The joys of macro...

Possibly the most rewarding form of photography is macro photography - close-up, detailed telephoto images, capturing the world of the miniature and rendering it large scale for all to see.

Here's an image I took last week of a bumblebee on my rear deck, the first I've seen this year:

Wildlife is a great subject for macro photography, but to get sharp images you need a fast lens, wide aperture and fast shutter speed (if your subject is moving). And stability, to prevent camera shake - so a tripod would seem mandatory. However, I find that macro opportunities arise at the most unpredictable times, and you never have the right kit to hand. None of the macro photographs on this page were taken on a tripod - I compensated by ensuring that the shutter speed, in one hundredths of a second, exceeded the maximum focal length of the lens in millimetres. So, in the case of the bumblebee, I was shooting with a Tamron 70-300mm telephoto lens in macro mode, and set my shutter speed to 1/320th of a second. I shot in raw format, so that I could adjust exposure in post production as necessary.

Often I just have a kit lens to hand, but you can still obtain decent macro images with these. Here's a young newt we found and looked after for a couple of days, before releasing him into the brook at the bottom of the garden:

A bit fogged, but it was shot through the side of a plastic tank with an 18-55mm kit lens. As was my son's "rainbow pilot", here:

Using a wide aperture decreases the depth of field, leaving one small plane of the focal length in focus, and creating a pleasing "bokeh" effect elsewhere in the image (normally the background).

I've experimented with "repurposing" lenses for macro photography. For example, I've  taken a fixed-lens Kowa camera and removed the f/1:1.8 lens and fixed it on an EF mount to fit my Canon. This involved destroying the armature that control the aperture and focusing ring, so I had to wind the lens fully open, and focus by moving the camera nearer or further away from my subject. The focal length is now at 9cm from the sensor, with a depth of field of 1.5 cm. The results of my "McGuyvering", the frankenstein lens, isn't exactly pretty, with all the Superglue, Araldite and rubber glue holding it together, but the results have been good.

Here, a couple of spiders, and my son's Triops:

Of course, you can find lots of inanimate subjects for macro photography, and then you don't have to worry so much about stability*. One of my hobbies is palaentology, and I have amassed quite a collection of fossils, primarily Trilobites. This montage is called Stone Eyes, after the fact that these prehistoric creatures are the only known animals to have, in life, grown their eyes from calcite, much as crystals form their geometric patterns. I hope you enjoy them.

*A tip: get an M6 bolt and attach a non-flexible cord, cut to a length of the distance from the floor to your eyeline. Attach a metal plate or spanner to the other end. Screw the M6 bolt into the tripod mount of your camera. Step on the metal plate or spanner and lift the camera until the cord is taut. Voila! You have a portable tripod you can roll up and put in your pocket!

Photographic postscript to the last entry…

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post… I went out in the late afternoon and took a few more current photos to illustrate my points.

Rotting hulks:

 Fallen heroes:

 Fell ‘em, lop ‘em, saw ‘em, leave ‘em:

…and some scary sky scenery:

My American friend Dick tells me that in the US, they call these “Widowmakers”. Unnerving stuff. Maybe the Rangers should be clearing these rather than erecting fences and building compost heaps…

On becoming a Woodsman... and a small rant about conservation policy

During our first winter at the cottage, the kitchen/diner and utility rooms were freezing, as the whole ground floor/basement (depends which elevation you look at, we're on a hill) relied on a single radiator for heating, and it had little effect. We'd already invested in an oil Combi boiler (no mains gas around here), and we didn't think adding radiators would be practical or effective (lack of available wall space and lots of glazing). So, last autumn we installed a dual fuel log and coal-fired stove. It didn't come cheap, but it's pretty enough and by golly, it puts out some serious heat!

