Mother's Day @ The Yard

 

So an even better Mother's Day for 2022 now that the threat of Covid-19 is receding and restrictions have been lifted. This year Julia, Tedster and I headed down to The Dockyard for a mooch around with the cameras - well my camera and Julia's iPhone 😉

The weather was our downer this year, you can't do much about crappy weather, having had a pretty good sunny week it turned rather miserable on Sunday and so we delayed our leaving time until after lunch in the hopes of avoiding the damp.

Which we succeeded in doing, still chilly and breezy but dry - thankfully. I took the Olympus TG-6 all weather camera along too, just in case, but it was dry enough for the M50. 

This is us up in Slip 3 - The Big Space. My most favourite part of the Yard. It is a truly iconic building, like a boat that is upside down. Good to be up there before the kids invade for the Easter Doc Yard Shenanigans. 

Good to spend quality time with my girl too, we had a lovely afternoon tea last year as we were in a support bubble and so were allowed to spend time together, the year before, 2020, I spent the day alone - one of the loneliest Mother's Days I've ever had 😭

Clearing Out The Shed!

 

So Saturday saw me rummaging around in the almost dilapidated shed trying to clear some of the crap out of it before getting a company in to remove the shed, replace the garage roof and replace the up & over door.

I'd already cleared some bits out last Autumn whilst considering putting the decking furniture in it for the Winter - but I'd omitted to check the size of the door and realised that the doorway was too narrow for the furniture to fit ☹

So whilst there is still some bits to go, most of what I found turned out to be useful for my Dad and Julia & James. So they've collected those bits and I'm left with the rubbish to prep either for the tip or to leave for the garage firm to remove.

Looking forward to getting the site survey for the garage refurb in the diary and a follow on date for the transformation. It'll leave the space dry and more useable and considering the garage is almost as old as me I think it's done pretty well!

Daffodils

 

Bought three bunches of daffodils in M&S when we went shopping at Bluewater on Friday. I LOVE these flowers, they always seem so happy :-)

So have two vases worth, probably should have stuck with two bunches, but popped the 50mm lens onto the M50 and took these images this afternoon.

Always a really good sign that Spring is coming :-)

Ostrich

 

This little chap is a print of a watercolour painting by a chap I know from the old Invicta Camera Club, David Tovey.

Julia and I went up to Bluewater for some retail therapy and David's art is being exhibited, along with many other varied artists, in a collection called Under the Rainbow.

Lots of different types of art, paintings, ceramics, mosaic and even some from several prisons, which quite frankly were amazing given the limited resources they have!

Julia bought an original, moody seascape for their living room, this little chap is now hanging in the little bedroom. Just loved his quirky look!

Under the Rainbow

Sahara Sand

 

So Wednesday saw rain containing sand from the Sahara - this is what is left everywhere, windows, cars etc. Like a kind of orange sand but almost "stuck on" rather than loose.

Earlier in the day the sky had been very peachy in colour but a photo couldn't seem to capture the effect.

These are my old black dustbin lid and the wheelie bin lid.

Bags Galore - Mia Tui

 

For those who may read my posts, and I'm never sure whether anyone does, apart from me (!), I mentioned in a previous post about my new "camera bag" Sydney from Mia Tui.

This is an awesome bag company that I think I stumbled upon via Facebook who sell a whole collection of things, but primarily handbags, travel bags and accessories.

Now I'm always on the lookout for another handbag, after all a woman can never have too many bags! And so over the last few months I have built up a considerable collection of their items from clutches to larger handbags and a few rucksacks.

This is where Sydney came in, designed as a travel rucksack and sporting a more rectangular shape, I thought it would suffice as a daypack for my camera outings. And indeed it does - very well. It's only missing thing is that I prefer a sternum strap on a rucksack that more functional than handbag like. Sydney is missing this but a bit of judicious stitching allows me to utilise a 3rd party sternum strap - sorted.

Link below to the website if anyone is interested. They regularly seem to do various offers and discounts. Lots of colour choices available but not all accessories are available in the same colour combinations which is a bit disappointing. Word of warning, their products are addictive, I have a whole raft of them now as I said above, mainly because perhaps I didn't think out the colour choices strategically enough to swap out a set of items between bags. Mind you some of the colours are so good that to limit oneself to a single colour choice seems criminal :-)

Mia Tui Website

Travel Tripod

 

So Saturday morning saw me dragging the travel tripod out of the wardrobe to test its height and foldability in readiness for our first upcoming Camera Club meet on the 1st April to do some light painting back on site :-)

We'd had a Zoom meeting on Thursday evening and chatted about the prospect of meeting up in person once again now that work have sanctioned on site Wellness meetings again post Covid-19. Wow that seems a weird statement!

Anyhoo we decided that as we used to meet on the first Friday of the month back in the day that we would continue with this time slot. Simon has offered once again to waft the Pixel stick around, plus his home made version and anything else light wise that takes his fancy whilst we take some photos. Hence the need for a lightweight and easily transportable tripod.

Now don't get me wrong, I have numerous tripods in different heights and fold-up lengths, but this particular one was bought for how small it folds up - the legs fold back 180° around the centre column leaving it at a relatively short 30cm long.

