Who Sees these Interiors?

First of all, the title comes from the opening line of the Manic Street Preachers song 'Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning). That is the only tenuous link, nothing that clever. Interior work is something that doesn't often feature in my photography, and yet is a key area I want to focus on in future. I have always loved how interior shots lend themselves so well to HDR, and the lack of a sky means that the time of the day is not so important.

If there is any photography business I could see myself going into, it would be interior design. This is simply because there are plenty of hotels, bars, local businesses and houses that require good photographic work. The main reason though, would be to bring my own creativity to these buildings, and we all know that HDR in the UK is yet to have created a big impact in the business world, as HDR real estate photography has in the US. The French photographer Serge Ramelli is a particular inspiration here, and has some tutorials on shooting interior design (www.photoserge.com).

The photo above was taken at The Swan Hotel in Bibury about 2 and a half years ago, when my main camera was the Nikon D90. It is an HDR image, taken from 3 exposures, and was taken on a tripod, which is essential for interior design photography. It means that you can shoot at low ISO, and therefore create all the light you need for a particular scene, without having to deal with noise.

You can see the image as it came out of Photomatix below, before my layer-masking and retouching steps in Photoshop and Lightroom. I used Topaz Adjust as well, to bring out more detail, perhaps lost by the layer masking process. If you click on either photo, you can alternate quickly between the 2 in the lightbox, to see the before and after changes a lot better.

Where the Red Trees Grow

Back again in Westonbirt Arboretum, this will perhaps be my final image to emerge from my trip there a few weekends ago. I stated on Thursday that there would be a change to my blogging pattern, specifically meaning that I would not blog on set days, but will try to keep up the regularity. Therefore as promised, I have posted this picture on my usual Sunday blog. When I blog again I have not decided, but it won't be very long. As I said on Thursday, this new approach is about posting the right picture, at the right time I'm happy with it, and not just because I have to get a photo ready for my set blogging day. When I'm a professional photographer and have more time on my hands, that may change, but whilst I'm juggling my photography course, as well as my full time job, I don't always have the energy and inspiration to blog on my set days.

Enough of that anyway. You may think today's picture is a bit similar to my 'Underneath the Maple Tree', and it is indeed the same tree. I have taken out the immediate foreground interest in this picture though, and gone for a more authentic and artistic 'far east' look to the photo. This is a Japanese Maple tree, one of the highlights to any visit to Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire, which I thoroughly recommend. It's time for me to go out and shoot some new locations now. With Christmas coming up and hopefully (fingers crossed) some frosty winter weather round the corner, there should be inspiration lying all over the place.

Finding a New Path

Uh oh, with a title like that, it sounds like it's going to be one of those 'announcement' blogs. Well it kind of is, but I don't want to make a big deal about it. As you may know, up until now I have been blogging for most of the year on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Well I'm going to change this slightly now. I'm still going to blog regularly, but not have set days when I blog. I had planned to do this in the new year, but now I figure why wait. The main reason for doing this, is simply that I want to focus more on posting quality pictures on this blog, rather than just filling the weekly quota. I have blogged about this before, but now I really do not want to be restrained by my set days of blogging. Sometimes, I have little inspiration to post a picture on say a Tuesday or a Thursday, but yet have to blog because of my title statement. And this is not good for creativity. I notice most other photographers do not have set days for posting new pictures, and I want it to be that way for me as well.

I don't want this to be misinterpreted as a sign that I'll be blogging less, I fully intend to keep this as a regular blog, but yes it will mean that there are times where I post very frequently, and other times less frequently. Again though, it will all be about posting the pictures when I'm happy and want to post them. Just to prove I do not intend the blogging frequency to become less, I have a photo ready and will blog again on Sunday as usual, so do come back!

Today's photo is taken within the Japanese Maple Tree Area of Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire. Ok so the title is really about my new blogging pattern, but it is of course entirely applicable to this picture as well. It would have been nicer perhaps if we had visited on a drier day, but late October is a great time of year to visit Westonbirt, though next year I reckon I will go a few weeks earlier.

