Raglan Castle

A few weeks ago we visited Raglan castle, I was surprised by how much of it remained standing since the ruins we have been to recently have all been in a pretty bad way. I took my OM2 with me on this trip as well as my D70 since I had already started a roll of HP5+ when taking some shots of my friend Paul's dad's pub, he has built it himself in his backyard! See the pictures here.



Since I had half a roll of film left I started with the OM2 in hand and wandered around taking different shots that I could see, as we got to the top of the keep I finnaly ran out of frames. 'Right time to rewind the film' I thought (an annoyance when you get used to medium format film which just goes from one spool to the other), however, I forgot to turn a little knob on the front of the OM2 which allows you to rewind the film. So as I tried to turn the rewind thingy I felt some resistance, unknowingly over doing it a bit and ripping the film from the cannister! Thinking something was a bit fishy I stupidly opened the back of the camera to have a look...massive error...film being sensitive to light n' all. this resulted in 5 out of the 36 exposures being completely ruined. I did manage to get a few nice shots though.



After this disaster I turned to the digital camera where you have no such problems where I got some more shots, mostly of the outside of the castle.



To see the rest of my shots from Raglan Castle Click here.

Flowery

I have been meaning to try out a little flower photography for a while now and on the weekend I managed to pick up some A3 sized Black and white card to use as backgrounds. With the new backgrounds in hand and some new flowers (thanks to Maria) I took the chance to get some shots.



The two flowers that I took photos of were Osteospermum (some kind of daisy apparently, pictured above) and another random plant that has just started to bloom (pictured below). The random plant was pretty tricky since I have no macro lens and the flowers are quite small but because the pictured part of the plant stuck out so far it was far easier to pick out the sections that I wanted to photograph.



On the other hand the daisy was a much larger flower and therefore easier to dominate the frame with it and use some of the other flowers to set the composition off. The challenge with this flower was to separate certain sections off so as not to complicate or make the composition fussy, I ended up placing the black card background in the middle of the plant itself, balancing on the edge of the plant pot.



Here is the link to the rest of my flower shots.

The Dags

I recently had the chance to try my hand at some group portraits with the aid of some willing subjects, The Dags. This was a far cry from the usual stuff that I get stuck into, but I still managed to get a nice landscape into the shoot (notice the backgrounds).



They wanted a moody look to the shots so I used mostly b&w with the colour shots desaturated a little to take the edge off the colours. The shoot was for their album 'Hold that Thought' so to give the whole thing a concept I decided to try something a little different. The idea was to have four group portraits where only one of the band members was in focus at any one time, the way I accomplished this was to use slightly longer than 'normal' shutter speeds and get three out of four of them to shake their heads during the exposure. This worked pretty well, after having to wait for the light to drop off (so I could achieve the right sort of exposure times; around 1/2 a second). I am not 100% happy with the outcome but I think I have proved the concept at least.



In between taking the group shots I ran around with my trusted 50mm prime getting some individual portraits, while playing around with depth of field (something I don't usually have to contemplate) which turned out to be the better shots from the day in my opinion.



Here is the link to the rest of the shots taken that day.