Unfortunately, to output such heat it uses up an inordinate amount of logs (and/or coal). I soon tired of paying through the nose for petrol station forecourt-purchased logs, kindling and coal, and discovered in short order that foraging dead, fallen branches in the forest is an offence (more on that later in this post). As luck would have it, the publican next door  (did I not mention that we have the good fortune to be right next to a country inn  and Thai restaurant attracting a "neighbour discount" on meals, takeaways and drinks?) had a load of surplus logs from a willow tree he'd had to cut down at one of his other pubs, where its roots were undermining the foundations. Did I want them? Of course! They're over out back, help yourself...

Oof, that was backbreaking work, rolling them down the hill, then manhandling the cords individually across the muddy field before throwing them over the boundary wall into my property. Eventually, though, I had built a couple of decent log piles on the deck at the bottom of the garden.

That should last us a while, once it's seasoned. In the meantime, I've found other smaller supplies of logs through talking to the locals, and the landlord keeps me supplied with wooden pallets to chop up for kindling.

I never thought I'd find myself doing so much woodsman's work! First it's the stacking, seasoning and drying, then the sawing and finally the splitting into stove-appropriate chunks.
 

I suppose it keeps me fit. I've also had to splash out on some specialist equipment, too - an electric chainsaw, a metal sawhorse and chain, a 4 1/2lb logging maul (wedge-shaped splitting axe), a 5lb sledge hammer, and my favourite, a log grenade (almost as much fun as it sounds).

I'm going to have to buy or build a sheltered woodstore up on the deck by the kitchen - currently it's being stacked anywhere that's available - in the drive, in the boiler room, even in Toby's kennel (he never uses it anyway)!

So why don't I go and collect firewood from the forest, then? Because you're not allowed to, that's why. Nor are you allowed to cut anything down (although you could once upon a time - the populace had lopping rights until the late 19th century). Now I'm all for promoting eco-friendly biodiversity, and realise that rotting wood on the forest floor creates a thriving ecosystem for beetles and other burrowing insects and worms. I'm familiar with being out with the kids searching for minibeasts, and carefully rolling over a rotten log and finding a stag beetle larva, recording it, perhaps photographing it before carefully rolling it back.  I also support the ban on mushroom-picking in Epping Forest - this isn't combating the lone picker foraging for some tasty fungi, but the large transit vans that turn up in the early hours with teams of harvesters to clear entire areas of woods and meadows, and sell them to the upmarket restaurants in London.

But there's something sickly about parts of the forest - trees are dying, and collapsing (or being blown down by gales and storms), and the cadavers are left to lay there and rot. Sometimes the forest wardens will saw them up, or even lop an entire tree, but still leave the logs there.

It can be quite daunting walking Toby in those woods sometimes - the trees creak and moan, even when there's no wind. At the slightest squall, you'll find uprooted trees the next morning, their root boles reaching skyward, and a large water-filled clay pit to mark their passing. I recently had a large bough, twenty feet long and about six inches in diameter, come crashing down not more than a couple of feet away from us. Looking up, I saw other detatched branches in the canopy, large and small, supported only by the limbs of their neighbours. And the more trees that fall, the more exposed and threatened the rest become.

There's little or no new growth on the forest floor, because the canopy is artificially dense through the practice of pollarding. Pollarding is a way of lopping, whereby you only lop branches at a height greater than where grazing animals can reach. Lopping promotes new growth, so pollarding ensures that the fresh shoots will grow unpredated. This gives the trees the distinctive appearance of a straight trunk for seven or eight feet, and then a proliferation of main boughs.
 

There's nothing wrong with pollarding - as long as you keep it up. But as I mentioned earlier, lopping rights were rescinded in the late nineteenth century by an act of Parliament (The Epping Forest Act 1878), and these old pollarded trees have been left to grow unchecked, leaving them top heavy and with weakened root systems. This, coupled with the the lack of growth and other root systems in the (mainly clay) earth under the forest floor, makes them vulnerable to being uprooted by storms, such as the ones we've had almost constantly since the end of last year.

