Good morning to everyone wherever you are in the world...thanks to Nigel for stepping in again.

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Rio, Brazil.

I picked up a SH Z105 macro at a good price. It was time to do something different. I also have been playing with focus stacking, which I find pretty incredible
. I have finally been able to photograph the wild Orchids in the Apennine foothills in a way I am satisfied with.

Here are a few first attempts.

I also shot some stuff on the balcony.

A rather older plant, that I picked up in Bath when I was at primary school, in Swainswick

Only 3 weeks ago

It's hard to believe, but Great White Frozen North (Canada, Ontario) still had snow. Today we have semblance of Spring - plus 11C. Onward and upward

A massive departure from your usual subjects, but results are excellent. The colours are amazing. Well captured.

Initially it's hard to decipher, but eventually you get used to magnificent view of the sunset. Excellent.

A tree

Took a walk over the local fell the other day. This oak tree caught my eye, seeming to shimmer in the spring sunshine.

I had to turn up the brightness of my screen to decipher this, but it turned out to be worthwhile. Those last traces of light in the sky are gorgeous.

The orchids are impressive. There are lots of Early Purple Orchids popping up all over the fell just 10 minutes walk from our new home - I must try to get up there with a camera...
The last of the cactus images is great! Could be a fantasy worm 😁

Beautiful harmony between the tree, sheep and the shadows. Stellar.

I like this graphic treatment of an ordinary subject.

I did not "get" this one until I saw it big, and saw the little crowd. Good one.

And that lovely green spring grass. Hope to see some of your local Orchids.

The Black Bubbles

This is name of Finnish band playing psychodelic rock in vein of 70'ies, this band was visiting Tallinn couple of weeks ago. I published initially photos in colour, but band reprocessed them as BW (maybe according to name :P ) and I tried also my version of BW approach. In some cases BW worked better, especially when light was quite dim and lot of smoke, so details are not distinguised anyway and all you have is contrast between artist and background. In one song our local vocalist stepped up, she can be easily distinguished by her haircut and powerful stage presence.

The Bluebells Cometh

I went for a wander in the woods on Thursday night to see how the bluebells were getting on. When I last had a look there was the odd one dotted around here and there, but now they're starting to fill out the meadows quite nicely. I don't think we're quite at peak bluebell inside the woods just yet, but another week should probably do it.

Despite these woods being on a West facing hillside, the evening light wasn't ideal for really making the bluebells jump out of the frame, it probably needs to be less overcast, although then you run the risk of getting hotspots all over the place, so there's clearly a Goldilocks zone somewhere between the two extremes. Selectively ramping up the blue saturation in C1P isn't going to help either as these guys are close to saturation on the blue channel as it is.

One other note, these do look a lot darker against the #white background on this site than they do in my editor or other previewing options that I have to hand.

All taken with the GFX100S + 45-100 f/4 + CPL on a tripod. Processed from individual raw files in Capture One Pro 23.

Onto The Path

This was one of the first compositions I found after entering the woods.

The View From The Other Side

And this is the other side of the same group of trees from further along the path.

The Winding Path

The path winds its way through the lower parts of Hodskinson woods.

Hints of Impressionism

This is the kind of image I only seem to get with the GFX, lots of splotchy looking leaves that, taken as a whole, look like they've been dotted on with a brush. The colours are a bit off here though. This seems to have become more of a problem as the evening progressed. To be fair, the leaves looked a bit odd when I was there, they're fresh and bright, quite garish really compared to how they'll look in a few weeks. This seems to make it difficult to get a nice looking white balance, probably because there was a lot of filtered and reflected green light knocking around when I took the shot. My initial attempt to process this shot ended with something looking a lot like chip shop mushy peas, which have a decidedly yellow tinge, but I reset my edit and started again, ending up with this result.

Not Too Far Down The Path

It's that tree again from the beginning. I haven't really made it very far down the path at all in what must have been about 30 minutes since entering the woods. Again, the colours aren't great here. I wanted to warm this up a bit more, but the tree barks very quickly head towards magenta, which is not right at all, so where I've ended up here (slightly warmed in the blue/yellow spread) seems like a reasonable compromise.

Meanwhile, Over In Fangorn...

This is taken a bit deeper in the woods, in an area that sometimes looks like it might have been plucked directly from the pages of Lord of The Rings. Yes, there are still bluebells in here, one or two at least, lurking in the shadows. The colour and lighting is very different here as I'm facing the sun, so the canopy is mostly backlit.

I took a number of shots at this location, some in XPan (65:24) format and some in 3:2 (for some reason). I eventually felt the XPan format shots pulled in too much of the surrounding details on either side of the central subject that were more messy distractions than adding anything to the image, which prompted me to crop the top and bottom of this image instead to a slightly more reasonably 2.35:1 ratio (i.e. Cinemascope), which is a bit taller than XPan format, but still quite wide. It looks a lot more impressive full screen than the tiny thumbnail the forums layout rules have assigned it here.

White Coppice At Sunset

A bonus pic taken with the Nikon Z8 and Nikkor 70-180 f/2.8 from an evening walk around The Nab last weekend. It's really the only successful pic from that outing as I set out at the last minute and managed to miss the actual sunset at the location I'd intended to reach, so I've tacked it on here.

However, on the way up to my intended sunset spot, I noticed White Coppice looking rather nicely lit by the pinkish hues of the setting sun, so I scrabbled around for a nice composition, ending up with this. No filters on this one, as the 70-180 has a 67mm thread, so I can't use my usual 82mm magnetic filters (that fit practically everything else I own) on it without an adapter that I don't currently have and am not sure I want. I don't think this image really needed filters anyway.

The main issue with this image straight out of camera, was a triplet of bright green power lines running the full width of the frame just above the house (White Coppice Farm I believe). C1P's healing mask did a rubbish job of removing these, so I ended up having to roundtrip through Affinity Photo where I used the infill tool to paint them out. The results are still not ideal as I didn't spent too much time on it, so you can see a bit of foliage duplication in some of the trees if you look carefully.

Great shot. Love the colours in the sunset and how it's counterbalanced with the little triangle of beach under the floodlight. Your exposure looks well judged to me.

I have tried a couple of times but find it difficult to come up with pictures that have any impact. Composition is so different becaiuse there is generally just one subject. I enjoy the technical challenge though.

Nicely judged shot. The tight framing works really well here.