'Crouching Camera, Hidden Cathedral'

No, not a martial arts movie remake but the mark of the first outing for my newly acquired Gorillapod+ Zoom ball & socket head - that I've had for over a week, now.

Having been down this foot/cyclepath to and from yesterday's Blip, I noticed how the floodwater on the watermeadow was lapping right up to the tarmaced path's edge - a few weeks ago, the water was right over. Being 6'2", I never see the world from down there, so to speak but guessed it would be a good subject to try it out on.

Forecast was/is dull dull and then dull, with drizzle, a complete contrast to yesterday's deeply azure-blue skies - and a polariser wasn't going to save this one!

So, before sun-up time and having delivered the disc with yesterday's edited pics to the Chairperson, placed Gpod (as I'm going to call it, from now on) did the exposure, but delayed using the Mirror-Up function, which locks the D700's large (full-frame) mirror up for a whole 30 secs and then opens the shutter. Nothing was moving and there wasn't exactly any action and I had no idea how stable this new camera platform was going to be, after all and I manually set the shutter speed to 20 seconds, so I wanted to do all I reasonably could to aid sharpness.

Image was crooked, but didn't want to lose any edges so rotating the canvas and then trimming was out, so it was 'treated' in "Transform", where I literally pulled up the image - sounds easy but you do have to make sure it's still all OK as affecting one part affects another.

This version has had a reed and its head removed from the extreme right, too. I made a copy of the original PSD (Photoshop file) and did the cloning on that - that way I could compare the two and use either but still have big (70mb) files to make the jpeg copy from. As soon as I had done it, I knew this worked better, but will still keep the other, as well.

Colour is as was - the cold (about freezing) temp is really accentuated by the overall blueness and the browny grassy weed is from the streetlight behind me, which actually was extinguished very shortly after.

If you think that this all sounds complicated, writing this text after has taken 10 tens as long and a lot more concentration - the more you practice and know what you want and how to do it, the quicker and second-nature it becomes.

Lens is Sigma's fixed 20mm f1.8, but stopped well down

Apologies for being a bit behind with responding to and leaving comments on my fellow blipper's - just that bit tired and still not sure if that bug I had Friday has actually gone, or merely going very slowly. I'll catch up later this evening.