Must Take More Photos...

Unfortunately life seems to have gotten in the way of taking any decent photos recently, hopefully the weather will clear up over the next few days and either one night this week or next weekend I'll get out and see what I can find.  Failing that I might dig out some gear to do something like smoke or water droplet photography.

Wire Wool

Last week I decided to take a little break from Stars and instead did some wire wool spinning with a friend, Lloyd, for those of you who don't know what I'm going on about watch this video from PhotoExremist.com and it explains things nicely.

http://youtu.be/LJkBLMhXvcQ

I managed to get some wire wool from B&Q a few weeks ago for £3, and was a little worried as to how long it would last but as it turned out we had plenty and actually ended up breaking the whisk before we ran out of wool.  A quick trip to a pound shop for a dog lead and an old whisk from home and all we needed was somewhere to go.  Not far from where we live is some ruins next to a Church which would provide somewhere we could give things a spin.

After about an hour of spinning I managed to get a few shots I'm happy with, now we just need more wire wool and a new whisk and am sure we'll be doing more soon.

Starscapes

After seeing the Northern Lights from the light polluted South Shields I thought it might be an idea to head to somewhere with fewer street lights on the off chance that they might be visible again.  So last Wednesday I headed up to Druridge bay with a friend however I'd never been there before, thankfully its only about a 20-25 minute drive from where I live and didn't prove too difficult to find.

As soon as we got there we noticed just how many more stars were visible so we quickly headed off to the beach.  By the time we managed to get down onto the beach it was nearly blowing a gale and a bank of cloud appeared but there was enough patches in it to manage to get some shots in.

They aren't perfect in my eyes, after all we are our own harshest critic, but I'm quite pleased with how they've turned out and it's definetly worth a return trip in the future, hopefully with a bit less wind and cloud about.

Northern Lights

The Northern Lights were visible as far down as Newcastle over the last day or two, or at least so I'd heard thanks to https://twitter.com/#!/VirtualAstro.  However I'd not managed to see anything so I took a chance and headed down to South Shields with my camera, if I could see something I'd take a few photos and if not well its not that far to go so nothing really wasted.

Rather glad I took the chance though as it turned out you could see it, but only just, but that was enough.  After a couple of test shots I ended up on 25 seconds at f5.6 and iso 400, I'd have preferred to up the aperture a bit but that would have meant I'd either have to increase the exposure and risk star trails or up the iso and bring some more noise into the picture.






After uploading them to flickr and then tweeting them to VirtualAstro my flickr views went from about 10 for the day to over 1600!

Danbo in the spotlight

Danbo in the spotlight, a photo by russellcram on Flickr.

I took this last week after finding a bunch of USB powered lights in a draw and the closest thing to hand was a Danbo figure who I'd bought ages ago with the intention of using as a photography prop after seeing lots of photos on the internet using him.  I'd never really come up with anything worth while using him until this and I'm hopefully going to get some more of him soon.

The Ubiquitous First Post

So after 15 years of using the internet I thought it was about time I started using my own blog, something I never thought I'd ever do.  But this one has a purpose, over the last few years I've found myself doing more and more Photography and I intend to do use this blog to encourage me to do even more over the next few years.

Or at least that's the plan...