Dusk in Bristol

It had (almost) stopped raining by the time I walked back to Frances's flat, so I thought I'd have a go at photographing Bristol life as the light faded.

This couple were window shopping...

I've processed the following image in both colour and monochrome.  I know which I prefer (but then you'd probably have been able to guess anyway).

It was almost dark by the time I took the last three.  Even Primark can look moderately attractive on a damp evening as it gets dark! 

The final image was taken while walking through Stokes Croft, which is the "alternative" area of Bristol.  They like their local shops there, though, which explains the mural on the wall behind the bus.  It was painted during the height of an unsuccessful campaign to stop Tesco opening a store on the Gloucester Road.

These pictures, plus those from Woolies and @Bristol  were all taken on a Sony NEX5, many of them hand-held down to 1/4s. 

Cambridge at Night

I'm embarrassed to see that it's over a month since my last post, but life has been very busy during January.  I've had no time to process any pictures; in fact, I've had precious little time to take any pictures either!  One exception was a Camera Club expedition into Cambridge to do some night photography.  I've done very little full-night photography before, and wasn't completely sure how to process the images for best effect.  The result is surreal, no matter how it's done, so I decided to use HDR Efex Pro to try and squeeze as much tonal range as I could from the shots.  A couple are three shot HDRs (-2, 0, +2 stops), but the majority are images processed from a single RAW file.  Anyway, make up your own minds as to whether you think the processing was successful...

First port of call was the area around the Mill island and the Garden House hotel.

We then wandered to King's Parade.  Well, you have to, don't you?

We then headed off to Garret Hostel Lane bridge, which has great views of the river in both directions.  The only problem with 30s exposures was that cars kept coming and going over Trinity bridge at random intervals.  My favourite subject of the evening was the Jerwood library in Trinity Hall.  These two shots were true HDR, as the contrast range would otherwise have been totally unmanageable.

 The final two shots are of Clare and King's, taken from The Backs.

The evening finished with a well-earned hot chocolate at the Graduate Centre, with the inevitable accompaniment of club members drooling over each other's equipment (photographic, of course).

Great Yarmouth at Night

I'd only ever been through Great Yarmouth on a boat, heading between the Northern and Southern Broads, so it was a novel experience to walk along the promenade after dark.

The sea-front was cold and windswept; and, apart from a handful of tripod wielding photographers, it was pretty well deserted.  Looking at the advertisements for past and future "attractions" (the likes of Roy "Chubby" Brown, Jim Davidson, Cannon & Ball and The Chuckle Brothers) told me everything I needed to know about Yarmouth's standing in the celebrity stakes...

The area in front of the Britannia Pier had obviously been recently renovated, and - when I first saw it - was bathed in a rather beautiful violet light.  I quickly set my tripod up, but by the time I'd done so the light had turned orange.  It took me a little while to twig that the vertical lamp-post objects were rather like latter-day lava lamps, and were changing colour on a regular basis.  Given the length of the exposures that night (10s to 30s) there was absolutely no chance of capturing just a single hue.  Luckily, good old Silver Efex Pro came to the rescue!

The final two pictures are of the same scene: the first was shot in colour and then converted to monochrome; the second is Infra Red, with the colour "corrected" as best I can.  Flare was a huge problem with the IR camera, so if I try this again I'll probably end up using a prime lens rather than a zoom.