A Touch of Frost

Feb21
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

The ever-changing moors keep throwing up surprises.  It’s why I keep looking for photo opportunities even when it all seems to be a waste of time.  After heather’s purple bloom at summer’s end and the autumnal golden glow of fading bracken, the dark brown blanket of hibernating heather that covers higher ground during winter couldn’t be more of a contrast.  Things don’t look too pretty then and it takes a covering of snow or frost to get my shutter finger twitching again.

Like most people, I’ve been studying local weather forecasts daily.  Unlike most people I’ve sometimes been studying them hourly.  That may seem excessive (I fear a touch of OCD is coming on) but it helps me make the most of what fleeting opportunities there are.  The contrast between this winter and last winter is remarkable.  Last year it was snow, snow and more snow.  This year it’s “Snow, what’s that?”  Not only has there hardly been a flake of snow but it’s also been very dry, so frost has been hard to come by as well.  There is nothing else for it; I have to keep studying weather charts so that I can make the most of any opportunities that come along.  On this particular morning I had correctly anticipated some frost, the daybreak colours were a welcome bonus.

Last year Freebrough Hilll was swarming with sledging children, aged from 5 to 95, for several weeks.  This year nobody seems to be interested, except for just one weather-obsessed photographer making the most of a short lived frost.  Thirty minutes after this picture was taken it had melted away.

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Flashbacks

Feb11
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

So there I am, digging through my archives and picking our some pictures for a project that I’m working on.  These are pictures that I haven’t given any thought to for some time, years in fact and bam!  I’m back there in an instant.  Memories rush in and once again I can feel cool evening air nipping at my ear lobes, while an early autumn musk fills my nostrils.  In my mind’s eye I can picture myself adjusting the position and height of my tripod, and looking down to make sure I’m not going to kneel on any sharp stones before getting down, dirty, and two damp knees.

A short while later I’m standing at the very edge of a river bank, carefully making sure that I don’t go over the rim.  The sun has dropped below the skyline, changing nature’s palette completely, out go golden tints and in come hues of blue, and now it’s beyond cool, it’s cold.  Mist is beginning to creep between pale tree trunks and another picture is screaming out to be taken.  While paying particular attention to a double-bubble spirit level, because I don’t want this river to run off at a weird angle, all of my concentration was fixed on my camera.  That’s why I didn’t see a beaver in the encroaching dusk that had obviously seen me; I just heard a tail slap on water and saw teasing ripples fan out and fade away.

Photography keeps doing this to me and I love it.

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Go To

Feb01
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

Most photographers that have been playing at this game for a while have at least one subject that they will return to repeatedly.  For some it may be an ongoing garden bird project, for others it may be a local fox den, or then again, it could be a wider brief such as woodland abstracts etc.

Surrounded as I am by intensely managed shooting estates, one of my ‘go to’ subjects is the somewhat predictable red grouse.  Grouse are a good subject for me as they are readily available, present all year round and can be seen whatever the weather (gale force winds excepted – nothing seems to enjoy gale force winds, including this photographer ).  Over the years I’ve built up quite a library of grouse photographs so I am now a little fussy about what I want to take.  That’s one of the beauties of a go to subject, it gives you a real chance, no, it forces you, to go beyond the obvious.

Every grouse I see draws my eye, but I don’t necessarily try to photograph it.  There has to be something special to make me reach for my camera (it used to be a reflex action – “There’s a grouse!” click, click, click; “there’s another one!” click, click, click. – but now I’m a little more considered in my approach).

It was sparkles of sunlight dancing off frosted grass that caught my eye here.  Once I’ve got a victim in my viewfinder I’ll take whatever I can, ordinary or not.  The real selection process takes place back at my computer and generally I’m a frequent user of the delete key.  I plucked this picture out of my inbox and quickly worked it up for your viewing here.   It looks okay but it is similar to others that I already have, so when I get around to working this up fully it will probably be let go.

Thirty minutes and one mile later I came across this scene.  It was a much more difficult photograph to take, but it is unusual in its setting and completely different in character to the previous shot.  This alone means that in my book it will be worth a second look, and when I get around to working it up properly I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that it’s a keeper.  Unless I come up with something similar, but better, the next time I go to photograph red grouse.

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Late Again

Jan21
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

Late again Steve!  Despite my best efforts and planning I can sometimes find myself off-location when nature puts on an outstanding performance.  And this was the case here, but this time it wasn’t really my faulty, well, maybe it was a little bit my fault.

