MorseBlog

I decided now at the end of this year to go through the exercise of defining and selecting my best landscape photos of 2018. I wanted to make the list short so figured on 6 photos and finally ended with 7. I started with a short list of 18 from the 378 film photos I took this year. The process of whittling the short list down was not too easy. I rejected ones that had imperfect focus, bad film, or were not strictly landscape images. Here they are in roughly what I think is reverse order leading up to the best. Here is a video summary of the same photos... Whernside:  Force Gill.  (Fuji 690 GSW--Ilford FP4+) This I took as we hiked up Whernside in Yorkshire. Initially it seemed wrong to feature this waterfall from such a distance with a wide angle lens (65 mm). However on reflection I became really taken with the composition. A conventional photo would have made the waterfall fill the frame substantially. This places it in the broad open country of the Yorkshir...

I am always on a quest to improve my photography. Recently I have been watching YouTube videos from the likes of Justin Lowery or Nick Carver . Young guys who cut their teeth on digital and found film; landscape photography in particular. Working in medium and large format and they put their experience and knowledge on video. The area I wanted to explore more is getting good exposures in difficult situations. Typically this involves some adaptation of Ansel Adams’ Zone System.  This article is a summary of what I have learned in researching the topic and my limited application so far. One should not hold this as authoritative by any means but it might be a helpful resource to introduce the subject. I have attempted to synthesize some sensible summary from the various sources I have researched. At the end I list some additional resources.   Zone System Having read in the past about the Zone System as promoted by Ansel Adams it seemed inaccessible to those working...

A few weekends back Vicki and I traveled to the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales. It is located as circled on the map below. It is a beautiful place with beaches, spectacular cliffs and the Snowdonia mountains as a backdrop. We only stayed a couple of days but the weather was fantastic and we fell in love with the area and the warm Welsh people we met. I brought along the Fuji G617 and hoped to get some nice landscape photos. I also brought along my recently purchased soft graduated neutral gradient filter. I bought a cheap version of the Cokin filter (100x150mm) and holder. I was concerned about possible vignetting or interference of the filter holder on the edges of the image. The holder can keep multiple filters with extra slots. I removed these extra slots in an effort reduce the chance these would interfere with the edges of the image. All of these photos can be seen here in full resolution . This blog format does not show them off in the best way. I started out with just...