Faces of the Civil War

Battle reenactment photography is probably no one's specialist photography field, but there is a great opportunity here to try and capture a sense of real history. My latest venture was to Basing House for a Sealed Knot reenactment, and though I took quite a few pictures, I wasn't that satisfied with them. The battle itself was quite far away to get any close up pictures this time, but it was always my intention to get more people shots as well, again to try and capture that sense of history.

The people involved in the battle were very willing photographic subjects, which not really being a people photographer, I am very grateful for. I shot and processed this as an HDR image, but masked in the original RAW images for their faces.

Welcome to West Woodhay House

And welcome to my blog in 2014! I have already shared my thoughts on moving into the new year in my previous blog post, so I will not dwell upon that today.

I have previously posted a photo of West Woodhay House on this blog, but this one is much more of a close-up shot. Although the summer seems everything to be yearned for after Christmas is over, and the new year celebrations have passed, I often look at pictures like this (taken in June 2013) and remind myself, what a typical summer in the UK looks like. Now we did get a lot of warm weather during the summer of 2013, but not on the day I took this picture. It is an HDR image from 3 exposures, and though I did consider replacing the sky with a different one, I decided to keep the mood of the picture, and 'enhance' the clouds that were present.

I have gone for a bit of colour variety, as well as the features surrounding the house as well. After I merged the HDR together in Photomatix, I processed this primarily in Lightroom and Photoshop, with a dash of Topaz Adjust as well. I am back at work today (like I'm sure many others are), but at least the weekend is not far away. See you on Saturday for a new picture!

The Winter Church

March is not the time of year I expect to be posting winter pictures full of snow, but then the English weather is not providing me many other opportunities at the moment. I take solace in the fact that I know the rest of Europe is pretty much plunged in winter still as well, at a time when most of us are hoping to see some spring. Such is life though, the weather is certainly something we cannot influence or change, so there is no point focusing on it that much.

Having grovelled a little there, I am secretly a bit thankful as well, as the snow allowed me to go up to the village I grew up in, Woolton Hill in North Hampshire, to take some pictures of the village church, or more specifically St. Thomas' Church. I don't normally have this opportunity during the week, so did not waste the opportunity presented on this Saturday morning.

Churches and Cathedrals I find are some of the hardest buildings to photograph. This is usually due to the fact that they are massive structures in sometimes small grounds, meaning that getting the whole church in the frame is a real challenge. For the angle I chose here, I had to (carefully) walk through the graveyard to set up in the corner of the grounds. The bonus of setting up there as well is that I was under some tress, which kept me and my camera fairly dry as I took pictures (as you can tell from the picture the snow was still coming down fast). This was not possible at other angles I took.

This is an HDR picture taken from 5 different exposures. There was a lot of work and time put into this picture, mainly in photoshop to rid it of ghostly artefacts (no pun intended there), clone out some bins and do general clean up work.

From a View to a Cathedral

First of all, I apologise if some people had problems viewing the slideshow I posted yesterday. I had to reload it a couple of times due to those advertising popups that come up, but after all that, I've realised I can't do anything about them and they come up anyway. I think they come up automatically if you have 'third-party content' on your video (which I do on that one with Enya's song), therefore next time I'll try to use something original, so the pop ups don't well, pop up. I guess you'll just have to click them off for now.

Today's picture is another I took of Winchester Cathedral over the Christmas/New Year period. This is looking down from the altar section towards the end of the cathedral. You can see their giant Christmas tree at the far side. Instead of the usual unsharp mask sharpening used in photoshop, I went for the high pass sharpening option. I have used it in pictures before, but never felt that blown away by it, but I think for quite detailed HDR's, it is the way to go. I will write more about sharpening in the near future and why it is not something to drive yourself crazy over.

The Crypt Beneath Winchester Cathedral

This is exactly what the title says. One of the oldest parts of the historic Winchester Cathedral, the crypt dates back to the Norman times. It's a wonderful place to visit within the Cathedral and was adorned with this sculpture (Sound II by Anthony Gormley) in 1986. Like yesterday's picture, I wasn't able to take a tripod in here, but fortunately there was a solid metal fence separating visitors and the water, which proved a useful stabiliser whilst firing off 3 bracketed shots. In the end though, I chose to use 1 single RAW file to create the HDR, as this simply was the sharpest image possible.

Highclere Castle

One from the archives today. I'm a little concerned that one day I'm going to post one of these 'classic' shots that has already been posted but hopefully that won't happen. I did just have to check I hadn't posted this one before as I have posted pictures of Highclere Castle already (from my Downton Abbey weekend) but this was my first and most successful picture of the building. I think it is still my second most popular picture on Flickr and this is perhaps a lot to do with Downton Abbey. I think it is a good picture in it's own right though, without all the attention from the Downton Abbey bloggers and I remember being pleased with this as a landscape shot at the time.

I have spoken before about re-processing a picture many months after originally processing it and though I think it can be beneficial, it's not something I will be doing any more of. Unless there are serious flaws with the original or there are techniques you really did not know of at the time, it is unlikely you will improve a picture. I say this because I recently decided I was going to reprocess one of my civil war battle pictures but after spending quite a while on it, realised that it is far away from my original picture and not nearly as good. I trust my original intentions of a picture when I first process it and intend to stick with that original vision now. Today's picture for instance, if I was to change anything, it would be the rather unsubtle vignetting but I accept that for whatever reason, that was how I intended the picture to look at time and what I thought was best then and therefore I'm happy to stick with how I saw it.

It looks like the weather might be turning for the better in England (just in time for the Olympics!) and so I will probably be out and about with my camera more. All that's left to say is I have a major announcement coming soon as well!

The Old Farmhouse

Luckily we had a small break in the blanket cloud cover we have had in England the last couple of weeks, for me to capture this picture yesterday. This came out of a project I have been given recently to take some pictures for postcards of Woolton Hill, which was the village I grew up in. The brief was to capture Woolton Hill in summertime and I was fortunately able to complete most of the pictures a few weeks ago when we had a heatwave. The brief sunny weather yesterday allowed me to complete the pictures I intended to get for this project.

This farmhouse is actually just outside Woolton Hill near a neighbouring village called East Woodhay. I don't think I will be using this picture for the project, mainly because it's obviously somebody's property and I would in a normal world, probably need permission to print. I was intrigued by this scene though as I was driving round narrow country lanes, hoping that a scene would jump out at me. It would have perhaps looked more perfect at sunrise but I'll plan that one maybe for another time!