*** This Week Through Your Eyes 2024.10.26 ***

Not so impressive as last weeks building. But the Soviet era door, has a certain menacing air to it.

Great shots, BW works well here. First image seems to be little too tight, bit wider framing would been perfect.
Not sure I'd enjoy mirra, deciding by description. For me range from espresso to caffè crema (without any additions), or in rare occasions cappuccino with whisky/cognac.

Love your tree shots, they are fantastic.
Makes me wonder if I could ever achieve something as good or should I thow my camera away :D

The light in the first accentuates an amazing tree.
But it's the second shot here that I really liked.

I love that little bridge shot. I stared at it for some while trying out work out its scale.
I also like the shot that follows it. Thanks for the walk.

Congratulations! I bet you can't wait to get all moved in? It sounds like a brilliant base for walking in The Lakes.

I've not had an entirely unsuccessful time trying to photograph our celestial visitor, although I've not got any spectacular pictures and I've seen much better ones allegedly taken with phone cameras. I'm not 100% sure I believe these claims, but maybe it was brighter on those occasions?

Anyway, the very first time I went out hunting for it, I managed to capture this shot during the 20 minutes or so that I had before the clouds moved in for the night.

Ideally, I would have liked it to be closer to the horizon but with the sea fog that's nearly always there out towards the Irish Sea that seemed a bit optimistic and, at least every time I went out, turned out to always be the case.

Still, distant sea fog was the least of my worries. On every occasion I went hunting it, the clear skies very quickly clouded over towards the West.

I managed to get a half decent close up with the 100-400 too...

Those shots were taken with the Nikon Z8. When I tried again last week, I figured I'd give the GFX a go, but I got much poorer results due to the comet being much dimmer.

On all occasions I couldn't see it with my naked eye and had to use the camera to find it, so you were lucky to see it on Saturday, although that's going to be a great advantage of living in a rural location.

Thanks, I think woodland photography is really, really hard. There's so much to think about in terms of finding an interesting subject and isolating it from clutter, but showing it in its environment. There's always a scruffy looking bit of spruce shooting up right in the way of where you want to put your camera, it's a nightmare.

I'm quite lucky, because there's a lot of open access woodland around here, some of it quite old too, but the trick (for me at least) is finding areas with interesting subjects, trees with character and scenes where they appear to be interacting with each other in some way, arguing, dancing, embracing and so on.

I spend quite a lot of time editing these too. Mostly dodging and burning to pull details out of shadows, or emphasise certain areas, it's rare that I add or remove anything though, but I'm trying to set a mood. Sometimes I wonder if I've actually destroyed the mood rather than emphasising it.

I think the main thing is just to get out into the woods at different times of day and different times of year, exploring, looking for subjects, making test shots and playing about to see what works and what doesn't.

Sometimes, I feel like I've made some quite nice images, but then I look at work from the likes of Simon Baxter, Adam Gibbs or even my good friend Colin Bell, who has a remarkable eye for this stuff and I also consider ditching my cameras too.

That's part of the fun though. The first shot had intense red sunlight on the upper half, making it really hard to bring up the lower half out of the shadows without it looking particularly unnatural. The second one had much softer light, so it was easier. It doesn't have the same impact though. I suspect it will look even more menacing at other times of the day / year, so I will go back and shoot it again. Hopefully it wont try to eat me.

Lovely locations. How high is that mountain? Just from the look of it, I suspect it would be well beyond my abilities these days. I'm getting knackered just walking around the woods, admittedly carrying far too much camera gear (how did I ever get suckered into the idea of needing a sturdy tripod?)

Looks like a lovely location, not to mention, very cold.

I like the reflection shot. I haven't done one in a while, but when I do take similar images, I quite enjoy cropping out the sections that aren't part of the reflection, flip it vertically and end up with a surreal looking image, bonus points if the water is pretty still and there are things floating on it, such as the leaves in your shot.

Nicely executed.

The mountain is Monte Casarola 1950m, which leads onto the 2000m Monte Succiso, after a short hike. I was at 1300m. I just walked at low level this time.

I did Succiso on my second attempt, some years ago. On the first attempt a stretch of steep wet slippery shale, with a sheer drop on one side, made me turn back, as I did not feel safe . On the second attempt I took a longer more spectacular path that climbs up a glacial bowl. On the mountain top I came across a very elderly Sheppard on his way to the flock who were at the mountain peak.

It is our most dangerous mountain, a lot of accidents happen here, on the more treacherous paths. A woman slipped, and fell to her death on this mountain a couple of weeks ago.

Here is Succiso from the crest of Casarola.

M43 was perfect for hiking in the mountains. My Z7, with just the 24-200 or 28-400 comes a close second.

We're debating when to actually move. We need to do radical building work to the new place, which will be uncomfortable if we're living there, but will take some time to organise (plans, planning permissions, finding a builder...) On the other hand,there's the cost of upkeep on two houses - we're not really into multiple homes... Then again, Galloway is so beautiful... Very mixed feelings.
You did well on the comet pictures. Sadly it was cloudy here every evening except the one evening in Levens, and that was after the peak visibility. I count myself lucky to have at least caught a glimpse.