And then there's this fencing that's gone up all around the forest, along the many roads that criss-cross it, as well as cattle grids. What's that all about? I don't remember any public information announcements in the local press, but a few enquiries revealed that it was to enclose the herd of cattle that are allowed to roam parts of Epping Forest. Aha! The English Longhorns - I knew about these, a herd of shaggy Neolithic-looking brutes, they were introduced in 2001, numbering about thirty, and were moved around the plains and meadows to graze in the summer months by an old shepherd and his three-legged dog. The herd had grown to about fifty by now. I know they're big buggers with huge side-mounted horns, and you wouldn't want that walking out in front of you as you're doing 50mph up the Epping New Road, but why the need to enclose the forest now? Because they're increasing the herd by a further *three hundred*!
 

That should please the dog walkers, horse riders and mountain bikers no end.

I've estimated that the fencing extends for at least twenty miles around the cordoned areas. You'd have thought they could have used the abundance of local wood to do this - The Warren, just up the road from me, is the base of the Forest Wardens, and they used to maintain a sawmill there (and sold logs to the public), except it's been shut down and dismantled. No, this massive amount of wood has been imported from Scandinavia at great cost. Not to me, I hasten to add - since 1878 Epping Forest (and other green spaces such as Hampstead Heath and Burnham Beeches) has been under the management of the Corporation of the City of London, so none of my tax pounds go to its upkeep. This is fully met by direct taxation on the residents and businesses of the City.

I doubt these beasts will wander far from the open plains where grass is abundant, they really won't prefer leaf mulch, tree bark or saplings, and will leave that to the deer (Muntjac and Fallow).

I really wonder about the guiding principles behind the conservators' decisions, sometimes. But I would say that, wouldn't I? I want those logs.

But I can't have them.

Winter sun... and opportunities for interesting landscapes (and model shoots)

I must have shot tens of thousands of photographs in and around Epping Forest over the years, both film and, in more recent years, digital. I've photographed the forest in its glory in all seasons, and with all sorts of lenses to achieve different effects - telephoto/zoom, macro, wide angle, wide-open aperture for shallow depth of field and pleasing bokeh, sunny f/16 for wide open vistas. But one constant was there - the landscape, the forest, the plains, those were the focal subject. I had never expanded beyond the role of landscape photographer whilst out in the woods, and was looking for new and unusual ways to break out of this mould. So when actress and model Samantha Tomlin (below) expressed an interest in taking her catwalk skills and haute couture into the mud and leaf mulch of Epping Forest, I jumped at the opportunity and we became eager conspirators in the "Ballgowns in the Woods" (or "Frocks in the Forest") project.

 (this headshot of Sam, taken at the 2013 British Fashion Awards at the London Coliseum, is actually a cropped group shot - you can see the strands of someone's hair blowing into shot from the left. The cropping, and the fact that it was an exterior night time photograph, has led to a grainy effect which I feel enhances the finish, especially in monochrome)

So, here was an exciting project in the offing. I started looking around for suitable locations, thinking about backdrops of dead trees and verdant foliage. It soon transpired that we were both thinking about this in different ways, and that Sam had in mind full-blown, ankle-length taffeta ballgowns, costing hundreds if not thousands of pounds - and which could on no account be spattered with mud! My carefully-selected locations no longer seemed feasible - at least for the ballgown shots.

And then I remembered Connaught Waters - a large lake between Chingford and Loughton featuring numerous islands, and a magnet for wildfowl and other birds - as well as photographers. When I was a kid, there were boating sheds where you could hire rowboats, canoes and kayaks by the half hour or hour, and a tea hut for getting refreshments. All long gone now - if you're lucky there'll be a Rossi's icecream van in the carpark on busy days. But what marks this location out now is that the City Corporation (trustees of the forest) have re-landscaped the paths and levelled them, to enable wheelchair access all around the lake, and, thanks to an army of volunteers, installed benches, piers and jettties around the circumference, and even created a zig-zag decking bridge across one corner of the mere. I may not agree with a lot of what the corporation has done vis-a-vis forestry management in Epping Forest (more on that in my next post), but the Connaught Waters restoration has been a triumph. Here was somewhere I could take my model and get some stunning shots - without ruining her wardrobe.

