Framedlight

Yesterday I went to the Olympic Velodrome with Alan and Derek who were booked in for a session on the track. They were lent the bikes by the velodrome and spent around a half hour being taught what to do. The remaining half hour they were let rip. Most of the time they don't look very happy and seem to be breathing through every orifice. I am no sports photographer and had forgotten my camera settings from the last time I came here. I started by using a fairly high speed (1/350) on my Nikon D500 with the  70-300mm DX lens. I then reduced to 1/180 for some panning shots. I was not confidant enough in my abilities to go any lower than that, although the panning shots are much better than the static high speed ones, even if sometimes a little blurry (IMHO). I find auto ISO really useful as it allowed me to set up the camera in manual mode, fix the speed and the aperture and just allow the ISO to vary. It was not that bright in there and most of the pictures were horribly noisy, whi...

On Thursday Mairi and I went for a walk along the Lee Valley. The day was not sensational - overcast and muggy. The web site for the Lee Valley (http://www.visitleevalley.org.uk/en/content/cms/outdoors/walks-walking/walking-routes/) gives a number of walks and we chose a circular one, around 4 miles in length, about as much as the dog can do. We started off by the boat pool and ended up there again, after walking down the canal,  past Dobb's Weir and then through the new river path  and back via Broxbourne station. To start we saw a canal barge used for trippers and then, strangely, we passed a man unicycling down the tow path. At times the vegetation on the banks looked tropical.