Going back to the source

I took a break from the Sherbourne over Christmas so I came back to it at the start of this year with a fresh pair of eyes. I decided to take another trip back to the source, and really take my time to think about what I was doing, even using my tripod!

I parked the car up on Hawkes Mill Lane where the river passes under, walked back to the source and then followed the course of the river back down to the car.

So there is still a lot of green around, although significantly less that before christmas so it is easier to see the river. 

I had a little bit of a focusing problem to start with. I'm guessing this was a combination of slow shutter speeds and uneven ground causing the camera to move so I found that holding the tripod helped with this.

It was rather a grey day, as I guess you would expect it to be in January, which works out pretty well I think. I didn't have and dark shadows to contend with. 

My Sunday Photo

Discovering the River Sherbourne

In the last couple of months last year I began a new project. I pondered for a long time after graduation trying to think up an interesting idea and I think I might have found it. 

Coventry's hidden river, the River Sherbourne, flows from its source near Allesley, under the streets of the centre of the city, to Baginton where it joins the river Sowe. Given that the river is surely the reason Coventry was built here in the first place it now feels to me to be undervalued and neglected. There are plans to uncover part of the the river in the city centre and clean it up but I do think that it's a great shame that it doesn't appear to have been looked after for such a long time.

As I'm not sure at this point where the project is going to take me and I've not done a huge amount of landscape photography before my starting point for taking photos is to document the course of the river whilst researching and learning about historic use of the river.

For my first shoot I went on a recce to Hawks End in search of the source of the river and this is what I found when I got there... 

As you can see, I struggled a little bit. In some spots it's very difficult to see the river through all of the foliage. I'm hoping that at least some of this fall off over winter and there'll be a better view of the water.

Going Mirrorless

Meet my new camera!

I've been thinking about going mirrorless since visiting the Photography show in Birmingham last year and last week I purchased a Lumix DMC-GX80.  I love love love my SLR but it is kinda big and heavy particularly when I'm just photographing for fun. With the absence of a mirror the Lumix is compact, light and much more portable.

It also has a whole load of new features so I took it out for a little test shoot last week to try some of them out. 

It came with a 12- 32mm kit lens which doesn't have a focusing ring but you can still focus manually using the buttons on the back of the camera which is cool. 

It also has a function called "Post Focus" which allows you to take a photo and choose the focal point afterwards as it records several versions of the image with all possible focal points in focus. 

When you play the image back it comes up with this screen. You then use the touch screen and tap the area of the image you want to be in focus and save the image as a jpeg.

So you can choose to have either the foreground...

... or the background in focus when you get home! And you can save as many different versions of the image as you have space for. With the photograph below I saved 3 version each with either the foreground, middle or background in focus.

Another feature that I had a go with is the automatic Bracketing. This allows you to take photos while the camera automatically adjusts either exposure, aperture, focus or white balance. The one that I used was the exposure bracket.

First it records the image with the "correct" exposure...

 ... then 1 stop under exposed...

... the 1 stop over exposed. 

Without going into extensive detail about how light meters work, especially matrix metering, sometimes they get it wrong maybe if your subjects is very dark or very light and so by bracketing you're giving yourself some options.

So for example, with the 3 photos above, the first is "correctly" exposed, the second is 1 stop under and the third is 1 stop over but I would choose the under exposed one to keep. 

The other that's handy for composing shots at weird angles is the the tilting screen. I used it a lot as a waist level viewfinder similar to a medium format camera.