Friday 23 December 2011

Happy Christmas Alumni!


I wish I could tell you that I’ve taken ages to post something new because I’ve been so busy. Freelancing is tough right now for most photographers, and I am no exception. 
Still, it’s Christmas and I wanted to upload some pictures for you to take your mind off the endless playing of Slade and Jona Lewie on the radio. 
These photos show a giant redwood tree standing next to the house at Wakehurst Place, a National Trust property near Haywards Heath. Every year, the tree gets decorated with hundreds of lights and becomes the country’s largest growing Christmas tree. 
I have shot this tree before, but I wanted to do something a little different this year. I kept checking the forecast until a clear, cloudless night came up; I wanted to see stars. I used a facility that I found on my camera called “interval timer shooting”. Have a look and see if your camera has it. 
I was able to set my camera to take a series of twenty-second exposures with a break of twenty seconds between each one. Clever stuff.
After loading all the pictures onto my Mac, I used Dr. Brown’s Stack-a-Matic to lay all the exposures on top of each other to give the star-trails you see in the pictures. There's a link here to Russell Brown's site. He has an interesting vocal style, there's no doubt about that (just watch his videos!), but he is a very interesting guy with some amazing stuff on his site. 
The one at the top is my favourite, and I quite like the one at the bottom, but it was this one that The Guardian used.
I also wanted to tell you about a couple of courses that I’ll be running in two locations this year. They are both slight variations on the course that you all successfully went through with me at The Argus building. 
The first is at Park Cameras in Burgess Hill. Details here. 
The second is at West Dean College in June, near Chichester. Here's their website.
If you know anyone who would be interested, send them a link! 
Meanwhile, have a great Christmas! 

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