Bob Small photography.'s photostream  

As we're not really all that far from the eastern flanks of Exmoor, I proposed a trip to Hay Tor with Jay for sunrise yesterday.

The angle of sunrise presented a couple of problems with balancing the exposure across the scene, so I stacked 2 ND grads to allow me to shoot into the sun - although this caused flare issues and the dust I neglected to clean caught 'speckles' of light!

The colours haven't been changed in processing, all I've done is alter the curves a little and dodged some of the exposure.

We happened to need a trip to Weston Super Mare today, so decided to walk along the bracing sea front before we headed off home.

I got some nice shots of a rainbow above the pier but decided to convert this one to black and white, as it was all about the tones across the image rather than the colour.

I like the way the branch that has washed up on the beach has joined the local tourist office to point the way to the fun of the Pier!

At last - a chance to get out with my new lens and new 100mm filters!

Although the weather wasn't fantastic (a mix of brief sun, cloud and drizzle) we took a trip to Porlock Weir to see what we could shoot.

As the tide was a long way out I decided to compose something interesting on the wooden harbour piled wall that holds back the shingle beach. I used a Grad ND4 filter to lower the sky exposure, processed to extenuate the contrast across the scene.

I haven't been back at high tide for a while, I think I will check out the tide tables and try for a spring to get some long exposures of the water against the piles.

View in light box and you get more sense of the tones against black!

This was the sunrise one day last week - for once mother nature decided to put on a show this winter.

The hunting of the title is hunting for focus - this was taken on my new 17-70 f/2.8 lens that came the day before. It has a focus problem where it hunts backwards and forwards before stopping and calling whatever it stops at to be 'in focus'. 9 times out of 10 it isn't!

Needless to say that one is going back in the post to the online store I got it from, I have already picked up a replacement locally so tested it in store.

Since this one was in focus it shows how nice the quality of the lens is.

Thumbs up from Santa :)

Merry Xmas to one and all - been a busy year for me what with a new job and marketing my photography online and at craft stalls - so haven't had as much time for Flickr and comments as I'd like.

I do look at lots of pics from my contacts often though, and despite the lack of me commenting, I can say the standard of images is amazing so you should all be proud of yourselves.

Raise a glass to a Snappy 2012!