Framedlight

At the beginning of November my daughter Mairi and I spent a few days in Athens. We did the sights, the weather was warm, it was completely stress free and wonderful. Here are a few pictures from the first evening we spent there. We were staying in the Plaka area of the city which is close to the Acropolis and wandered down to a little restaurant right under the Acropolis Hill. The view from the restaurant Hadrian's Gate Mairi The Parthenon reflected in the museum glass  

That evening I went down to the beach at Cobo Bay to get some night time shots. Guernsey is an official 'dark sky' location and a good place to see the Milky Way. The group were playing with light effects, so I had a little go at that as well. For the sky pictures I kept my speed down to 30 seconds so that the stars did not appear as streaks. This did not appear to be as short a time needed for this and there is a little streaking.

As if we hadn't done enough already on the day, it had been arranged for the group to go into St Peter Port and photograph some models. This had been arranged by Guernsey Camera Club and Ann Miles from Cambridge Camera Club to whom thanks should be given. In fact Ann organised the whole trip on Guernsey in her own completely selfless way and it is not surprising that she has recently been awarded a medal by the RPS for her services to photography. Not that my efforts on the night were a particular service to photography! The models we are working with were two local girls. It was going to be difficult photographing them without lights, and without using flash in the darkness of St Peter Port, anyway. But the fact that it initially was bucketing with rain did not help either. Any way, with incredibly high ISO I converted their pictures to black and white to give a bit of a 'noir' feel.

Here is a collection of alley pictures I took in Venice, by day and then after dark. The last one is looking down to the door of our apartment.

After our late dinner, or early breakfast we drove to a quiet residential area on the north bank of the Thames, overlooking Canary Wharf. It was still dark but by the time we left the sky was starting to brighten. Our next and last stop was More London, just downstream from Tower Bridge. There was a bit of a sunrise which promised a lot but delivered little, and then the sky brightened very quickly. By 5.30 we I was back at Kings Cross and waiting for a train to take me home. Many thanks to Doug and Terry for excellent scouting, driving and organisation. All the pictures were taken with the Nikon D800e and the 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom lens, apart from the last two where I used the 24mm f/3.5 tilt shift.  

We were dropped off by Terry at Tate Modern. The time was now a bit before 1.00am and we were told by Doug that the lights illuminating St Paul's would be switched off at 1.50am. I started photographing around the entrance of the Tate and then started to walk towards the Millenium Bridge, finally crossing it and arriving on the other side just as the light went out. I managed the classic shot from the ramp at the Tate end of the bridge looking across to St Pauls, and then a less classic shot of a curve in the bridge. The blue colour of the bridge at night was electric and looked wonderful against the velvet black sky. I managed to process all the shots just in Lightroom except for some minor cloning out of a sign in one. It is amazing how Lightroom can cope with these extremes of contrast, especially in long exposures, although the wide dynamic range of the D800 must help as well. Terry picked us up in front of St Pauls and whisked us off to a cafe in Smithfield where I had tomato...