Underneath the Maple Tree

The third part to my Westonbirt Arboretum trilogy, this is more specifically a Japanese Maple tree, one of many they have at the arboretum. As I said on Tuesday, it's anyone's guess what the best time of year to visit the arboretum is, but last weekend was quite a good time to picture these wonderfully coloured maple tress, as there is plenty of colour left on the tress, but a lot on the ground as well. This is one of the rare occasions where I have used the camera's popup flash, which helped give the photo nice foreground details whilst keeping the colours strong in the background. It is on my christmas list (stuff to buy after christmas, not the Father Christmas list) to get a decent flash unit for my camera, as I can see myself taking many more pictures that will benefit from it going forward.

I have mentioned a few times (though can't remember the last time when) I am doing a Photography Institute course at the moment, which is teaching a lot of things I didn't really care to know about before. One of the lessons has been the benefits of shooting in Manual mode, something I can now see myself doing a lot more of, rather than the typical Aperture mode I use for 90% of my shots. I will share  more more in-depth some of my learnings as the weeks go on.

HalewoodPhoto.com makeover

Please head over to HalewoodPhoto.com to see my new, and may I say more 'professional' look. I know it's easy for photographers to appear that they are being paid by certain photography companies, when they rave about them to death, but if you are interested in setting up a good website, I would recommend the SquareSpace team. I have used them for my HalewoodPhoto.com site, and continue to find them helpful and equipped with the best tools for photographers on a budget who still want to set up a very professional website.

I'm not one for new year resolutions, but one I think I have vowed to myself, is that I will spend much less time working on websites next year! I seem to lose a weekend or 2 working on them every couple of months, and would now like to invest that time in taking more pictures!

The Autumn Way

Trees are in my opinion the hardest subject to introduce HDR techniques to. Even if you are picturing whilst on a tripod, it only takes a minute amount of movement by the branches or leaves of a tree to make the whole post-processing task a (photographic) nightmare. This can be rectified by producing 2 versions of an HDR (as I commonly do), a heavily anti-ghosted version and a non- ghosted version, and then combining the best elements of the 2, which in this case would include the non-moving parts of a tree. That doesn't always work but it helps a lot. Another problem with trees and HDRs though is the patches of bright exposure between the leaves and branches, which can be totally out of sync with the exposure of the bare sky in the rest of the picture. Photographers will probably know what I am talking about here.

Luckily, I did not seem to have many of those problems with today's picture. It was another picture I took from Westonbirt Arboretum at the weekend, and is the kind of picture I wanted to post on Tuesday, but just didn't have the time to do. This tree didn't move at all during the 5 bracketed exposures taken (only 3 were used for the final HDR) and I had very little problems with exposure as well. It is indeed a beautiful tree, though that is about as much information as I have on it. I am no expert on plants, trees, things that don't talk etc, and do not have the patience to go looking on the net for a tree that looks like this, just to know the name of it.

Away From it All

Unfortunately, I have very little time to write a blog today and I have had even less time to process many pictures recently. This mini busy period should not last longer than today though, and on Thursday I will have had much more time to work on a few pictures and write a proper blog.

Suffice to say that today's picture was taken at Westonbirt Arboretum in Gloucestershire where I visited on Sunday. I had planned to visit this place for a long time, though my timing was perhaps not great last weekend. It wasn't raining when we visited, but the heavy rain that had fallen earlier in the day had led to quite a muddy arboretum and being I guess the tail end of Autumn now, a lot of trees were becoming bare. It's still a great place to visit though, with some wonderfully coloured trees and I do have a few pictures I would like to process properly from my trip there. This picture is a bit of minimalist postcard type scene, but one that nonetheless I found interesting when I approached it. It just gave me sense of relaxation in the fall season that I wanted to share.

Beautiful Bibury

Over the weekend I finally got round to shooting some new pictures, having been over a month since I last took photos. It wasn't a massive affair, I just walked round my local town of Newbury on Sunday evening looking for any potential sights in the cool spring evening. I think I've got 1 or 2 good ones, the first of which I will probably display on Thursday but for now I post another picture from the spectacular village of Bibury in Gloucestershire.

I posted quite a few shots of Bibury on my old blog website but off the top of my head, I think this is the first one I have posted here. It's one of those villages like Castle Combe in Wiltshire that could be used extensively in period films, as it still has a very authentically historical feel about it. The houses in this picture (Arlington Row) originally date back to the 14th century I believe and there aren't many villages left that have that type of architecture remaining! On a summer's day especially, Bibury is an absolute joy to walk around and of course fantastic for photography as well.