My parents had a long awaited Hot Air Balloon ride last week (cancelled 3 times because of the weather) so I decided to see them off and get some photos at the same time…

Lilys, alongside Pansies, are great flowers to shoot, with their multiple different colours, shapes and styles there is a whole macro world out there.

Well no actually, just plain DSLR fun. Recently I’ve been very interested in getting a medium format camera to have a play and try and get some experience with. To see if I like the change in aspect ratio I’ve been shooting and processing my photos in a 5×4 aspect ratio, rather than the standard 3×2 of 35mm (film and DSLR). Here are some of the results from the macro scene…

(Spot the wrong ratio…!)

Some more shots taken of the local flowers…

I’m having a major reshuffle of my equipment at the moment, gone are some of my staple lenses I’ve been using for the last couple of years (bye bye 300 f/4L and Sigma 24-70) and hello new equipment, the veritable 70-200 f/4L and the Tokina 17-50. These changes have given me a major decrease in size and weight of my equipment whilst still giving me the quality and versatility of my old kit, something important for my trips in the near future.

With the changes I needed to test out the new equipment so off to the local countryside I went:

Some more shot today, I had aimed to get some more B&W shots but I couldn’t find some nice textures that would do them justice so went for the plants instead!

I’ve been a bit lazy with the photography recently however for the last couple of days I’ve got back into it with a bang…

This Dandelion was aching to be shot in B&W, then I went and found another the second day to get the third shot.

Well we’ve all heard of Eyjafjallajökull by now, the volcano in Iceland that has caused travel chaos throughout Europe. While it is causing chaos in the flights department the Geologist in me is interesting to see the consequences of such a minor eruption and watch the volcano on webcam. During the day you see increasing and reducing activity as the volcano pulses out lava and ash but during the night it can become more spectacular, as the  image below shows.

 A snapshot from the webcam monitoring Eyjafjallajökull 

The snapshot shows an impressive lightning strike, caused by the agitation of ash and other particles in the plume. There have been several small ones alongside this one so far tonight so well worth watching if you are interested!

The initial eruption started around a month ago but was minor in the scheme of things, releasing a small amout of lava and not much more. The second, bigger eruption occured after the first had died down. This occured under glacial ice however, which caused the melt water to interact with the magma, cool it down and cause the much larger plume that is causing the problem today.

Lets just hope Katla doesn’t go off…

As the winter cold is leaving us behind now is the chance to get some of my favourite type of photos done: Startrails. The end of summer, autumn and spring are some of the best times to do star trails (in the UK), the nights are comparatively warm, the skies less (just) cloudy and the nights just long enough to get some good trails in without having to stay up til stupid times in the morning!

Star Trails?

For those of you that don’t know what or how you can get startrails in photography lets go to the basics first. Star Trails are basically long exposures of the stars, and as they move in the sky their tracks are saved in your photo. Obviously the stars don’t actually move, it is the earth’s rotation changing the location of the stars relative to your position, the same way we get night and day and the moon and sun rise and set. Due to the rotation of the earth on its axis these trails will appear as curves, becoming steeper the closer to the North Star they are (the north star is broadly above the axis of earth and as such doesn’t appear to move).   

ISO200, f/3.5, 18mm, Fourty five 1 minute exposures

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This is the second of my series of kit reviews, written after (reasonably) extensive personal use of my own kit, using my own opinions, from months/years of use, and the occasional fact from other websites… The first review was of my Canon 300mm f/4L prime lens (see here), a very ample lens, cheap enough to be within reach of most people, but of L quality. This one concentrates on the wide angle area of my camera equipment, the Tokina 12-24 f/4 (IF) DX AT-X PRO.

There is quite a range of APS-C lenses that cover this sort of focal length, and so the market has a lot of choice, both for quality, range, aperture and cost. These include the:

• Canon 10-22
• Nikon 12-24 f/4

From the major manufacturers, and the:

• Tamron 10-24
• Tokina 11-16 f/2.8
• Tokina 12-24 f/4
• Sigma 10-20

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