theonlyD800inthehameau
Photography by theonlydeadheadinthehameau
Lens-Artists Challenge: Intentional Motion
Posted on October 22, 2024
It’s almost counter-intuitive to move your camera intentionally when taking a photograph, but the effect can be quite arresting.
When I got my first proper DSLR we were living in an apartment in the centre of Abu Dhabi city. I took a couple of photography courses and this is the result of one of the exercises that was set.
With the camera on a tripod sitting on the apartment’s terrace, I aimed it at the night view, which was of a busy road with high rise buildings at the far end.. The effect was achieved with a long(ish) exposure, during which I slowly rotated the zoom lens. Weird.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Looking Back
Posted on October 15, 2024
A particularly interesting theme for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge: ‘Looking back’.
If you think about it, every photo you’ve ever taken – even the one you might have captured less than a minute ago – is looking back: a split second of a memory preserved for ever (or at least until you press the ‘Delete’ button). Indeed, why do we take photos in the first place, if not to create a memento?
I’m fortunate to have many happy memories – and perhaps even luckier to be able to remember them, but I’d be lying if I said that having a photographic record hasn’t helped in that.. So, the choice wasn’t easy, but I finally settled on something.
Madame and I have been lucky enough to visit Venice four times, all for wedding anniversaries, of which three were significant milestones. This is the hotel , on the Grand Canal, that we stayed in on two of those occasions. Happy days…
Lens-Artists Challenge: Setting a mood
Posted on October 8, 2024
The light of Golden hour adds a mood of serenity to this image of boats at anchor in the Vieux Port of the city of La Rochelle in western France.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Unexpected Vista
Posted on October 1, 2024
This week’s Lens-Artists Challenge is about finding beauty in unexpected places. Good one.
As the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder – in other words, a matter of personal taste, whatever the ‘rules’ say about the rule of thirds, the golden ratio or colour wheels..
This is actually the last photo I took in the month of September, so the ‘untouched’ version has been posted for Bushboy’s Last On The Card challenge here. It was taken in the nearby village of Rancon. It’s – obviously – an archway, although interestingly it’s completely free-standing and in fact the ground slopes away steeply about twenty feet beyond it.
What i failed to notice until I looked at it on the big screen of my desktop was the nicely framed vista that lay beyond, illuminated by the light of the ‘golden hour’. I wasn’t expecting that.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Cabbages
Posted on September 8, 2024
What could be more mundane than a cabbage? Even a red one?
These red cabbages, cut into halves or quarters, were on sale at the Saturday market in the city of Perigueux. Opened up like this, it’s possible to appreciate the complex layering of the leaves.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Cool colours
Posted on August 27, 2024
This is a detail of a variety of golden fern – or so the internet tells me. That’s definitely a cool shade of green, though.
(Sorry, but I cannot bring myself to spell ‘colour’ without the ‘u’.)
Lens-Artists Challenge: cool colours
Lens-Artists Challenge: sense of scale
Posted on August 19, 2024
The Minster dominates the skyline of the Yorkshire town of Beverley. It’s not a cathedral – although I’ve been in smaller churches that are counted as such. However it is, apparently, the largest parish church in England. I’m not surprised.
The vaulted ceiling of the nave reaches 65 feet above floor level (the nave itself is over 170 feet long). I think this image conveys a sense of the scale of the building. I captured it by dint of setting the timer on my iPhone, (using the Snap Pro app), placing it on the floor and beating a hasty retreat to get out of shot.
Lens-Artists Challenge: What’s In A Garden?
Posted on August 13, 2024
What’s in a garden? Many things, large and small. From stately homes to formal beds, from fountains to mazes. Obviously, not every garden has any of these, but I can pretty much guarantee that thy will all have flowers and insects that have a symbiotic relationship with them.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Tourist Attractions
Posted on July 14, 2024
Who among us has never been a tourist? And who among us has never thought that somewhere would be absolutely wonderful – if it wasn’t for all the bloody tourists?
This is Venice (of course), just off Piazza San Marco. And it wasn’t even high season.
Lens-Artists Challenge: Habitat
Posted on July 2, 2024
My regular reader (sic) may recall that where we live in the depths of rural France is very much sheep country. I’d estimate that most of the local farmers have at least some sheep as part of their agricultural ‘portfolio’, so to speak, although none of them do so on what you might call an industrial scale.
Our nearest neighbour and her late husband were full-time sheep farmers, albeit only on a modest scale. Their flock used to graze in our fields, which certainly kept the undergrowth under control. Now retired, she still has a small flock of maybe ten ewes, more as a hobby than anything else.
Their new habitat is a field just across the road from our house, from where they view me, should I happen to pass by, with a mixture of curiosity and contempt, as I wrote about here.
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