Mar 27

Mar 27 Castle On The Hill

As I have been saying on my blog recently, the lack of nice weather has been a real pain and the chance to go out and shoot with some good light has been few and far between until very recently. One such chance was last wednesday evening on my way home on top of a double decker bus. Looking out in front of me as I came into Kingston was the most amazing sky, with wispy clouds touched with pink as the sun was beginning to sink. I rushed home as fast as I could to get the gear I needed and raced over to Kingston Bridge to get set up. I was running out of time as the light was fading fast so I just had enough time to get one decent shot off before the light was gone.

I was just able to get the last of the pink over the River Thames just outside my Home. This was the beginning of a bit of a change in weather that carried on into the weekend with the chance to go out and get some more images.

Saturday came and the weather held out for once. It was a beautiful, clear day and we were off to Richmond Upon Thames for meal tasting at the Richmond Hill Hotel. (below are a few of the meals we looked at and I took pictures of)

After our meal tasting we got to have some time walking around Richmond and take in the Spring weather.

On Sunday I made my way over to Hampton Court palace and then into bushy park to lap up the spring sunshine. sadly for me I was not the only one as it seemed like the whole of the UK had the same idea and had descended upon the area with their children (and prams ) in tow.

The last of the images above was taken in Hampton Courts grounds was achieved by stitching several images together in post processing using the 100mm macro, paired with the Ring flash. I had a little issue getting the macro ring to fire at the time, and was beginning to get frustrated as it was simply not firing. I have since discovered that the hot shoe connector is fairly loose on this kit, even when tightened. This meant that the connection from the flash and the camera was not always perfect, and takes a lot of getting used to, to actually achieve an image like this one above. The key to getting an image like this, is setting the Aperture to around F/32 and setting the ring flash to ETTL mode. Most cameras will have a max sync speed (5D MK 3 is 200th of a second). This is enough to get a fast enough shutter speed and black out most of the background. I then stitched images together so every part of the flower was in focus, converted to black and white, and then finished off with touching up the background to give this high Key look which I think is quite striking and stands out.

I finished off the day attempting to get some wildlife shots on the 400mm in Bushy park. Now to say the park was crowded is a massive understatement. There were people everywhere. The noise from them coupled with the noise of the planes coming into Heathrow, and the sheer volume of cars coming in and out of the park, made for the chances of getting close to any wildlife a 0% chance. As you can see with the image above, even the deer were obscured by literally hundreds of people taking their own pictures and getting stupidly close. Although tame, these are wild animals and these younger males have antlers like needles which if used could do a lot of damage to a person. To be this close is crazy but humans are inherently stupid so at least if it did go wrong, I could get a great image of it.

I did manage to get some images in the end like this swan on it's nest (below)but the amount of people and the noise generated was enough for me to call it a day, I think the early mornings on a weekday is by far the best time to come to a park like Bushy but at least the sun was out....