Short enough I thought to fit inside Sydney, the new "camera bag" from Mia Tui. And yes, without the camouflage bag, it lays perfectly in the bottom of the bag. I have a padded camera drawstring bag to hold the M50 and several other padded items/wraps that I can lay in between the tripod and the camera to give a little more protection.

So this was me double testing the overall height and hanging Sydney from the bottom hook, just to see how that fit between the legs, whose spacing is quite narrow. When I had originally got it out of the cupboard and put it up it seemed shorter than I remembered... Having another look at the item on Amazon, which is where it came from, I realised that the centre column is in two sections - and I'd omitted to open it fully - doh! Overall height should be 132cm which is still shorter than me but taller than it had appeared on first opening.

Wondering if this omission to fully extend the centre column was what made me think the monopod part of it was too short when I'd intended to use it for the Christmas Lights? When I'd first thought of taking it, it had seemed to be a good height - but somehow whilst prepping it for that evening (some days later), it seemed waayy too short. Am thinking that somehow I didn't extend it fully? Mind you, setting up the monopod in the first place seemed a faff and I struggled to remember just how to do it. Having watched the video on Amazon again yesterday it wasn't too bad, semi-obvious really, but chances are I'll have forgotten again before it needs using again!

So, looking forward to a meet up with my fellow 'togs.

Happy Flowers!

 

Friday morning saw me take a wander around the estate for some exercise after being cooped up the day before for a work's meeting @ The Yard. Although it had been a lovely sunny day on the Thursday we'd not really gotten to see much of it and as is usually the case the weekends and my Off Friday's seem to attract the rain :-(

So went for a mooch and having chatted with my Dad about the daffodils looking lovely along the verges of the main road I thought I'd try capturing a few images on the phone as I came past.

Hard to get a decent angle so you can see the blooms but not too much of the buildings behind them or the traffic! Too low and all you see is a "forest" of green stems ;-) Anyway this one was my favourite.

Love daffodils, they make me happy and are a good sign that Spring is on it's way.

Symmetry

 

Set up in the studio this Saturday morning to have a go at some symmetry ideas for this month's family photo challenge. This is a quick snap of the new pop-up tent which I put on a small picnic table so I could manoeuvre the tripod in position to allow the camera (when it was fitted onto the quick plate) to point through the hole in the top of the tent.

LED lights provide all round illumination, in different strengths and colours, i.e. a mix of warm & bright, or bright or warm. Different backdrops are also available in the set, white, black, grey and blue. More often than not the white or black are the most useful colours, I have a larger, similar tent which fixes together with Velcro seams and I don't think I have ever used anything other than the white and black backdrops in that one.

This particular tent poppers together which makes it easy to set up and put away, the bigger tent tends to remain set up as it's Velcro is rather cheap and very prickly thus making it both uncomfortable on one's fingers to take it apart plus the cheap Velcro tends to shed everywhere.

Got a few images I quite like and have also been perusing my extensive stash looking for ideas. Hopefully now that we are running the family challenges for a month instead of a week there may be some decent enough weather to get outside and take some base images. This weekend has unfortunately been wet and miserable, not to mention cold, and isn't due to improve until I'm back working again next week 😠 C'est la vie I guess.

Playing with HDR

 

Spent some time playing around with Aurora HDR 2018 and an image taken from the Yard of the sunlight just kissing some machinery in the RNLI area.

Not that I profess to understand the different sections within the tool or what they do, I simply picked a base preset that I quite liked and then moved sliders around until I got something I liked :-)

Cropped and tidied up in Photoshop to remove some of the bird poop & feathers that inevitably land on everything within the Slip 3 area and below I quite like the final HDR image compared with the original. 

Although I say HDR it is a single image so not true HDR in the normal sense but that doesn't stop you running a single image into these tools and applying some quite unique looks.

And subjects such as this can accept a harsher set of effects than say landscapes or indeed portraits.

It's certainly fired up my interest again, although I'd started off investigating using RAW over JPEG, single image over a bracketed set. The issue with RAW is that the camera settings, in particular noise reduction, isn't baked in as it is with a JPEG. I'd have to use DPP, Canon's proprietary software in order to apply those settings and then save off as a large TIFF file because Lightroom et al cannot apply the equivalent noise reduction because that info isn't shared outside of Canon. All this potential faff makes me think I'm better off sticking to the usual bracketed JPEGs and be done with it. I rarely shoot RAW anyway, most modern cameras deal with high ISOs very well these days and although I don't have a full-frame camera my DSLR and mirrorless produce equally good, reasonably clean images. Plus pixel peeping these days is unnecessary, unless you are going to view your image from a significant distance away you won't even notice the "grain".

So back to the bracketed JPEGs and save myself the aggro, if nothing else I'll keep DPP installed for now as in this testing I've realised that the 77D RAWs can't be read by my old, more simplistic HDR software and the new mirrorless RAWs can't be read by Aurora HDR - so if nothing else it could be useful for conversion purposes... Should I feel the need to shoot RAW at any time.