The following two montages were taken in early January, once I'd decided this was the location of choice, and I started framing possible backdrops. I shot wide with a standard kit lens (18-55mm wide angle/telephoto) - the exercise was just to give myself ideas (backlighting, sidelighting, flash-fill into the sun with rim lighting), and to show Sam what I was proposing. Have a look at some of these and imagine a model as the central focal point.

Needless to say, we haven't had a crisp, clear and sunny winter's day since, only rain, clouds and floods - until Sunday, that is. We had the cousins over, so we all went over to Connaught Waters, and I thought I'd try and catch some more images, this time populated with actual people (some ours, some strangers). I was hefting the 70-300mm telephoto lens this time, and decided to shoot in shutter priority mode at a higher shutter speed than the nominal maximum focal length (300mm meant 1/320th of a second). This was essential as I had no tripod, and moreover was shooting single-handed, as I had an excitable and energetic Beagle on an extender lead in the other. In those circumstances, I think they came out OK...

Sam then dropped the bombshell that she wanted a *horse* in the photos as well - I suggested that this might be difficult as we'd have to waylay a rider and persuade them to dismount and let us film with the rider out of shot (they'd be togged up in hi-viz jackets, and probably both horse and rider would be muddy). Also, all the rides are well back from the lake, so we'd have to up equipment and move around. By the way, Sam sent me this photo as an example of what she wanted:

 (photograph by Kareva Margarita)

I wasn't sure we'd be able to recreate that, but after a bit of driving around, found a couple of stables and riding schools at Lippett's Hill, near The Owl and the Met Police Helicopter ASU. Hopefully we can ask the nice people there for permission to shoot, in slightly cleaner conditions. Flash fill photography will be a no-no though, with horses around! I must admit it doesn't look quite as glamorous...

 

...so there we have it; "Ballgowns in the Woods" is awaiting a suitably sunny day, when both photographer's and model's diaries align. Watch this space...

A bit of local excitement starts the week well...

Well, Monday brought a bit of excitement - the road outside the cottage was closed and cordoned off by the police, at about 11:30, and remained so until about 8pm, from what I can gather.

The first I knew about it was when I was disturbed by the sirens, which seemed to be going on longer than usual. Upon investigation (looking out of the front door) I saw the police cordon just on the other side of the Robin Hood Roundabout, and then heard the chuntering of the helicopter (EC145 from the Met ASU at Lippetts Hill). The police weren't saying anything, and no-one at the Robin Hood pub had any news. Lunch at the Victoria Tavern cast no new light on the matter.

It continued all through the afternoon and into the evening, with the chopper circling continuously. When I took Toby out for a walk, I meandered back via the boundary fence along the A104 and was amazed at the number of support vehicles and personel standing by (apparently they had closed most of the forest paths, but then I wasn't technically on a path).

By late afternoon Twitter was picking up on it:

 

The evening rush hour was a nightmare, with diversions from the M25 through Loughton from the Wake Arms, and from the North Circular through Buckhurst Hill from Woodford.
By the time I got back from doing the Monday night Scout runs at 20:30, all was back to normal. 

Here's what the local Guardian online edition had to say about it:

"Police have closed a road after a man was seen throwing tools towards traffic. Officers on the ground and a helicopter unit are currently attempting to calm the distressed man, who threw objects into the A104 Epping New Road. The man, who parked his van between the Robin Hood roundabout and Ranger's Road in Chingford, contacted the police himself and was said to be severely distressed following what is thought to be a domestic dispute." 

