I was feeling a bit restless a few nights ago as it was unseasonably warm, the sky was clear and I felt I wasn’t making the most of it, so I decided to go out and do some night photography at a location I’ve wanted to shoot for a while.   I’ve been to Llandaff cathedral once before but it was ages ago – and decided to visit it at night.

Naturally, wandering around a graveyard at 2am there are lots of weird noises and intruders (mostly hedgehogs though… I hoped), but also people – I was a little worried at first as a group of people started wandering around the churchyard and stopped where I’d left my camera bag, but I said hello and they were actually really nice!

It isn’t quite the shot I was after, as there’s a really annoyingly placed streetlight which completely overwhelms the photo from the position I planned to use, but I have a cunning plan that may yet let me get the shot I need (without destroying said streetlight).

Fire Whirling from Phil F on Vimeo.

[codec details: Mov to Avi for editing, virtual dub filtered and trimmed, Xvid, HD 1080 ->Vimeo]

So, recently I scoured ebay for a cheap intervalometer and found one of the Pixel ones for a reasonable price.  I wasn’t expecting much, but it does the job quite happily.  The only real downside is that there’s no way to turn it off – I doubt it draws much power, but I’ll probably have to remember to switch the batteries every few months.

Anyway, I took it to a hill whilst I was home in Yorkshire for my stepdad’s 60th and made a mini-timelapse, just to try it out.  It was a nice day with big fluffy clouds, so even with this short timelapse made over maybe 5 minutes, you can still see some of that lovely fluid motion of the clouds.   And that’s the whole purpose of timelapse, to show you something on a timescale that’s barely perceptible normally.

There’s nothing particularly fancy to see here, just a quick gear test – and a first test on converting and uploading to Vimeo, the quality might be terrible until I figure out the best way to do HD there.

Shallow depth of field is something that most photographers don’t really want, most of the time – landscape photographers for instance, usually strive for the deepest possible depth of field.  However, it allows something that my normal lenses don’t – a much greater ability to isolate a subject from background clutter – which is an asset when doing portraits or wildlife, or the ability to selectively focus the eye on one element of the photo.

Tiny waterfall in the woods, Cardiff!

Moss

Mystery orange bug

Smoke trails, in which I can't help seeing a dog.

I also fix computers, and I’ve always wanted to dismantle a hard drive and take a shot of it for my website.   After a lot of effort in getting out 2 incredibly stubborn screws, I finally managed to get the entire top casing off, leaving the platters and heads intact.    I shot this on my desk using a small ghetto striplight made from a flash and a long piece of tube, with a fill flash bounced off a red piece of card for the accent light which I felt gave it a bit of contrast and depth.

Hard drive interior

Over the weekend I went camping in the woods with a few friends, I didn’t actually do all that much photography as I only brought my backup camera and left the fresh batttery in the charger at home…..

Why we camp.

Kye texting in the woods (I was trying to get a vintage type look here with the processing).

Close up shot of a wave of fabric.

Fabric wave

And a shot of a leaf from my ficus tree, I have plenty lying around as it’s a very temperamental one!

Leaf on leather

For the exterior I tried an elevated shot to show a little of the trees beyond the house.   It sort of worked but didn’t really convey what lay beyond.  But after chatting to the owner, he told me where to find a good footpath to one of the hills we could see from the garden – so I took a brief post-shoot walk along the hills overlooking the town, to find a viewpoint that could suitably capture the environs of this cottage.  I think you can see that the second view shows the context a lot better than a simple ground level shot.

Slightly elevated front shot.

The context, as seen from the hill.