Week 1 Self portrait

“ Night shift ” I chose to capture a self portrait at work, we are in the middle of moving offices so everything is a mess right now, this building will be rubble within weeks, so it is a little bit of history as well, by the time the album is live I will have already done my last shift in this office. I decided to give the image a vintage feel to match the fact this is the "old" office. I achieved this by editing in Nik Analog efex pro 2 then putting a rough border on it in Color Efex pro 4. I used a tripod and a 10 second timer then went to my seat, and just out of luck the phone rang while I was waiting for the camera to fire, so the pose is completely natural. If we have a challenge for "something new" in the year ahead, I may try the same in our new office.

Week 2 Leading lines

This is the new Marina pier in Dover, it opened in 2019 as a part of the redevelopment of the area, I had thought of using this to point to the shipping in the channel, but as it was completely empty I thought it made a striking image on its own so picked a different POV. The glow in the sky is from the harbour lights in Calais, France to the left, and Boulogne to the right

Week 3 Wabi Sabi

“ Done sailing ” There is something about an old boat that has been abandoned that has a certain charm, this one even had grass growing inside the hull.

Week 4 Fill the Frame

“ Indoor garden ” It still being mid winter here in the UK I couldn't find any large flowers that were growing, but did have some very small ones. I was going to use a whole lot of plants to fill the frame, but after sharing some images chose this small head of flowers taken with a Macro lens. I used a lamp above and to the side to give the illusion of sunlight using a 30 second long exposure at f/29 for as much DOF as possible.

Week 5 Shoot From Above

“ Over the road ” I held out until the end of the week waiting for less wind so I could try out my Drone for an aerial image, but alas the good weather never came, so this was my next best option, we don't have many tall structures with public access, so I used a foot bridge over our ring road, there was only very light traffic, so the light trails are limited, but I still liked how things turned out.

Week 6 Rule of Thirds

“ Kings and Queens ” King Ethelbert, one of the founding fathers of the Christian faith in England faced by his wife Queen Bertha. The backdrop is Christchurch Cathedral, the home of the Anglican faith, and the church of the Arch Bishop of Canterbury. I chose B&W because the church is lit with Sulphur lighting and the statues are LED, so the cathedral looks very orange.

Week 7 Intentional Colour

“ Red & Green ” I have always liked how water can bend light, and this challenge was the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the effect. Originally, I was just going to use the glass, but then thought that as it was there, why not do some water drop photography, this was the result.

Week 8 Pairs

“ Twins ” I decided to go for the pair I have always been a part of, my sister and I, born together, we come as a pair, but how many more pairs can you find in this picture?

Week 9 Extreme Contrast

“ Tiffany ” I chose my daughter as this weeks subject, she is a beautiful looking lady, but a little bit shy around a camera. Making a silhouette image of her was the compromise she was willing to accept. I achieved this result by having my daughter stand in front of a softbox and had the flash set on 1/4 power taking the picture looking straight at her and the soft box. I did have to stretch the borders out a little and increase the highlights plus lower the shadows a little, but that was it.

Week 10 Abandoned

“ Toys aren't us anymore ” It often looks quite sad when you see toys that once gave so much joy just left where they were dropped, this plane must have been someone's favourite toy once, but sadly it is abandoned in some shrubbery and will probably never fly again, it has seen it's last sortie, it's final flight.

Week 11 Trianular Composition

“ Too much GAS ” This is my fall back image as I was trying to do something new with a prism, but couldn't get anything like the results I was hoping for. These are all my tripods, most get used, but I have two favourites depending on what I am doing, the tallest one is my go to tripod when out and about, and the smaller Carbon fibre one if traveling. I could get away with just those two, but the others get used quite a lot as well. I'm not sure if they really fit this weeks theme but they are the best I could come up with once I realised my over ambitious first idea wasn't going to work out. I have given the challenge 5 stars just because I have tried something completely new to me, and even though I didn't achieve what I was hoping for, I am going to keep at it until I manage to get that image.

Week 12 Books

“ bent pages ” I chose to use a macro lens for this weeks challenge taking a picture of the top edge of a small pocket book, I tried a few different angles and lighting from different directions, but liked this the best. It was a fun challenge and I was quite pleased with the results of most of the images I got.

Week 13 Line from a song

“ Look up to the sky and see (Queen) ” My line from the generator was Queen's Look up to the sky and see. I am on lockdown, so the only access I have to the sky is from our garden. We had clear blue skies all week, and that would have looked pretty dull, so I decided to take a shot of the stars, we have a lot of light pollution where I live, so can't see very many, but a 30 second exposure made some visible, the moon was added as it was on the other side of my house and there were far too many lights to get anything else on that side, so this is a composite image, but both taken on the same evening.

Week 14 Curves

“ Yellow Bird ” I chose this as a last minute switch, I don't know where it came from, but noticed it in the back garden when looking out of the window, it might have been there for a long time, but my wife has just been cutting growth back ready for the summer months and there is was. I do like all the curves as well as the colours, and it looks cute...

