Cambridge E-luminate

Cambridge E-luminate festival is in full swing again http://www.e-luminatefestivals.co.uk/ I have to admit it passed me by in previous years, but when Phil one of my photo buddies suggested we went to take a look how could I refuse! The weather seems to have consisted of rain, rain and more rain so after checking the weather we decided to plumb for Tuesday evening after work.

We met up on the top floor of Lion Yard car park, still hoping for a decent sunset from here, but to date I've been refused.

View from Lion Yard car park

This shot was taken a few moths back, there was a little bit of a sunset, but it was way off to the left.












After a few "test shots" we headed over to Kings. The screens were lit up rather nicely and the light was just starting to fade, there was a bit of cloud cover and the rain held off ideal shooting conditions.

Kings College

Rainbow Kings

Every so often the colours would fade from purple to rainbow across the screens, sometimes this was little frustrating since it was in the middle of an exposure, but generally quite predictable.

I tried to adjust the perspective in Lightroom with varied degrees of success using the "Auto" button, so in most of the shots I did a little extra work in Photoshop with a combination of perspective, skew and warp transformations.

Ominous colours - this could be out of Harry Potter!

Next stop along Kings Parade was Senate House, this was a little more tricky since the light display was changing rapidly and there were lots of people on the road either walking, cycling or stopping to take snaps with their phones. After 5 or so minutes the road cleared and with a higher ISO I grabbed this shot. The image on Senate House isn't that sharp, but you get the idea.

Senate House

Pretty in pink

By 6pm the sky was getting a little dark. This shot of Johns Tower was taken from the junction of Trinity Street & Sidney Street. The colours here are completely natural it was very, very pink.

Phil and I then wandered down to the Mathematical Bridge, but unfortunately it wasn't lit up even though it was mentioned on the e-luminate website.

Resources: 
www.cambridgeimages.co.uk

Boothsmere Knutsford

Boothsmere in Knutsford (53° 18.180', -2° 20.943') is a relatively small shallow weedy mere set in the grounds of Booths Hall. My in-laws live just round the corner and about a year ago they took the whole family on a nice walk past the mere. I made a mental note that it would be good to try and do a winter sunrise shoot there at some stage. With this vaguely in mind I packed a very basic camera kit including a tripod when we went to visit at Christmas. 

Boothsmere Knutsford

The few days we were visiting the weather was rather mixed. Half the country was flooded and the other half was being battered by storm force gales, but on Boxing Day morning there was a little bit of a frost and the promise of a possible sunrise.
I grabbed my camera and was off. Unfortunately in packing light, or rather very light, I had failed to bring my ND graduated filters, I was going to have to make do with HDR. 

I'm not a big fan of HDR, but needs must.This first shot was 6 shots combined using TuFuse
What I like about TuFuse is that it give very natural HDR results it simply brings up the shadows and maintains the highlights, what more could you want?

Having just downloaded the latest version Max has included a batch file so in windows you can select the images you want to combine together and click - "send to" which a really great addition. Previously you had to open a command prompt and type in a simple text string listing all the images in turn, which was a little tedious. 

Dead tree

Once the sun was up I attempted a shot of the sun creating flare just behind a dead tree. This is just a single exposure with a little help in Lightroom and some minor perspective transformations in Photoshop. Ideally I would have been further way to help with perspective, but there wasn't sufficient room between the tree and the mere!

After a few more shots around the mere, I headed back home. 

Tangle of branches

Frosty

Resources:

www.marona.co.uk

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I thought I would start off with a honest admission that I'm better at taking photographs than I am at writing. Hopefully if you stick with me you may find something useful or interesting in my posts. 

At the moment I'm going to combine postings from both Cambridge Images and Keith Taylor Photography so you will get a mix of information on anything from gear reviews, landscape locations to taking photos in Cambridge.

Cheers,

Keith