Wednesday 28th December 2011

Driving onto an empty carriage of the channel tunnel train in a coach felt like driving into something from a sci-fi film. Unfortunately by the time I'd realised I could take a photo that didn't contain a whole lot of motoin blur from the moving coach, there wasn't much of the carriage left, but maybe you'll still see what I mean. I did correct the white balance in Photoshop but I've put it back to show a bit of the orange glow since that's how it looked in reality.

200mm, 1/25s, f/6.3, ISO 1600

Tuesday 1st February 2011

A new month and new exciting opportunities! I go running with a club one evening a week and I've started seeing it as a chance to explore the city's photo opportunities... after running I then head back out into the dark streets with my camera and tripod and record the night-scapes that I eyed up on the move. I was very pleased with how this one turned out, just how I'd hoped but it's an idea I was trying from a book and I was still excited when I took the first exposure. This was the last out of 22 images that I took, from slightly different positions and with slighly different exposures.

As a general rule I like to take photos that are representative of what you actually see at the time (or could see with telescopic eyes, in the case of macro which I'd like to experiment with). As you can tell, this is is a slight departure from that as it isn't quite what my eye saw tonight, the colours and light are different, but all I did was put a fluorescent white balance on and take a longer exposure than our eyes do, so not altered as much as you may think. Likewise in photoshop I only like to go so far as to tweak images so they are closer to how they appeared at the time (or at least try to!) without overly enhancing them, so I've deliberately done very little post-processing to this, only applying a single unsharp mask.

18mm, 10s, f/5.6, ISO 400