Peek

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The tulip from a few days ago has opened.

I should have focus stacked this one for optimal effect, but I'm tired and feeling slightly under par today, so I skipped that.

Outlier

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I was helping my parents out with something in their garden today, and grabbed a few photos as I was leaving.
I was quite pleased with this one.

Rainbow

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This rainbow was one of the most intense I've seen, particularly against the dark stormy sky behind.

https://open.spotify.com/track/79qxwHypONUt3AFq0WPpT9

Tune up

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I'm a bit knackered tonight, and quite glad to have finished work for the long easter weekend.
This is another one from yesterday.

Don't Fret

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A bit of photographic fun with a guitar that I've been asked to do some minor electrical work on.
It's a beautiful instrument, I wish I had the skills to make it sing.

I bought a Smallrig mini cube light, it's really meant as a video light, but it turns out to be pretty handy to stick up next to the flashgun as a modelling light of sorts. I think it'll be quite useful.

Waiting Game

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Thought I wasn't going to have time to get a photo today, but I eventually got round to shooting this tulip my Mum gave me a few days ago.
It's starting to open, hopefully in a day or two it'll be properly out.

Lunch is ruined

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It is only fortuitous that I had a new pack of bagels ready to go...

Explorations in Infrared

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Dug the old infrared filter out today because it was nice and sunny.
I didn't quite get the punchy clouds I was looking for because it had gone a little bit hazy, but it was fun to have a play with IR again.

I'm quite tempted to full spectrum convert one of my older cameras to play with this further.

A couple more after the jump.

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Radiant

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Not the most inspired or creative image, but I liked the way that the rays came out from behind the clouds.
I think it's relatively unusual to see these rays going up, versus how often you see them coming down.
Either that, or I'm very unobservant. Could be either really...

Inverted Understanding

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This post originally had a long spiel, but I'm told by a normal human being that this isn't the place.
Fine. Here's a self portrait where I'm exploring what is perceived versus what is experienced.

We see things through our own lens, and there are things in others' situations that we do not understand, even when we think we do.

A flower for Lucy

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Lucy's Camellia has just come out with a single flower. Not ashamed to admit that it made me cry.

Busy, busy

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A full on day staring into deep the soul of my CAD software, and a full on evening with faaaaaamily (you know who you are from that...) meant no time for a photo today, so here's another one from my trip out last night.
I'm slightly annoyed at having missed that bush in the foreground, I'd have moved a bit had I noticed it at the time!

Pending extinction

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The last coal fired power station in the whole UK.
While I'd be a very long way down the list of people to argue against the transition to cleaner energy, I have to admit that I'll be kind of sad to see it go when it closes down later this year. It's been such a fixture on the horizon, and a landmark on the way out to the motorway all of my life.
I wish I could go on a tour of the station before it closes, but it doesn't look like they offer tours.
One more after the jump.

VHS

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Remember these?
I've been digitising a few old tapes for a family member, and felt inspired to pay homage to the way we used to do home video.
Less than half a megapixel equivalent resolution, and full of analogue noise. Today, HD or even 4K in your pocket is now pretty much the standard.

I wonder what we will be recording our family memories on in another 30 years' time?

Never mind faffing with those flowers, I'm much cuter!

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A long walk with my parents and Bailey seems to have done my mental health a bit of good today.
One more after the jump. 

It's a drill!

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A few years ago, I did some macro work on a mirror. I thought I'd try it again here.
It may not have been the best idea, especially with the very harsh, raking light setup I went for. Despite cleaning the mirror carefully, I still ended up with a lot of dust spots in the image that had to be cleaned up in post. The flashes were very low down, in the same plane as the subject, so any dust on the surface of the mirror gets intensely highlighted!

Monochrome Bay

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I'm not entirely sure what to write today. I don't know how I feel. Perhaps a bit better than yesterday, but still a bit dented.

It's been a full on day again.
I spent the majority of the day working in our High Voltage test area with an external calibration engineer. Unfortunately the test area is rather bodged onto the factory floor, and far too close to a lot of noisy production work for my liking. It was very unpleasantly noisy, and I spent most of the day shouting over the noise of machinery while trying to carry out a calibration. Despite a near-disaster that I thought had killed part of the equipment at one point, the work was successful, but my ears are still ringing now.

I am exhausted

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Sorry if you're one of the numerous people I've missed messages from or let down in some other way.
Life is very busy, and emulating normal human behaviour is exhausting. I'm forever half a step from running out of mental bandwidth completely.

Normal service may resume at some point, but for now, here's a backup image taken a few days ago.

Bubbles!

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Continuing the (unplanned) abstract theme with some bubbles today.
This is a very transient subject to shoot, so I ended up with a fairly narrow aperture and blasted the scene with a softbox from above.
I don't have any flashes with modelling lights, but I tried bouncing a worklight up onto the face of the softbox, which worked really well for finding my shot, but was dim enough to make little impact on the final shot.
The extension tubes are proving pretty handy for getting a bit closer. I might splash out on a decent set at some point, just from a quality of life standpoint.

A couple more after the jump.

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Nothing in particular

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Feeling a bit abstract and unfocused today, and thought this fit the bill.

From the sublime to the ridiculous

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After the extreme depth of field work recently, here's the other end of the spectrum.
A wide open aperture on the 50mm f/1.4, plus a small extension tube, made the DOF vanishingly narrow.
I cranked the ISO up and turned off noise reduction to get a film grain feel to to the image.

I need to get one of the film cameras out for a play again...

Fell off the wagon (2024-03-08)

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First time during this project...
A headache, and feeling very tired after a rather annoying, underproductive few days back at work, conspired to put a stopper in my creativity, and I ended up shooting little and posting nothing.
This one is a backup pic taken earlier in the week - another one stacked with Helicon Focus.

Onwards and hopefully upwards...

Electrical Shenanigans

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My garden lights appear to have become posessed by nefarious gremlins, so a spot of troubleshooting is required...

Blackthorn

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More fun with stacked macro work today.
I ordered some cheap EF extension tubes from Amazon, so I can get a bit more magnification out of my macro lenses – they seem to work rather well, despite some questionable reviews on the product page.
I've been trying out Helicon Remote to control the 6D Mk II today, and this makes the whole process very straightforward. You get quite an intuitive interface where you can set the extents of the focus range, and then you can kick the process off without touching the camera. It's a bit slower to run the shooting sequence than the built in bracketing on the M6 Mk II, but it’s a lot more controlled, with less guesswork for the end point and number of shots required.

Photos are downloaded on the fly, and immediately after shooting, the photos are sent straight into Focus for stacking.
A quick trip from there to Photoshop for RAW processing, and there you go...

After the jump I've also included another shot of yesterday’s subject – some of the buds are starting to come out now, and I thought they were a rather nice colour.

Forget-Me-Not

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More after the jump. 

A matter of scale

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I feel like this could easily be a map of waterways on a huge scale, a city's road network, the patterns in a leaf, or a microscopic section into an organism.
As I've not (yet) developed the ability to fly, and I don't (yet) have an electron microscope, it's a leaf.

Stuck for a title

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Brain fart in progress... Couldn't come up with anything coherent to call this.
One more after the jump.

Planting Trees / Muddy and Knackered

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Planting trees in memory of Lucy today. Hard work, but it felt right to remember her in this way.
I hope at least some of the trees we planted today outlast me by a long time.

Whoosh

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