Canon 5D 26 mm, ISO 200, 5 sec @ f/16

This is a photo from the archives, taken way back in May 2008 whilst I was working in Dublin. According to the EXIF data this was taken at around 23:00 and I remember the thinking the reflection of the lights in the River Liffey may have made nice image.

Unfortunately I was wrong and this sat until very recently unloved and untouched in my Lightroom catalog. The lighting was vey warm and I just didn’t like the way it looked as it distracted from the architecture.

I decided to try converting to monochrome using the ever reliable Lenswork Warm Tone, then dodged and burned in a couple of locations. Finally, a tight crop to accentuate the width of the building and the job’s a good ‘un!

Canon M6, 22 mm. ISO 800 & 1600, various speeds @ f/8

For the first time in a long while I revisited some of my old photos today. A couple of months back I had bought a new computer and spent time trawling through some old disks and clearing them down, adding loads of stuff to Lightroom and moving everything onto a nice speedy SSD… Anyway I came across some pictures I had taken back in 2017 on a trip to Italy. I have published some of these previously as Patterns of Pompeii. This time though I found some interior shots. Most of them are too dark or shaky given you can’t use a tripod there and I don’t think I’ve ever bothered looking at them. I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of them scrub up quite well!

I think this is down to firstly to the subjects – they’re old – very old, and therefore have imperfections. Second, the material – it’s stone, so not super smooth with razor sharp edges or exact details – perfect for images with some noise… Finally the location was inside and heavily shaded from the sun, i.e. the light was benerally flat with no areas of high contrast.

The left image is of an amazingly well preserved and colourful Dionysiac frieze in the Villa dei Misteri. I decided to remove the colour using an amazing Palladium Print Lightroom preset from LensWork to try and produce an old book drawing type effect. Whether it does that I don’t know but I like the result and actually prefer it to the gaudy coloured version. I also corrected a converging vertical with Photoshop to straighten the vertical lines in the painting. Tying in with the earlier Patterns of Pompeii, the upper right hand corner of this image shows an example of the underlying brickwork featured in that previous post.

The middle image is from Casa dei Vettii and shows I believe, the fight between Eros and Pan,  I have left this as colour as the hues are quite subtle yet varied which really helps define the picture. In monochrome, the image feels rather flat and the detail indiscernible unless the contrast is pushed up, which I think ruins the overall delicacy of the image.

The final image is a bit of a mystery to me as to exactly which building this was in! This was taken on our second visit early in the evening (highly recommended in order to avoid the crowds). Other than being lightened in Lightroom before being subjected to the Palladium Prining preset, the image has had nothing done to it and I think the noise from ISO 1600 really suits it well.

Canon M6, 23 mm, ISO 200, 71 sec @ f/11

Having read about Kynance Cove and that it got incredibly busy during the day, I wanted to make sure I staked my spot, so one morning I arrived there at around 06:30 to find a couple of other people wandering around walking their dogs, another person with a camera who looked to be packing up already and a fisherman who was on his way home, apparently having caught four bass. Kynance Cove is a National Trust site that is absolutely stunning. From the car park it’s approached by walking down. steep path. I didn’t attempt that due to my choice of footwear. However, I wanted to get a high-level shot so that was fine by me. As usual the Big Stopper was brought out to play and it occurred to me that it might be worth trying a panoramic shot. The above image is made of three separate shots, stitched together in Photoshop. I wish I had thought about it a bit longer and taken a fourth as I feel the cottage on the right is too close to the edge of the image. Oh well. Once stitched together, the image had a bit of adjustment including the ever-reliable Lenswork LW Warm Tone treatment. A few days later I went back to the site but could hardly stand up thanks to Storm Ellen that was passing through, and any thoughts of setting up the tripod were instantly dismissed! Instead I retreated to the relative safety of my tent though there were times when I thought that would blow away too…

Canon EOS M6, 22 mm, ISO 100, 1/640 sec @ f/8

Over Christmas and New Year 2018/19 we spent time touring Thailand. We visted Bangkok before flying to Koh Tao for some diving, then getting the train from Surat Thani up to Chiang Mai before driving up to Chiang Rai, then returning to Bangkok for one last night. At the centre of the trip, wedged between time spent in Koh Tao and Chiang Mai was a five night stay on an island called Koh Yao Noi. On Christmas Eve we hired a couple of scooters and spent all day driving round. Stopping for lunch in a tiny fishing village I took a walk along a long pier where a haziness meant the view was was almost fog-like, whilst the sea was a similar shade of blue to the sky and everything appeared very flat. In the distance were some fishing boats whose relative proximity provided the only items of contrast against the background.

