My current youngest (we are awaiting our 5th daughter) was happily climbing about on quite a high platform, giving a great perspective from below. The vibrant colour of her coat was a great complement to the vibrant blue sky. The yellow bars of the slide that she was attempting sets it off nicely.

Vibrant Day

She’s a cheeky thing. She has these looks that indicate mischief being on her mind. Although it looks like she is about to go down the slide, I’d often be there encouraging – and ready to take a photo – and then she would run off and giggle, definitely her own personality.

I again ‘developed’ this in the Adobe Lightroom Beta, which I’m enjoying more as it stops you fiddling with the image like you might in photoshop. Limiting what you can do (and yet making it easier) actually makes you think more about what you’re doing. I didn’t do a lot to this photo, bit of a vignette, slight increase in saturation and contrast. I very slightly increased the exposure on the left eye, just a subtle change really helped.

Must get more of my other kids…

I will get back to posting regularly – because I love photography etc. and I enjoy my blog.

So, to keep us going here’s a random spikey picture!

Autumn thistle

I did wonder if it might be a burdock plant – but I’m pretty sure not having looked at some other images around the net.

This first picture is actually after about half an hour of collecting the sweet chestnuts. My youngest daughter couldn’t really help collect them as they’re so very very sharp! She would not let anyone else carry the tub though!

My daughter clutching the tub of sweet chestnuts we foraged

The spikes on these things are incredible. The shell is completely covered and they’re really spiney, they don’t bend at all. I started off trying to prise them open by hand, but my resourceful son (typical boy) discovered actually smashing them with the heal of your boot was the most effective, and surprisingly didn’t damage the actual nut inside at all!

Spikey Chestnut Shell

The photo below was of an open one still on the tree – these were few and far between though and mostly they were covering the floor like an incredibly spikey carpet.

Scary Open Sweet Chestnut Shell

I love the colours and gloss of the newly extracted chestnut. They’re a little like highly polished walnut, like you would find in some stately home.

Lone Sweet Chestnut

We collected loads, the tub you see my daughter holding was literally overflowing.

Inside the tub of chestnuts!

We’ve not tasted them yet. Some have been blanched and frozen to make into a stuffing for Christmas and the rest we have hung in nets with the aim to roast them in the oven.

What really amazed us is that we found walnuts in the same park! That’s not something you see everyday in the UK, but they were in the local park and we didn’t even know it. Foraging is great family fun. We definitely want to do it more – unfortunately we discovered the fun a little late in the season, but we’re going to gear up to collect a lot more in future.

As a matter of technical interest I graded these in the Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta it’s free to use until early next year. I really like it. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles (Layers!) of Photoshop, but in a way that’s good as you concentrate on the photo – more like darkroom development. The only problem is it’s not cheap, once the beta runs out it’ll be back to Photoshop only for me then.

Dripping wet washing lines

Colourful Autumn Sumac Leaves

Strangely this Autumn has been very very dry. It’s not very English at all. Much more normal is the kind damp and drizzle that I went out to capture this photo in. I got quite wet without realising it – what our family call ‘Cornish rain’. The kind of rain that just seems to hang there, almost like a heavy mist – but you get absolutely soaked.

The Sumac leaves amaze me. In the Summer it is a deep green, but come Autumn they gradually change to a deep red, with hints of yellows, oranges and greens in between. I love the drops of rain hanging like crystals beautifully finishing off the leaf apex. However, this is the first time I have noticed that the leaves on the branches form a shape somewhat like a dinosaurs rib cage!

I love Autumn – this is turning out to be a gorgeous one. An update with the results of our chestnut foraging soon!

(Btw Loving Spotify, in particular listening to Hans Zimmer, inspiring music)

Bright & beautiful sunflower

I love Autumn, the fresh weather, the beautiful colours – but I couldn’t resist taking a photo of this sunflower as it really brightened a bit of a dreary day. I bought a bunch for my wife who’s been feeling tired due to carrying our 5th child! She loves sunflowers and I think they reflect her character well.

