Category: Photographs

An Autumn Walk

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We woke up this morning, looked out of the window and could see it was going to be a nice day. We dropped off Samuel to school and got in the car and headed out with the camera to take some autumnal photographs while we had the chance.

The idea today was to just get some lovely photographs to go with the ones we’ve taken with Samuel over the years. When Samuel is off school next week we will do the same with both the boys, so this was great practise to get some things right. I chose to take the Viltrox 23mm F/1.4 and Viltrox 85mm F/1.8 and have my settings set to the MGA Colour Chrome setting (which can be found in the Fuji section of the website).

The idea today blossomed into doing everything away from home, so I’m writing this in the car while Llinos is shopping and George is sleeping. The photos were transferred from the camera to my mobile phone via the Fuji mobile app, which works amazingly. Editing consisted of a couple little crops and a border added to the photographs, all performed in Snapseed.

So, here are the images after going through this process… Autumn is certainly upon us!

The wonderful colours of autumn!

As can be seen, this all turned out really nice! It was quite a nice challenge that I set myself, and it turned out well.

Hopefully in the coming days I will share with you the shots that I took that were not of the family, but I just think this will be a change to a lot of my readers.

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Aberavon Sunset From The Top Of The Beach

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You never know what type of sunset you will get at Aberavon, so the fun is just turning up and taking photographs of the sunset and seeing what happens. For me, I can never get enough of this beach, as it has the most beautiful sunsets in the area. Tonight was no exception, although I tackled it from the opposite side of the promenade that I usually take my photos from.

Tonight my gear was my trusty Fujifilm X-T20 with my Viltrox 23mm F/1.4 and Viltrox 85mm F/1.8 lenses. Along with this I also used my Huawei P30 Pro mobile for some photographs, although this blog entry will focus just on the camera photographs. One day I will do a side by side comparison of a shoot, photographed both with the camera and the mobile phone.

Photographs were shot in MGA Leica-Like film simulation (which can be found in the Fuji section of this website) and processed in Darktable, where they were simply straightened and cropped where needed. The couple of monochrome images were converted in Darktable and set to the Fuji Monochrome setting.

As always, please click on the photos to see them full screen, and you can also see full EXIF data.

I’m really impressed with the performance of the camera and lenses in the night time. Of the 200 photographs I took (I done a few panoramas which I will look at later, plus a few burst shots of joggers), only 3 of them suffered camera shake or missed focus. I am more than happy with that result!

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— I am always learning with my camera, and sometimes I push it too hard. I set a minimum shutter speed on my camera to 1/60th and a maximum ISO of 3200, and for 90% of the evening this worked perfectly, however with the 85mm lens on I could see I was sometimes having shake, so I have now adjusted the settings to 1/100 and maximum ISO of 6400. I’m more than happy with the limited noise these settings produced when pushed to that limit.

Aberavon Seafront Sunset Photography Shoot

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On September 29th I decided to pop out for some sunset photography with a couple of friends. I also wanted to try out my Viltrox 23mm F/1.4 and 85mm F/1.8 lenses out in the evening and on the darkness that followed. I shot a lot of images that night, mostly because I bracketed a lot of images using exposure bracketing, but I learned a lot from doing that which I will explore in a future blog post.

I’ve chosen 16 images from the evening that I like. Of course, if you’re a photographer you should always like your images where possible. On this night, although the sunset wasn’t perfect, I had images that interest me. There’s a saying that if you have one image you like each time you go out you should be happy, but I think that was said by some bad photographers, as there’s always something to photograph, and if you don’t like what you’re taking photos of, then why bother taking the photograph in the first place?

These images were edited from the raw file of my Fujifilm X-T20 in Luminar 4. If you are interested in trying Luminar 4, or any Skylum products, then if you click here you can have exclusive free trials and money off. If you decide to buy any product from Skylum (Luminar, Aurora etc) then use code GPWNPT at the checkout for £$€10 off the product. You’ll be helping me by visiting the link, or using the code, as it gives me the opportunity to try their new products to try and review.