Canon EOS M6, 22 mm, ISO 100, 165 sec @ f/16

We recently decided to do battle with midges and expensive alcohol and booked a lake-side cabin in southern Sweden at Deralycke, near Linneryd. The place was fantastic – utterly unspoilt and once we found another route to bypass a rather large tree that was blocking the road we had a splendid week of BBQs, fishing, reading and generally feeling vey isolated. Oh and I even managed to take a couple of photos. However, not having been able to take my proper tripod was a bit annoying but I did take my Manfrotto PIXI Mini tripod along with the M6 and Canon’s EF-M 22mm f/2 STM as well as my bag of filters. I ended up using a couple of chairs stacked on top of one another which wasn’t ideal due to squidgy, uneven surface and a fairly strong wind but it was better than nothing.

The fishing wasn’t much to speak of but I did at least manage to read five books over the week.

Canon M6, 22 mm. ISO 400 & 800, various speeds @ f/4 & f/8

Consider this – it is quite possible that in a little under 2000 years’ time your current home or place of work will be part of a world famous heritage site, subject to the annual footfall of millions of tourists all fascinated by your ancient way of life. What would those tourists find? It is hard to imagine how the effects of long term decay or massive destruction might alter the buildings we see around us now. Factors would include the materials used during construction, the type of destruction suffered, environmental factors such as enduring weather patterns, etc…

For approximately 11,000 citizens of the Roman town of Pompeii in Italy, life came to an abrupt end in August of AD 79 courtesy of Mount Vesuvius. Over just a few days the whole town along with several others in the region, were obliterated by a massive volcanic eruption that buried the town with up to 6 m of volcanic ash. The impact of this total devastation was to create a remarkably well-preserved time capsule that was left undisturbed for some 1500 years.

I visited Pompeii in September 2017. Challenges of photographing there include… the sheer number of visitors and the need to obtain a permit to use a tripod. As a result I had to change my approach and shoot everything handheld. This wasn’t a problem as I could imagine a tripod becoming a burden in the presence of so many people but it meant the pictures I had hoped to take were not possible. As it turned out this was quite fortuitous since I became fascinated by the complex patterns and colours visible in the excavated ruins.

Some of the buildings are remarkably complete, whilst others show varying signs of disrepair. Equally present are signs of rebuilding that would have occurred following an earthquake some 17 years before Vesuvius. The use of different materials that often appear to be shoe-horned in to plug or wedge a gap provide interesting contrasts to their surroundings.

One aspect that I found particularly eye catching was the presence of layers of coloured plaster upon which preserved frescos sometimes contrasted with exposed underlying brickwork. The presence of the frescos themselves were not necessarily the main attraction in this case however, rather the contrast of textures and the varying shades and colours.

Once I decided to focus on these aspects my original aim was to produce a monochrome portfolio, but I found the subtleties in the colours too irresistible to ignore. All images are of vertical walls. I have purposely excluded any reference to scale in order to introduce an element of abstract into the patterns.

For eagle-eyed archaeologists, some of the images were taken at the nearby site of Herculaneum, that suffered the same fate as Pompeii. Upholding the alliterative name, the complete title could be “Patterns of Pompeii, Hues of Herculaneum”.

Canon 5D, 40 mm, ISO 800, 1/4000 sec @ f/9

On 23rd June 2016 the UK narrowly voted to leave the European Union. In a quirk of fate I happened to be in Istanbul that day, a city that straddles The Bosphorus Strait and as such both European and Asian continents. In a feeble effort to mark the occasion I decided to take a trip to the Asian side of the city and take a picture of Europe from the outside.

The journey was made on the Marmaray underground system from Sirkeci on the European side to Üsküdar on the Asian side before heading back across by ferry.

Canon 5D, 40 mm, ISO 800, 1/15 sec @ f/8

I hereby declare that day to be both the start and end of my photo-journalism career!

On the trip I had taken a reduced set of equipment and stuck with a single lens – my Canon EF 40 mm f/2.8 STM pancake in an attempt to satisfy a ‘single focal length’ challenge to myself, inspired by Sean Tucker. The results of the challenge were somewhat varied which is fine by me as I am happy to continue learning.