Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
A RSPB St Aidan’s this morning: volunteer wardens Tom and Evelyn, rivers MEET cafe crafter Miss B, moorhen footprints and a six-spot burnet on knapweed.
We also saw a drake common scoter, spoonbill, bittern, a juvenile kestrel dustbathing and preening and a gatekeeper blundering into a web amongst the grasses and being instantly caught by a spider.
Barbara’s mum and her friend used to go into town on the access bus on a Friday morning and she’d often come back with a brush. This bannister brush from Wilko’s was a bit of a bargain at £1.49.
I drew the brush and my camera bag in Procreate on the iPad, using Procreate’s Technical Pen.
Portraits, landscapes, nature, still life, movement and street photography . . . I feel that I’m got to know my Olympus DSLR and its 14-42mm kit lens a whole lot better in the past week.
My final module in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course is street photography, so I’ve set the Art Filter my Olympus OM E-10 DSLR to ‘Grainy Film’ and headed to Ossett Market.
Sitting on a bench looking down at the flip-up screen, I can snap away without being spotted. So apologies if you’ve ended up on one of my photos.
I like the low viewpoint that I get from a bench but to get the feel of a market I tried browsing the bookstall while ‘shooting from the hip’. But I’ve been spotted… .
“Are you capturing the moment?” asks the man on the mobile phone accessories stall.
How can I do street photography without including a pair of street preachers?
As we head home we meet Ruth Nettleton. As she’s the local historian who wrote a centennial history of Ossett Town Hall, I photograph her with the current restoration work behind her.
For the still life module from my photography course I’ve taken my sketchbook as the ‘hero’ object with pen and watercolour box as secondary props.
My wallet was the first thing that I had to hand, so I set up my desktop ‘studio’ – a curved sheet of watercolour for ‘infinity curve’ background.
Also making an appearance, centre stage, my 1950 Bedford delivery van Dinky Toy.
Yes, I know that the portrait module was Tuesday, but how could I resist Winnie and Pepper – a 2-year-old St Bernard and his aunt – when I spotted them in the courtyard at Nostell?
But before I could get the shot I was after the two of them came to life, checking out the camera so closely that I might as well have switched to macro.
Luckily they soon settled down and I got my shot.
Today’s module in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course explores movement, so he suggests techniques to freeze or alternatively blur the action of speeding vehicles or to capture traffic trails at night but I’ve headed for Coxley Beck to try some long exposures of flowing water.
For these one- to two-second exposures a tripod was essential and, as with the macro flower shots yesterday, using an app on my iPhone to trigger the camera and set the focus point made things a lot easier than squinting through the viewfinder. It also cut out any chance of camera shake.
After the portrait module I’m back on home turf with ‘Nature’ today in Ben Hawkins’ Complete Beginner’s Photography Course.
He suggests getting up at dawn for a dew-fresh close-up of grass blades but yesterday, as the late afternoon sun backlit a patch of our front lawn, I went for his alternative suggestion of adding the ‘dew’ with a fine-rose watering can.
My usual approach to flower photography is to snap away and hope for the best, so it was interesting to try his more considered approach, using a tripod and setting up the shot with a bit of extra care.
This is where the ability to remote control my Olympus DSLR with an iPad proved useful (you can also use a smart phone). It enables you to control aperture, shutter speed, ISO ‘film speed’ and focus without crouching down to look at the subject via the camera’s viewfinder or flip-up screen.
The final challenge was to photograph a backlit leaf. My Huion light pad wasn’t bright enough so I sprayed the leaf with water and stuck it to the studio window.
The whole beginner’s course is designed for a digital camera with an general purpose ‘kit lens’. Mine zooms from 14-42mm, which in traditional 35mm cameras that would be 28-84mm: ranging from a wide-angle (28mm) that doesn’t distort perspective too much to a short telephoto (84mm) that is useful for portraits.
When I bought the camera it also came with a dedicated macro lens and a modest telephoto zoom (80mm to 300mm in traditional 35mm terms) so I’m impressed at how well the everyday kit lens has performed as a macro lens on the leaf.
I’m out with my Olympus DSLR again and today it’s the portrait module from Ben Hawkins’ book, The Complete Beginner’s Photography Course. That includes a portrait of hands, so I set up a mirror and photographed my ‘all-fingers-and-thumbs’ method of holding the camera.
For older gnarly hands like mine Ben suggests going for black and white and adding a bit of grain.
Our next challenge was pet portraits, although challenge is hardly the right word as it would be impossible to take a bad photo of Bertie.
“Does he mind having his photograph taken?” I asked the woman at the next table in the Little Owl cafe, RSPB St Aidans.
“He loves it!” she replied showing me her phone with Bertie filling the home screen.
In the book Ben Hawkins suggests setting the shutter of your camera to silent when photographing pets and you can see that Bertie was getting a tad suspicious by the time I took this, the second photograph.
We’re asked for a portrait with the figure in context so as we sat in the Rivers Meet Cafe in Methley, I couldn’t help thinking that the busy sewing room, with the Monday morning class hard at work, would be a brilliant setting. I got what I was after straight away, or I thought I had when I checked the photo on the camera’s flip-up screen. It was only when I got it on the big screen back home that I realised that I’d caught my model mid blink. Moral: always take several shots.
On location and I’ve brought my trusty 1950 Bedford delivery van with me.
We’re on assignment because I’ve just started Ben Hawkins’ The Complete Beginner’s Photography Course, A Modular System for Success and the park at Nostell Priory is an ideal location to complete the Landscape section, including this attempt at ‘forced perspective’, creating an illusion with a toy car.
It worked better on the lichen encrusted capstones on the old park wall than it did in the sunlit courtyard at the stables because I couldn’t get the camera down far enough to get ‘eye level’ at about the height of the van roof.
But there’s more to landscape photography than toy cars – or as Ben suggests we call them ‘the right props’. He starts with the rule of thirds.
Then adds a focal point – again, to have most impact, at a junction of thirds.
His next suggestion is to create depth by adding a lead-in line, such as a path or shoreline.
And of course you can frame a landscape with an overhanging branch, a tree trunk, a bench or even a Robert Adam bridge.
The only shot that I struggled with for technical reasons was one which showed a still landscape with one element moving and blurred – such as cascading water or windswept grasses.
I need to try again with a tripod and, as a long exposure is needed, on a duller day.
This was my attempt at ICM – intentional camera movement – a rowan with plenty of ripe berries. It’s intended to give an impressionist effect.