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Please view the images full screen for the best experience, you’ll also find full EXIF data for each photo.

These images were taken at Aberavon in Port Talbot, South Wales. Aberavon is a coastal area, with mountains within a mile or two behind the sea. It has some of the best sunsets Wales has to offer, with a variety of landscape opportunities, a small town, great architecture and much more. It’s close to the market town of Neath, and the large city of Swansea

A lot of my photography is based in this area as I live right next to the sea, a few hundred yards from where some of these were taken. I never tire of the opportunity of photographing the area, documenting it at every opportunity.

— As usual, if you like what you see, please like, share and comment. It inspires me to carry on with my photography and my blogs. I am an affiliate for Luminar 4, so just checking out the links in the article will help me promote this great software!

Minimalistic Photography Shoots

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Photography is an ever expanding journey into discovery. Standing still makes you become boring, so it’s nice to get out of your comfort zone and do things a little different on times. For these images I didn’t deliberately go out of my way to get something different, but due to circumstances and editing technique, the photos formed a series which I quite like, and may expand on in the future.

The photos were mostly take on my Fujifilm X-T20 using various film simulations for the most part, although there is one photograph from my Nikon camera and one from my Huawei Phone as well. The style for these is minimalistic and artistic, hopefully standing out a little different from my usual photographs.

The first seven photographs were edited in Snapseed during my downtime, while the eighth was edited in Photoshop 2020. I will use whichever editing software I have with me at the time, quite often using Snapseed to just try out ideas. Quite often though, as here, I will keep the final results without going into any other software. All images except the final image were edited from the camera jpeg.

Please view them full screen on your computer to see their beauty. All images come with EXIF data.

I believe variety is the spice of life, and that includes what I shoot, what I shoot it with and what I edit it in. A photographer can become to boring using one thing all the time, or staying to one type of editing style. You have to keep it interesting, you have to edit for your wall and you have to print out your photos to really understand where you are going with your photography.

— If you enjoyed this blog post, please check out my other blog entries. If you want to view only photographs, then go to my Photos Page, where you can view all the photos in blogs that I have put up for you to view. Please remember to like, share and comment if you liked what you seen! New blog entries at least twice a week, so subscribe too!

Clydach Canal Photography Outing

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It’s always good to get out and about, especially in the climate we are currently facing. Meeting a group of friends from Great Photography Walks NPT we re-visited the Clydach Canal in Swansea, this time heading north instead of south through this idyllic part of the country.

I thought I would use this outing to try out two film simulations that I have been working on, in the real world. There was a of green, oranges and browns today, so it’s difficult to judge the Leica-Like recipe, however I’m really happy with the J-Street recipe. I will use older raw files to look at the results of Leica-Like and judge how I feel about it, but from the images here, I really do like it.

Shot with the X-T20 and Viltrox 23mm F/1.4 and Viltrox 85mm F/1.8, these images were placed into Photoscape X Pro where they were simply straightened or cropped. We had various lighting conditions, and both lenses perform slightly differently, so here are the results of todays meet.

As well as countryside and the canal, I did take photographs of some of the people who were at the meet with us. Here are a few of these people, I’ve tried to choose photographs which show the colours.

There we have it, it was a great day today and many photos were taken. As a side note, I also used Performance mode on the camera all day, and managed for the first time ever to get through a battery! I actually didn’t really notice much, if any difference using this mode to the standard mode, so may just switch it back over.

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*** Note: The Leica-Like film simulation was shot on White Balance custom setting 1 in these shots and these are the jpegs. When run through Fuji X Raw Studio and using Auto WB, the green shaded images change colour slightly as they are not in sunny conditions. This has been a great eye-opener in creating film simulations using custom white balance. Usually I haven’t seen much of a difference, but conditions today forced them.