I do have some more autumnal photos to follow – I was determined to get back up-to-date so stood in the drizzle and took some dripping wet photos!

So I hope this brightened your day like it did mine

Autumn Plastic Frog

Well Autumn has most definitely arrived. There were a few days where we had glorious sunshine and on occasion temperatures you might even consider balmy. However, the temperature has dropped as have the leaves, the nights are darkening and Autumn is in full flow.

I like Autumn, it’s fresh and you get beautiful colours as leaves turn from green, to red, to brown.

The image above at full resolution is not what I would consider technically perfect – but here’s the thing, does it capture what I was after? And the answer is yes! Reduced and softened with a bit of colour correction and it looks really Autumnal – which is what I wanted!

In Photoshop try using different layers with different blending modes. Blur the upper layer, reduce the transparency and see what you get. Trying things out in Photoshop is important as you never know when you might want to use the effect another time, even if not now. It would be interesting to see the most used techniques or the ones everyone wishes they knew!

So don’t throw out a photo without thinking – maybe you can stylise it somehow and still get an eye catching image.

One of my daughters

During the family photoshoot of about forty minutes I took around 120 photos. (Some of that time was spent controlling the children). We ended up with a couple of montages and a couple of single framed shots. When shooting video always roll at least 5 seconds before and 5 seconds after and always always do it more than once if possible – with documentary style photo and video that’s not always possible, but the key is to take more than you think you’ll need. Start rolling/shooting slightly before you think it will happen.

You’ll be surprised at the shots you didn’t plan. You also get to learn what works and what doesn’t. You can’t practise and test enough. Be prolific.

The more you do it the more great shots you’ll get – and then the pain comes from choosing, not from that missed moment!

A frame grab from a motion graphics sample I'm working on

I’m frustrated at not having kept up with posting – so here’s a flavour of something I’m working on in the background. It’s all done in After Effects and will be a 10 second animation. The finished clip will go into a montage of Motion Graphics stuff soon(ish).

I do have some tips and tricks posts coming up and some more photos to upload – where does the time go?

So the ident turned out okay, not exactly amazing, but a quick spruce up of the original one, I have an idea for something much more funky, but it’ll take a while to sort it.

It was a lovely sunny day and the kids bikes were liberally scattered round the garden. It doesn’t help that we have more bikes than children (and we have 4 of those!), but that’s because they always seem to be growing into the next one.

Bright sun and dark shade are hard to reproduce in video cameras, unless you pay serious money, so that was one of the things I was testing, how far can you go? The end shot is a little blown out, but I wanted to keep some information in the shadows.

I also wanted to practise some focus pulling and creating smooth ‘dolly’ shots with with my Glidetrack slider (http://www.glidetrack.com/) – I’ll be reviewing some of my kit at some point soon.

The video was edited and coloured in Sony Vegas 8 (The link is for version 9, which I haven’t upgraded to yet). I like this program for editing, audio and quick ‘treatments’. But Adobe Premiere and After Effects are much better for more complex video alteration/creation – the ident was done in After Effects CS3 (Again I don’t quite have the dosh to upgrade yet).

Testing cameras, techniques and your own capabilities is really important. You get good at something through practise, whether that be music, photography or video. So what am I doing writing this? Better get creative…

A pebble my daughter found, washed and photographed

Well I took my own challenged of finding ordinary objects and finding the ‘beauty’. I found this pebble in our lounge! My 21 month old daughter has a habit of collecting pebbles, stones and the odd large rock – whilst at the beach we found her wandering across the sand with a rock about the same weight as her (She’s quite a strong lass), simply saying “tone, tone” (She still drops initial letters).

At first glance this pebble was dirty and ordinary, with a bit of a dust off it became more interesting and then I washed it. It’s amazing what a bit of water can do for a subject; see this Chookooloonks blog entry After the storm

Heh, heh, also just realised the photo caption makes it sound like my daughter washed and photographed the pebble! Definitely not, she is known as ‘Lottie the destroyer’ for good reason!