No doubt the paper edition will run the full story tomorrow. Just think, a nutter hurling spanners and monkey wrenches at passing traffic. Toby and I were lucky not to run into him deep in the forest - all I had to defend myself were strips of Dentabits and a handful of Bonio!

Bad blood at Bletchley Park

I was very saddened to read yesterday on boingboing about the escalating rift between the Bletchley Park trust and The National Museum of Computing (TNMoC), and the former's appalling management of the latter. You can read about the story, and see TNMOC's trustees' open letter outlining their grievances here.
 
The company I work for, IP Performance Ltd, have held a number of technology events at TNMoC, and have always ended with a guided tour of the facility, led by one of the volunteers. You can read a news item write-up of one such event on the company website. 

It is these same volunteers that are being fired after years of voluntary service without notice, volunteers who not only undertake the guided tours, but also maintain and restore every single exhibit in the museum.

Unwarranted sackings, removal of collections, limiting access, surrendering editorial control of exhibits and collections to business sponsors - it's a sad and sorry state of affairs. Let's hope public outcry brings pressure to bear to force the Bletchley Park trust to reconsider its decisions.

I wrote a blog on the museum and the Bletchley Park trust's neighbouring permanent Turing exhibit on our company website - you can read it here. 

UPDATE: Please have a look at Gareth Halfacree's well-researched article on the two trusts' debacle here...

On photographing launch parties and events

When I'm not tooling around in the garden or the forest, I spend my time gainfully employed as a pre-sales consultant, working with, or writing about computer networking technology. I also get involved in new business development, web content management and design, tender responses and bid management, social media integration, graphic design, electronic marketing... the joys of a private company with a flat organisational structure and matrix management!
 
One of my business verticals is Media, and in particular TV Broadcast and Film post-production editing. Consequently, I spend much of my time at customer and partner meetings in Soho. I've usually got at least one of my cameras with me (for case studies and promotional material), and over time began to get asked to attend various events - launch parties, shows, interviews etc - and record the proceedings in stills photography (it also helped that as a company, we have supported various independent projects, such as ELBA's London Legacy 2020, and Amo Production's "Makers Our Story", a documentary on the British Independent Film Industry - see brief trailer below).

This has led to one of the more interesting facets of my photographic work - not only capturing the interview, or the pose, but also the unguarded moments. The laughter, the spontaneous arguments, the wardrobe malfunctions, the storming-out-because-my-rider's-not-been-met, the superstar's stretch limo being clamped, it's all there, ready to be snapped.

There's been a wealth of interesting moments, ranging from covering the Renderyard Film Festival in Rioja, watching the passion and animation of Leee John (ex-"Imagination") talking about his new projects as a director, to the frankly bizarre experience of listening to Patrick Murray (Mickey Pearce in "Only Fools and Horses") plugging his book on the history and proliferation of the Giant Hogweed.

  The most recent event was the FMF Show back in November, held at Archer Street, a cocktail bar and club in, wait for it... Archer Street in Soho. A celebration of fashion, media and film making, it featured a set by Chris Jones (brother of Grace), millinery from Philip Treacy, works from artist and photographer Glenn Bracke, as well as jewellery and clothing from various British designers, and worn by the FMF models.

 
Guest of honour was Grace Jones herself, along to support her brother and to perform a few songs. Fashionably late, she arrived with Philip Treacy and his entourage in a gleaming white stretch limo (and yes, that's the limo driver being ticketed in the first collage, above).

Below is a collage of various photos I took at the event - models, designers, celebs, organisers.

This type of informal snapping is probably my favourite form of people photography - just milling around, chatting, putting people at their ease, composing, framing and shooting on the fly, and every so often, getting that unguarded or unexpected moment (I always regret not having a camera at the launch of "Who's Not! 1987: The Alternative Who's Who", where I found Jeanette Charles - HR Queen Elizabeth II lookalike and impersonator - in her underwear in the coat room at Worksop Town Hall).