CLOSING DOWN!

I've moved my blog over to a Wordpress blog hosted with my website, so this one won't be used any more.

Find the new one at blog.shendy.co.uk.

Flat Holm

I went to Flat Holm today - an island in the Bristol Channel for those that don't know.

There are some fairly interesting Victorian gun emplacements, and it's particularly notable for a substantial colony of aggressive seagulls that will dive-bomb you with poo if you get too close to their nests and chicks. Couldn't have asked for a better day - the hottest day of the year so far, and completely calm for the crossing.

The boat goes from Penarth, just by the Cardiff Bay barrage - this is the counterweight for one of the bridges.

As seen previously, I'm always a sucker for lighthouses, and this one came with a nice rusty gun as well.

This one was taken from down in one of the old gun emplacements

A load of the flying crap factories. I didn't get pooed on fortunately, but it was close a couple of times.

Next month I'm going to Steep Holm, which is nearby and apparently steeper than Flat Holm.

Dorset

We spent a couple of nights in Dorset last week - the first night happened to coincide with the 20th anniversary of our moving in together, which was nice. We stayed in Burton Bradstock on the Jurassic Coast, also the home to Billy Bragg. I thoroughly recommend the B&B we stayed at - Chesil Beach Lodge.

We didn't really do much for the time we were there, not venturing away from the beach during the day and no further than the village for dinner in the evening. I also took quite a lot of photos...

The sandstone cliffs are really photogenic, particularly when combined with a blue sky and some light cloud.

This is a fence that's been built on top of the cliff to stop people using the old bit of the coastal path - erosion and rockfalls mean that the cliff edge tends to move inland somewhat, and there's quite a drop over that edge.

Due to enjoying dinner, we didn't quite make the most of the sunsets - we missed it completely on the first night, and could probably have done with being there a bit earlier on the second. I think what you really need is to be there earlier in the year when the setting sun shines directly onto the cliffs, as the warm light on the cliffs would be superb.

Someone had been mildly creative with the stones on the beach...

On Friday, we went over to Portland Bill before coming home, and you can't beat a nice red and white lighthouse in the sunshine against a blue sky.

I spend some time playing around with my 10-stop ND filter again, blurring out the waves.

This one was 30 seconds at f22, taken at 3pm.

4 seconds at f6.7

3 seconds at f32 (3-stop ND filter)

28 seconds at f22

8 seconds at f22, 9:20pm

I did start to experiment with some really long exposures in the evening, but only got 2 minutes into a 3 minute exposure when the battery gave up.

And finally, on the last night, I got round to experimenting with photographing the stars.

283 secs @ f5.6

314secs @ f5.6

This was intended to be a much longer exposure, but my second battery ran out after about 5 minutes - the other one was still re-charging after the beach shots above. I was a bit annoyed by this as I'd only used it for about 15 minutes of exposures - reading on t'interweb suggests I should be able to get 80 minutes. I've had the camera and batteries for just over 5 years and have taken somewhere in the region of 15,000 photos, so it could well be that they're reaching the end of their useful life. Thinking about it, I should probably have been turning off the image stabilisation for the long shots (especially as I've been using a tripod) as that uses a bit of juice, but surely not that much?

Looks like I need to get a new battery or two, as I want to do more star photography in France in the summer.

All hail Adobe, for they are geniuses.

Oh my.

A couple of minutes in Lightroom with the Clone tool, and look at this. Au revoir smudge!

Gnaargh!

So, I'd got this smudge on the sensor, which buggered up a few reasonable photos. I also discovered a downside to the long exposures - the longer you leave the shutter open, the more chance of dust landing on the sensor.

I spent the afternoon at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, and at one point it clouded over a bit - this shot is a 1 minute exposure and is pretty much everything I wanted to achieve with the 10-stop filter - you get the movement of the clouds and the water smooths itself out.

And a couple of bloody great dust sports.

I really like the picture, but it's been ruined by dust and the mystery smear.

Been a while...

Been a while since I posted - mainly explained because I haven't taken any photos...

Anyway, I recently invested in a 10-stop ND filter - it only lets through 1/1000th of the light, so a 1/30sec exposure becomes 30secs, making it easy to get long exposures in broad daylight.

I spent Monday morning wandering along the Grand Union Canal just outside Northampton. Took me ages to find it, as the roads bear no relation to what they were when I last went (probably about 25 years ago), and it's mainly a big set of distribution centres. It's one of the places I can genuinely look at and say "I can remember when all this was fields".

A 15 second exposure

30 seconds - really annoyed by the smudge top-centre. I cleaned the sensor before the rugby on Sunday and still ended up with it. Really annoying.

As the canal passed under the M1, there was an interesting juxtaposition of the old canal and the stark modern bridge.

Confit

We've spent the last couple of weeks making duck and goose confit.

Aldi has been selling frozen ducks and geese at pretty reasonable prices, and Asda have taken to selling duck legs for £2.70 a pair.

Makes a change from chutney - on which subject, SWMBO cooked up a huge vat of green bean chutney using our entire green bean crop from this summer. And then threw it all away as it wasn't at all nice...

First up, dissect your bird - separate the legs and breast, and perhaps the wings if there's a bit of meat on them.

Marinade in salt, oil, pepper, thyme, bay leaves and juniper berries.

After a couple of days stewing in the marinade, clear off the salt and vegetation and sear the meat.

Put it in a casserole dish, cover with goose fat and cook at 150 degrees C for a couple of hours. Yes, all that liquid is goose fat.

Then put it in jars and cover with lashings of goose grease.

End result - one of my favourite foods. No, strike that. My absolute favourite food.

Roast it in a moderately hot oven on a rack so that the fat drips off and the skin goes crispy.

Serve with reblochonade - sliced potatoes baked with a piece of reblochon cheese on top so that it melts through it.

Can you feel your arteries hardening just reading this?