I had set out with enough time to get where I wanted to be for daybreak (just).  Although it was a bitterly cold morning and I expected some ice, I got more than I bargained for.  I had to drive along a hilly one-car-wide road that was covered in patches of thick ice.  It was literally skating rink conditions and I was forced to drive extremely carefully and very, very slowly.

Dawn colours turned on when I expected them to; I just wasn’t in the right place.  Rather than miss out altogether I parked up as soon as I safely could, then slipped and slithered to this frozen patch of flooded moor, hoping that the ice would pick up overhead colours.  I managed to capture the effect I was after, but only by venturing out onto ice that shattered when I put my full weight on it and ultimately left me standing shin deep in ice-cold water.  It was the only way that I could get my camera low enough to give precedence to the foreground texture.  This picture certainly isn’t a jaw-dropper and I won’t be practising any award reception speeches on the strength of it, but it’s definitely better than nothing at all.

Perhaps I should have anticipated the road conditions and set off earlier (it’s always better to be on location twenty minutes too early than twenty seconds too late).  Perhaps I was too complacent about winter sunrise times and I should have made better use of the landscape photographers’ best friend – an alarm clock.  On reflection; I think that it was entirely my own fault that I was late (again).

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Harsh Light

Jan11
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

It was always going to be an all day job.  When I say all day what I really mean is all day, from dawn to dusk.  Such is the way of hide photography sometimes.  So there we were, my wife and I, settled in for a nice long bird watching and photographing session.  Our hide was located in a remote spot and overlooked a small reed-fringed lagoon.  We would be alone all day, just us and (hopefully) some birds.

Bird activity kicked off just after sunrise.  Low golden light sliced across the lagoon from left to right and sympathetically lit whatever birds dropped by.  As it was a clear-sky day and forecasted to stay that way, I knew that I could also look forward to a similar effect from late afternoon on, but with the light direction reversed. It was immediately obvious to me that mid-morning to mid-afternoon was going to be the real challenge, when I would be photographing against desperately harsh light.

What could I do?

Actually, there were plenty of options when it came to passing away the dead hours, when light was horribly poor and birds were mostly inactive.  We could… have something to eat, sleep, send a text message or two, listen to a piece of music, sleep some more (it had been one in a series of very early starts), read a book or play ‘squash the mosquito’.  Between us we did all of these things.  I also sneaked in a few photographs.

I know I said that the light was awful and believe me it was, so I looked for a different opportunity.  Recognising that the usual conditions for taking a decent photograph weren’t available, I decided to try for something that would work in black and white, where colour is of no importance but where tone, texture and character of light are.  It was still difficult to get a picture that worked, but here is one of a cormorant that I liked enough to spare it from the digital equivalent of the executioner’s axe.

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Woody

Jan01
2012 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

I’d like to introduce you to an acquaintance of mine.  Reader, meet Woody; Woody this is my reader.  At first glance, dear reader, you may quite reasonably think that Woody is a common, garden visiting great-spotted woodpecker, but he isn’t.  In fact he is a Syrian woodpecker.  This species isn’t normally found in the UK, so you can confidently assume that he wasn’t photographed here.

This picture was taken within a small Hungarian town a couple of metres from a junction of two roads and less than five metres from a residents’ front door.  Undisturbed he went about his business, flying back and forth without hindrance of any kind.  While camera wielding visitors such as me would tend to make a fuss over this ‘amazing opportunity’, locals walked by completely unfazed, (well, unfazed by Woody, but amused by my keen interest in photographing him).  Woody wasn’t just tolerated; he was totally accepted to the point of almost being ignored.

The ease with which rural Hungarians live with their natural neighbours is one of the reasons that I enjoy visiting Hungary.  I’ve been there several times so far and would happily go again and again.  Here at home things seem so much different.  I can’t help thinking that a woodpecker attempting to nest in such a public and accessible place would be living on borrowed time.  It would probably be harassed to the point of nest abandonment in no time at all.  It’s testament to a treasure that a lot of Hungarians still have and that we in the UK have mostly lost – an intimate connection with nature.

Back in Hungary; not only was Woody and his mate able to nest without disturbance, they managed to successfully raise at least one very noisy, demanding and ravenous youngster.

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Coast Fever

Dec21
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky” (from Sea Fever, a poem by John Masefield).  For me, it isn’t so much the sea as the coast.

At this time of the year, when my surrounding countryside is slinking into hibernation and is, to be frank, less than photogenic, the coast claims a higher priority on my list of places to go.  I keep a seasoned eye on tides and weather, watching and waiting for optimal conditions to arrive (for me that means a falling tide and broken cloud at sunrise).