Week 15 A Different angle

“ Seagull shooting range ” These are just a few of the cars we use that have had to be parked up for the duration of the Lockdown. This is the first image I have submitted here using my drone. For some reason the local Seagulls have decided to use our fleet as target practice over the last couple of weeks.

Week 16 Fast Shutter speed

“ OK, the cup was not really being honest ” Stuck indoors has left me scratching around for ideas, I managed to get up to 1/2000 shutter speed using HSS flash so that it wasn't the flash that froze the action, but it is an uninspiring image. What it is though is me embracing that imperfection we all need to do once in a while, being stuck inside seems to have me doing it more than I want to though. But Hey! I can live with that, it is another post for the streak, and you've got to love a streaker

Week 17 Soft

“ Out of this world ” This is a soap bubble, ot at least a part of one, I had never tried this before, and it took a lot of images before I was getting anything I liked, a total of over 400 pictures were taken to reach this one, but I am happy with both the image and the learning of a method needed to achieve this result. I don't know many things softer than a soap bubble, which was how I came to think of this as my picture, the different patterns and colours achieved every time was fascinating to see, every single shot was different, which made it hard to choose just one of them, but this one had a good mix of shapes and colours, and eventually won the cull. I used a macro lens, a softbox for lighting and a mix of washing up liquid, water and glycerine for the bubble mix.

Week 18 Low Key

“ The Lady in Red ” I persuaded my wife Tina to let me take a photograph of her for this weeks challenge, I think she looks beautiful, but she is reluctant to have her picture taken. I used a black background and an off camera flash in a 60 cm softbox. There was some editing needed to obtain the result you see here, I did warm the image up just a fraction as well as raising the highlights very slightly, and apply a crop.

Week 19 Roll of Film

“ Makin Bacon ” As an extra bit of a challenge this week, the mini group I am in also had the option to follow a theme which was to use a frying pan, so I spent the last week thinking of all sorts of things I could do, but struggled to come up with many options. In the end, I decided to pick what I thought would make the most interesting image and set it up. While composing the image, it became obvious that the different colours around the cooker would be a distraction, so with that in mind I chose to create a B&W image. The pigs are a small amount of a large collection we seem to have acquired over the years and were the perfect size for the pan, so in they went. The image qualifies for the extra credit as it was the only picture I have taken all week. I used a mounted flash pointing to the ceiling

Week 20 Not What You See

“ My favourite five ” After a lot of images had been taken, I eventually managed to put this together, these are my 5 wives, they are all great fun and fill the house with laughter most of the time. It is not really flattering using the two girls on the sides of the picture, as the wide lens isn't flattering at its edges as it distorts quite a lot, but Tina allowed me to use the images anyway. I think she has resigned herself to being the only model available while we are on lockdown. We both had some fun creating the image, but I had the easy part to play.

Week 21 Symmetry

“ Circles in circles ” THis image was taken from the beach at Herne Bay in England, it is made up of 105 images all having a 30 second exposure, edited in lightroom, then merges in Photoshop. I also made a very short 4 second video from the images, there were some wispy clouds came over fairly low to the horizon but the sky was generally fairly clear Photo Location: Herne Bay Beach

Week 22 Fifty feet from Home

“ Down our street ” As there is little of interest within 50 feet of our home, I decided to just take a picture of everything, and then through the power of Photoshop, turn it all into a little planet. This is 19 images shot in portrait orientation made into a panorama and then resized to 3500 X 3500 pixels, rotated 180 degrees, and then turned into this mini planet. I have posted the panorama on my website, a very large 112 mb 38715 X 6598 image. I will include a link in the first comment. I have done one of these before, but not so close to home. I was exactly 50 steps from our gate as well. I shot this just after sunset, but the blue of blue hour isn't really visible.

Week 23 Dancing

Dancing in the wind I must admit, I struggled to find inspiration this week, a couple of ideas I had didn't work well, so I went into the garden and thought this English Laurel might be a good subject. I took several images with a Lee 10 stop filter on to capture any movement from the breeze in the flower heads with a 13 second shutter speed then took another image without the filter to freeze any movement using 1/80 shutter speed. I then developed the images in lightroom and selected two to take into Photoshop as layers, and blended them until I got an image that looked like what I was hoping for. I didn't quite get what I wanted, but this was as close to achieving my aims as I could get.

Week 24 Hands

“ A Bird in the Hand is worth two in the bush ” This is Charlie our 10 year old Cockatiel, he was hand raised, and is a very friendly little bird although sometimes a little destructive. The image is a composite as I could only capture an image of Charlie sitting where he likes to come and visit without having a messy background, so I used one of my old images which I blurred to help with depth, I also added some soft shadow behind Charlie to help blend him into the background a little. Gently blowing on Charlie is the best way to get him to raise his wings, but he does tend to wriggle about quite a lot when I do that, so I had to take a lot of images before getting one that was clear enough. I used a corded remote trigger and had the camera set up for about an hour before getting the shot.