Games, Pipes and Water Blur

The old piper, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Great weekend. Every August, Nairn hosts it’s annual Highland Games, the links are taken over by a fairground, the games themselves and the entire town along with just about everyone else descends on our sleepy town for a day of boozing and fun. It’s a grand day out and I thought it would be a good chance to get some cool photos of the celebrations. The weather was great, sunshine and nice chunky clouds that should have made for good photos.

The challenge was the crowds, it was incredibly busy and with so much going on, I found it really difficult to isolate subjects and ‘tell a story’ with my photos, there was lots of photo-fodder but I guess it’s just my lack of experience in these kinds of situations that made it tough to find something meaningful to photograph. Ah well, there’s always next year, my one reasonable shot was this one of a guy from one of the pipe bands. Just a quick bit of black and white and some contrast made a half decent photo. The rest of the shots are on the Picasa stream here…

Disappointed with my failure on the Saturday at Games Day, I decided to head down to the beach on Sunday evening to get some shots of the sunset. I actually missed the ‘actual’ sunset, arriving late but there was still a fair bit of ambient light and I was able to do a bit more experimenting with slow shutter speed stuff. I did some of this last year and had some good results, but that was at sunrise rather than sunset, meaning it was a race against time to get the right shot as I was constantly gaining light. Sunday was much better because the sun was setting, meaning I was loosing light and for some reason this feels like I’ve got more time…of course it’s all relative but anyway I was pleased with the output.

So todays second shot is what I think is the best of my ‘water blurring’ attempts. The camera was wedged on rock inches from the sea and I cranked the aperture round to f22 which forced the shutter speed to slow to about 4 seconds. Even with the light from the setting sun, I was able to blur the water successfully…although it got a bit nervy as the water came surging towards my beloved camera!

Anyway, the shot was then given my usual 5 shot HDR treatment from Lightroom 2 to Photomatix before getting a final contrast blast in photoshop. I’m really pleased with it, and think it’s better than my previous efforts!

Really excited about this week, on holiday from Wednesday onwards and hopefully off to get some camping and fishing done….can’t wait!