My Favourite Clump...

Yes, indeed, I'm not too embarrassed to admit that I do have a favourite clump of trees. It's not on some windy weathered-beaten hill but on the banks of the Avon. It's done me well over the years - The 'Wiltshire Trophy' at the local camera club, a big (massive) silver cup awarded annually for best landscape print (long before I was digital) for example.

Continuing the current theme of stillness, but a total colour contrast to yesterday's Heinz tomato soup's reds, a cool fresh and minty blue, here. Taken at that pre-dawn blue twilight time the original was a striking blue - very striking - and that was how it was going to remain....until;

Whereas as yesterday's tom soup had almost no changes, this has had more Photoshop layers than the number required to venture out in the spring oops, bleak mid-winter landscape. It might seem odd to make a black and intermediate PSD (keeping copies each time) and then adding a 'cool', (rather than straight blue) photo filter after but this does seem to contain the tranquil translucence that I (sort of ) had envisaged.

The street lamps way in the background had to be cloned out too, as while they even added to the colour original, in black & white they became hard, sharp and unnatural blobs.

Lens is an old Nikkor D 70-300mm f4-5.6 ED, which has long been replaced by Nikon with the VR version (note Mr Stein!) and can be got secondhand for about £80 on ebay. I had one before that snapped on the mount when I fell on it and as you can see, is an admirable performer. Whilst I have a nice posh and new top range Tamron SP vibration control and everything 70-300mm, for just sitting on a tripod, its technology is overkill and unnecessary. The old Nikkor is 2/3rds the weight and size of the Tamron and if it ends up in the river, it's nowhere near such a loss. And if the Tamron ever needs to get repaired or broken, I have the Nikon as a back-up. The 70-300mm is an essential lens for so many subjects, I couldn't live without one.

Absolutely essential to get in on all those details on 'L' large, especially round the bank.