A cold Sunday in Ely. Shot in RAW

We took a trip to Ely, Cambridgeshire last Sunday to have a look around.

Luckily the weather remained dry, however it was pretty cold but as its November it was to be expected.

Ely, a city, is known for its cathedral, although I'm not a religious person i was drawn to the building due to it size; you have to admire the workmanship.

My favourite part of the day was walking by the riverside; canal boats, pubs, restaurants and fresh air, all a good combination.

Although the image contains lens flare, i used the foliage to diffuse the sunlight in order to achieve a decent exposure

One thing i didn't expect to find while walking alongside the river is what has dragged out and left on the side.
It seems I'm drawn to odd things.

I used this trip to shoot in raw for the first time. Although I've been into photography for a few years now I've never felt the need to shoot in raw.
I usually shoot in the finest quality JPEG and try to read the histogram to monitor weather the image is correctly exposed. Another good trick is to use the clipping display on the camera to show weather the image is over exposed.
On average i also shoot with negative exposure compensation, i think i must prefer darker images.

I hope you enjoy my images!

One Day In Her Life; Manual Focusing and B&W With My Fiance Laura

The history behind this post is that i recently bought a Canon FD lens to reverse mount onto my camera to practice macro photography.

When buying the lens and reverse mount from ebay i also purchased an adapter to mount the lens onto Laura's Olympus E-PL1 compact system camera.

All in all, 1 old lens, 1 reverse mount and 1 adapter cost roughly 20 quid, which in my opinion isn't too bad.

Being an old lens it's fully manual, which was new to me as I'm used to controlling the aperture by the camera; this lens has an aperture ring just below the focus ring.

Mounting the adapter to the camera was very easy, just like mounting a true Olympus lens however mounting the lens to the adapter is a bit fiddly, especially to ensure control of aperture isn't lost due to incorrect mounting (this happened a few times) and now its mounted i really don't want to take it off.

It looks so good!

I really like how the camera sits in the hands with the larger lens on, it feels more natural than when it has the kit lens attached as the kit lens is tiny in comparison.

History lesson over.

I wanted to get to grips with using manual focus, so i decided to annoy Laura by following her around all day taking photos of her doing mundane things.

I really like this photo, the Laura's hands, phone and face area really crisp and sharp.
Its a very natural candid photograph.

 

Rough with the smooth

Im still loving and loathing the reverse mounted macro lens.

Loving it because its opened up a whole new world of photography for me.

Loathing it because its tricky with such a small depth of field and hard to find the focus distance.

Altering the aperture doesn't seem to make any difference either apart from making the image darker (due to opening being smaller) although i think i read this would be the case somewhere on the net.

So.

I ventured out the other morning when it wasn't raining with the intention of capturing different textures.

Can you guess what they are?

 

This photo shows how shallow the depth of field is.

Please comment.