On the same visit as the last photo, we also visited a fair where we were supposed to see some balloons taking off. Unfortunately for us, just as we got there, the wind picked up and we were forced to instead see what you see in the photo above.

Unsurprisingly, exposing this shot correctly proved quite tricky since the brightness of the flame far outweighs that of the background. Here, I took the approach of setting a low ISO; my thoughts were that even if the background were dark, it could probably be compensated by post-processing. Luckily, I was right! The processing here was to boost overall brightness and saturation of blues.

So this is the first post in quite a while. My plan for this year is to post one photo a week, starting from now. So hopefully, every Sunday, I will post some new stuff!

This one is continuing the Iceland theme, located at the same glacier I posted earlier. Around the glacial tongue, large puddles (actually more like small lakes) form where the ice melts below the surrounding volcanic rock.

It was a really nice day and there was a lot of blue in the sky, and this is something I tried to emphasise by bumping up the saturation on the blues. I always thought this picture a kind of other-world type look; the volcanic rocks, random pool and a fleeting glimpse of the mountain range.

I’m back with another picture from the Iceland trip. My intention is to post one a day for the next week – maybe it’ll look like I’m actually using my camera gear this way!

This is the Skógafoss waterfall, one of the largest in Iceland at about 180ft, if memory serves correctly, and is probably one of the most photographed sights. It can easily be seen from the main highway, Route 1.

In any case, I should probably point out that on this particular day – and on another three of our four days in the mainland – the weather was horrible. Very dreary lighting, mist and rain everywhere and I was struggling to come up with anything interesting from the photography point of view. Luckily, there were a couple of other tourists there and eventually my eye saw this. It just reminds me of how utterly insignificant a human life is compared to some of the other stuff we can find out there in nature.

I have to admit, going to Iceland I didn’t realise the sheer size of the glaciers you find there, or any of the surrounding features you get around them. Near Skaftafell National Park are a series of glacial tongues where the Vatnajökull glacier comes over the existing mountain ranges.

Probably the most striking thing is how blue the ice is, which is to do with the way that the snow forming the glacier is compressed. Near the edge, you also get the ridges that you see here. I’m not sure what forms them, but I assume it’s to do with the way that the ice melts. In any case, I think it makes a great picture.

Some more pictures from Iceland to come!

I know that I already posted one of the London Eye, but really it was too tempting to post this one as well! After we got off of the Eye we went and had a meal, and afterwards I managed to capture this from the Golden Jubilee bridge.

Really the conditions were ideal and I got lucky with the light. Very little wind, extremely still water in the Thames, which really made this an obvious candidate for the long exposure treatment. However… I’d neglected to bring my tripod. Oops – not doing that again!

Luckily, if you’ve ever been to the bridge, you’d know that the handrails are spaced just far enough that you can slip in a DSLR lens in-between them, and brace the camera against one of the supporting columns. So I got this pretty sharp 4s exposure.

This photo has been a while coming, taken back in the summer. That weekend we were celebrating a friend’s birthday and went down to see the stage musical Wicked. This was the view from the side balcony of the flat we were staying in, around the London Docklands area. and I just had to capture it – luckily, we’d arrived in time for the sunset and there weren’t any clouds in the way to spoil the view.

I decided against a HDR-type image, as the “gherkin” was nicely lit up and, to be honest, the buildings surrounding it weren’t particularly fantastic.

Way back when in October, I visited Keele University to attend a summer school on hydrodynamic stability theory. In essence, this covers topics such as perturbation theory applied to fluid dynamics and is hopefully something I’m going to study later on.Keele is also the largest campus-based university in the UK, and has its own arboretum. We had an afternoon off to look around, and I saw this opportunity for a shot. Clearly the farmer had just laid down a whole load of seeds and this attracted the attention of a whole load of birds for some free food. The conversion to black and white is to give a little more atmosphere to the shot.

Myself, Sarah and Mark all traveled down to London a couple of weeks ago to visit the London Science Museum. It was a great day out and the first time I’d been to London in quite some time. The place itself is vast, but there’ll be more about that later.

This particular shot was taken on the way back to the tube. It caught Mark’s eye and we went and had a butchers. To capture a bit more of an “arty” shot I took a long exposure and balanced on the nearby railing. However, I do wish that the tree lights weren’t there; it would have been a lot nicer without them.

As an aside, the 10-22 was absolutely great; I was a little worried that it was too “specialized” for my style of shooting, but it simply didn’t come off all day. For super wide angle architecture and shots like this you can’t beat it.