On such a morning I found myself heading for Robin Hood’s Bay where, while slowly freezing to the point of not being able to feel my fingertips, I spent some time photographing…

The twilight glow…

 

Dawn colours…

dawn colours

 

Sunrise over a boiling sea…

 

And oystercatchers foraging on the tide line.

After an hour of patiently working my way in onto these birds and just as I was about to hit the sweet spot, they lifted off as one.  It was game over in an instant.  Disappointment reigned as I slowly uncoiled my frozen joints and stood up, picked up my tripod, turned around and almost bumped into a surfboard.  Its owner enthusiastically asked me, ‘Did you get any good pictures?’  ‘One or two thanks’, I said, ‘one or two’.  Satisfied at that, he turned around and quickly walked back up the beach to join his surfing buddies, leaving me all alone without a single bird to be seen.

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Star Gazing

Dec08
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

I’ve been doing a bit of ploughing.  Not till the earth kind but tilt the camera skywards kind, towards one of my favourite group of stars – the Plough, a.k.a. the Big Dipper, the Butcher’s Cleaver and what I used to call it, the Bent-handled Saucepan.

Star photography isn’t something that I’d normally do but the Plough was shinning bright and my camera was handy, so I thought that I’d give it a go.  I’ve read endless comments on how light pollution destroys night photography, but I actually like the effect it gave to my particular attempts.  A little bit of colour doesn’t seem too bad and it allowed me use trees in silhouette as a compositional element as well.

Turning around and gazing into an eternally-deep, black sky I was over-awed at the starscape above me, as I often am on crystal clear nights.  Not having access to the Hubble Space Telescope I couldn’t go in close for details, so I contented myself with taking the wide view.  But I found that trying to make a picture of it was a real challenge.  I’d describe it as being akin to photographing an enormously wide vista of jaw-dropping beauty, only to be jaw-droppingly disappointed by the result.  It’s hard to squeeze the sense of scale and depth into two limited dimensions without losing something; a landscape comes out looking flat, my awesome starscape merely looks like a piece of black card full of pin holes.

Clearly there is more to photographing stars than meets the eye.  I’m already convinced that in order to do justice to the majesty of the heavens a good star photograph needs to be composed and executed with the same attention to detail as a good landscape photograph.  With that in mind I waited for another clear night and went back to ploughing.

With nights getting ever-longer, I think that I’ll continue to explore this avenue of photography to see what I can do whenever an occasional clear night comes along.  It’s all good fun.  You never stop learning in this game do you?

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Misty Mornings Are Back

Nov27
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

Locally (and I have to say locally, because I have no doubt that things will be different where you are), autumn colours are fading fast now, with the majority of trees reduced to bare skeletons.  Oak and beech seem to be the exceptions, both of which still have good leaf coverage.  Oak leaves have been dropping in one’s and two’s for a while and those that remain are now mostly dull brown.  In contrast, beech leaves can still manage some show of colour, but probably not for much longer. I think it’s all been a bit of a long drawn out process this year, due to the relatively mild weather we have had (I’m told that it’s been the warmest October on record).  Thankfully however, temperatures have suddenly dropped and going outside now needs an extra layer of clothing to be worn.

I say thankfully because one thing that I’ve missed is mist.  It’s been too mild for far too long.  But now that I’ve had the chance to be out at sunrise on a misty morning, a sense of normality is returning.  However, there is a fine line between mist with all of its ethereal effects and dense all-smothering fog.  One fills me with endless inspiration, the other doesn’t.

My favourite time for misty morning photography is just when the sun is rising out of a mist bank.  I’m easily seduced by the way that mist-filtered sunlight can take on vivid warm hues for a few moments, until the sun breaks fully clear.  But it doesn’t usually last for long.  In a matter of seconds bold colours can fade to white. 

My favourite position for misty morning photography is to be almost level with the top of the mist.  This maximises the effect.  Sometimes I’ll chase that position, frantically rushing back and forth until I hit the sweet spot.  I know when I’ve found it, because it seems as if I’m looking at the world through a Velvia filter.  All that remains to be done is to quickly find something interesting to put in the foreground, such as an oak tree perhaps.

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Mellow Afternoon

Nov17
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Stephen Street

After a seemingly never-ending string of dull days the sun finally squeezed through a crack in the clouds.  It was all that I needed.  Grabbing my camera bag with one hand, holding my tripod in the other and with my car keys clenched firmly between my teeth, I dashed out to try and make something of the hazy remains of the day.  After several false stops I settled on this view of the Cleveland Hills, and played around with lenses and compositions, while autumn put on a light show that reminded me why I love this season so much.

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