#3 – The Swans
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Calendars
I’m excited to announce that I have found a company that prints custom calendars, therefore I will be starting a range of calendars, beginning with a collection of my hand painted photographs of Cambridge and the colleges.
RedBubble is the company that will be doing the printing and you place your order directly with them on their website that can be found here. The gallery of my available calendars can be found here. I hope to be adding more very soon.
My first calendar is a compilation of lots of my Cambridge College Hand Painted Photographs, which I have been announcing over the last few months, see this post for some examples and here for how they are made.
I hope you like the calendars, I hope to be adding more in the future. Please do let me know what you think by adding comments, or requests for particular sets of images.
Photoblog
I have decided to add a photoblog to the site, it will be featured in the sidebar at the top left of the homepage. I plan to post interesting photos there when I find them and hope it will allow me to challenge myself as a photographer to find interesting things to put in it.
Posts to this will not show up in the usual feeds for this blog, if you are interested you must add the seperate feed at the bottom of the PhotoBlog. You can find it here.
The first post I have added is a shadow self portrait, I might try and add other self portraits with a twist at some point.
All of the previous posts to this photoblog can be found here.
#2 – Winding Path
#1- Self Portrait
Winter Weather and Christmas Cards
I hope to be able to get out very soon and expand my range of Christmas Cards, firstly by taking pictures of the Cambridge Christmas Lights and Decorations, but also in the strong frosts (and possibly snow) over the next few days. I managed to get out this morning and take a few pictures, hopefully more will follow soon. A small selection is below.
I particularly like the objects like the tyre in places that you wouldn’t expect to see them. I think it has a lot of interesting detail work, the same is also true of the fence post/wood detail. I also really like the different colours in the fields. The strong frost really picks them up well.
Christmas Exhibition – Haddenham Gallery
For the first time, some of my hand-painted photography will be on display at an art gallery! Seven of my paintings will be in the Christmas Cornucopia at Haddenham Gallery, near Ely, from 13th November until 24th December.
Do go and have a look at my work, they also have card versions to buy too. The gallery features work by many other artists, sculptors as well as having many rugs, wall hangings and other more unusual artwork.
The artwork they have on display is as follows:
Description of the works can be found in previous posts, here and here.
New Artwork – October 2010
I have been working on lots of new artwork recently, following is a round-up of all the new pictures I have painted and a short description of each.
I think my favourite is the Sole Bay Inn, Southwold. It just has so much detail and interest. It’s also quite special to me as I have been on holiday to Southwold many times in the past. I hope you enjoy looking at the rest of them.
The Sole Bay Inn, Southwold This is a small pub in Southwold, which should be familiar to anyone who has visited this small seaside town on the Suffolk coast. I really love the colour contrast in the picture, and it holds lots of good memories for me.
The Cathedral Lantern, Ely This study of the Lantern on Ely Cathedral gave me the opportunity to paint lots of detail in, it is the second in a selection of studies of different parts of Ely Cathedral.
Senate House in Snow, Cambridge When I started to paint this picture I wasn’t really sure about how it was going to turn out. It just looked really grey and miserable, however when I finally added the spots of colour to the grass under the melting snow, and to the urn in the centre I thought it sprung to life and now I am really pleased with the results.
Rose Crescent, Cambridge I thought it was time to try and paint parts of Cambridge that are not just the colleges, and this was the first one I have tried. I really like the result, and the bikes make it look like a typical Cambridge scene, while the person in the background adds some life.
Robinson College, Cambridge This painting is of my college and therefore had to happen at some point. I really like the variation of greens on the lead in, as well as the many different colours in the bricks.
Clare College, Cambridge Another classic Cambridge college, I really like the lavender details in the lead in to this picture.
St John’s College Chapel II, Cambridge This is the second painting I have done of St John’s Chapel and I like the way the red brick hall offers a contrast to the sandstone of the main chapel.
Magdalene College, Cambridge I like all the garden details in this painting, and it offers a different view of a college, rather than simply being the front entrance. I’m going to try and paint more of the colleges in views that are less commonly seen.
Christmas Cards
This week I am releasing the first of a set of photographic cards for Christmas. Included in these are Cambridge Christmas Cards and other landscapes and buildings in the snow in my local village and the surrounding fens. Have a look in the Christmas Card Gallery and see which you like. As usual with my cards they are sold on the UrbanLightbox website.
The cards are the same style as my regular PhotoCards, including a hand mounted photograph on the front, blank inside for your own message and include envelopes. Have a look here for information and ordering instructions.
The prices for the cards are listed in the table below.
| Pack Size | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Single | £1.50 | |
| Pack of 5 | £5 | Pack can contain different images |
If you are looking for a very large order please contact me to discuss your requirements.
I plan to release further cards later in the year, possibly including Christmas Illuminations and Christmas Decorations. So watch this space for new developments or subscribe for updates.
Aperture and Depth of Field
Further to my post on Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO, I thought I would cover how aperture relates to the depth of field in a photograph.
The “depth of field” in this sense relates to the part of the photograph that is in focus, foreground, mid ground, background or a combination of all of these. Physics makes it impossible to have everything in focus at the same time. But different lenses and apertures allow you to have different amounts in focus.
As a rule a large aperture (small F-number) has a small depth of field, i.e. only a small part of the picture will be in focus at a time and the rest will be out of focus. This can be a very useful effect if you are trying to focus attention on a particular part of the photograph and the background is distracting. I have been trying this a lot recently, as shown in the selection of pictures below.
A small aperture (large F-number) will have a larger depth of field meaning that you can keep more in focus, this can be very useful when taking large landscape shots.
Having said what the effects of aperture is on the depth of field you then have to remember what I said in the previous post about how it relates to exposure. A small aperture to keep everything in focus will let less light in and require a long exposure time, and you have to be careful about blurring. Just remember it’s all a very careful balancing act! Keep adjusting settings until you get what you want. And remember you can also use filters to compensate for some things too.