Just point the lens to the sky and...

It's usually difficult to get photos of a plant or flower isolated in a normal setting as there's always background distractions and colours lingering around, no matter how much you bokeh it out. Blurring the background heavily narrows the depth of field on a subject. and you can't really avoid all the background colour unless you're in a studio setup, or you do some selective colouring (not exactly my favourite technique). I decided to experiment with a few shots by using an overcast day as my flat, colourless background, which meant shooting upwards.

These were all taken around March-April, when the weather was still nice and grey. I set my camera's white balance to Daylight to preserve the colours; despite the cloudy day, I didn't want these shots warmed up. (I also rarely use 'auto' white balance anymore, which probably would have had the same effect.) I like that they look cold and icey, especially the last shot of the newly emerging blossoms. I think they also look a bit like slides from a microscope, particularly the shot of the green leaves. Shooting into what is essentially white light meant that the foreground subjects were a bit dark. I didn't want to use my on-camera flash because it's crap (and I didn't have anything at hand to diffuse it) so I adjusted the shadows afterwards in post.

I think they turned out quite nice. The plants are in isolation with no noisy background colours or shapes (no need for selective colour), with just a little help from Photoshop and an English spring time.

Distant relatives

If I see a Mandarin Duck and I have a camera, chances are I'll end up taking a photo. I know they aren't native to the UK but the males look so impressive in their full colour, and stand out so well against the drab grey of London. This one, however was paired up with an unusual friend.

The other bird is a Wood Duck. I spotted this pair of males in St James' Park. The Mandarin was bossy, but the Wood Duck seemed to tolerate his company despite getting pecked at every so often. I like that the Mandarin is puffing his chest out, I assume as a display of dominance over the Wood Duck. I didn't see any other Wood Ducks around, maybe it was lonely.

The two species are closely related to each other, but Mandarins are native to East Asia whereas Wood Ducks are native to North America. In the wild they would never meet, it just took a few thousand miles and a London park for them to get together.


Makes a nice change from all the black & white photos. (I do like my b&w's)

Ignore the horse

I remember passing by this window a few times. One day I decided to cross the road and wait for just a few minutes.

The two people lined themselves up nicely, and I like that they both ignored the big wooden horse as well as each other: the woman engrossed in her iPhone/MP3 player, the man in his own thoughts, probably.

I would have preferred a more centred, less-cropped shot, but I had to shoot off-centre as my own reflection in the window was really obvious even though I was on the other side of the road. I suppose a polariser would have been good to have (at least to lessen the reflections in general) but I only have a 52mm polariser and this lens has a 62mm filter, and fiddling with polarisers isn't very efficient when shooting on-the-move. I'm still in the picture (left door reflection, under the awning) but I'm standing in a shadow and my outline is barely visible in this 900px resize.


Last night I had a dream in black and white, which wasn't entirely surreal as it was street photography related. I remember standing around a lot of other photographers in an urban setting, and we were all moving around, trying to line each other up with the backgrounds to shoot some interesting compositions. Nobody really stood still for too long though, we were all looking for that perfect shot. I did manage to get a couple of guys framed up between two vertical structures, and I remember being quite pleased at framing and shooting these fast-moving subjects.

That was pretty odd.