Milk Droplets

Manchester University PhotoSoc put on a great still life photography session this afternoon. I focussed on the classic coloured milk droplets with some beautiful outcomes.

GDT European Wildlife Photographer of the Year

While killing time between lectures, I found the gallery for this year's GDT Europoean Wildlife Photographer of the Year on the guardian website. Some beautiful pictures, well worth a look for those with time to kill on their lunch hour:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2010/nov/17/gdt-wildlife-photography#/?picture=368699851&index=0

I'll be posting photos from my recent trip with Manchester University PhotoSoc around Castlefield soon. I know that I've posted lots of pictures from that area recently, but hopefully these have captured a different aspect to the area, which certainly looks different now that winter is well on the way...

Marsden Moor Panorama

This is the panorama taken at Dinner's Stone on the Pennine Way on Marsden moor. Definitely best viewed enlarged rather than on this little screen. Just click on the photo to see a bigger version...

Marsden Moor - Part 3

And here is part 3 of our Marsden moor trip. The whole of this trip was brought to you by those two hiking staples: Minstrels and Jamaica Cake

There's just one final thing to come from the Marsden trip. At Dinner's Stone on the Pennine Way about half way through the walk, there was a beautiful panoramic view of the moor and a village and fields in the valley below. So a photostitch was called for, and will be put up in the next post.

Marsden Moor - Part 2

This is the second part of the Marsden moor photographs from Saturday. I forgot to mention in the last post that the walk we followed (minus the odd short-cut through cow fields and over Pule Hill) can be found at: http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-marsden_moor-walk.pdf

Now, on with photos...

More coming in Part 3 soon...

Marsden Moor - Part 1

Christopher and I, being countryside people born and bred, started getting withdrawal symptoms living in Manchester. We found on the National Trust website details of a 'Heritage Trail' walk around Marsden moor and, taking and gamble on the weather forecast, decided to go exploring. As it turned out, it was a perfect day with beautiful, crisp sunshine.

We had a lovely walk, which I thoroughly recommend to anyone in the area with walking boots and a day to kill, and got some lovely photographs. Sadly, and I've already mentioned in a previous post, the winding mechanism on my film camera seems to be malfunctioning, so most of the film photos taken haven't come out, but I had my digital camera with me too, so still managed to make the most of the lovely sunshine. Disaster very nearly struck when I fell in a bog up to my thighs, but thankfully I managed to save the cameras. The photographs are going to be put up in over a few posts, of which this is the first.

 And then the Pennine Way gave way beneath me...

The perils of a manual camera

I learnt a number of things this weekend:

a) Whatever pictures you take in film, take the same in digital if at all possible, especially if the light is beautiful and you're somewhere quite difficult to get to, e.g. the middle of bloody nowhere...
b) Places to develop film are rarely open on a Sunday, and those that are open are unlikely to have the best customer service available
c) My pentax film camera may well be broken, causing most of the filmto have 2, 3 or even 8 exposures on a single frame

Those pictures that were salvageable are shown below. If anyone has any suggestions about what might have gone wrong, please let me know! I'm much more used to digital cameras, and manual film cameras are a bit beyond my expertise, not to mention before my time (the pentax I'm using is older than I am...)

Some of the double exposures actually produced quite interesting shots. The two above are the same image, but I think each orientation highlights different aspects of the picture

Unfortunately, the multiple exposures means that almost all of the pictures taken on Marsden moor on Saturday have been lost. We took a wonderful walk around the National Trust Heritage Trail, and we couldn't have asked for a nicer day. Thankfully, a couple of the moor photographs could be saved, and I managed not to drop my cameras in when I fell up to my thighs in a bog.

                     Digital pictures from the Marsden trip to follow soon