosco photo gel filter (another recent purchase) to the flashgun and tried again. I was a little happier with the results. The focusing could still be better and I was using the built in camera flash to trigger the flashgun which was off camera to the right which is why there is a mixture of white and blue light plus the white streaks and shadows with the drops in the last 2 shots. Still a lot of work to do to get some results that I'll be really pleased with but not too bad for a first attempt with a basic setup.

Trip To The Sea

Haven't had much of a chance to get out and take pictures recently but did manage to take a few snaps at Ocean Village when I went to Southampton last week.