An English Summer Scene

You probably wouldn't know it but this is another picture from my day spent at Hever Castle last week. I mentioned the other day that as well as the castle, Hever has some spectacular landscape surrounding it and I hope this picture demonstrates that. I was very lucky to visit on a beautiful sunny day (hey, I live in England!) but the weather was my inspiration to go on this particular day. The bright weather made it quite difficult to capture some HDR pictures but it was still a fantastic opportunity to capture some great scenes of the English summer time.

This isn't an HDR photo but a single exposure processed in Lightroom and then Nik Color Efex Pro using the Glamour Glow filter. I wanted it to represent the English countryside in the summer but I dialled back the vibrance of the colours as my original version I felt was a bit too green. So this way I hope to have given it a more artistic look which is the aim of most of my pictures.

Hever Castle

Finally something from a new place on this blog! In fact, this photo is a bit of a change in more than just being somewhere new but in actually looking more like a real photograph. I spent all of yesterday's glorious sunshine at Hever Castle in Kent and whilst the sunshine was very welcome, the blanket bright blue sky did not really lend itself to taking HDR pictures. So it was back to my photography roots with the intention of just capturing a single shot fantastic landscape, which for this scene I wouldn't have done any other way. I will perhaps be a bit more creative with this scene in the future, like making it look a bit historical with a filter or texture maybe but with over 500 photos to go through, I'm pretty happy with this for just being back at the computer for a couple of hours.

So this is Hever Castle in Kent, a place I have wanted to visit for a couple of years now. Hever Castle is best known for being the childhood home of Henry VIII's second wife Anne Boleyn. She lived here from soon after her birth (circa 1501 believed to be in Norfolk) to around perhaps the time she was made Queen in 1533, with a 6 year gap in the middle (circa 1516-1522) during which she lived in France. She was 1 of 2 of Henry's wives to have been beheaded, the unfortunate victim in a conspiracy to replace her as Queen (almost certainly because she had been unable to provide Henry with a son). As I intend to post many more pictures from around Hever Castle in the near future, I won't go into a complete biography of Anne Boleyn now but naturally she is fondly remembered at Hever.

You can walk round inside Hever Castle, where you will quickly learn it's not really a castle at all but a large country manor house. It can be toured inside in half hour but what really makes Hever special are the gardens and landscape surrounding the castle. There are beautiful statues, fountains, streams, lakes, mazes, waterfalls...it really does go on. It's a fantastic place for the photographer and I highly recommend it. It was a fantastic opportunity to try some creative shots within the grounds of Hever Castle and as I said, will post many more of them in the near future.

Crosstown Wroclaw

So the weather is finally looking like it is starting to turn into dare I suggest sunshine in England and I will hopefully soon have some pictures of glorious summer days and heavenly summer evenings to decorate this blog with. I did go out yesterday evening to take some shots and though I did get a few, I've decided to hold back on the immediate processing and perhaps wait until Thursday to share one. It was mainly as a scouting mission to be honest. As I have recently moved house to the other side of Newbury, I've been looking at locations I haven't seen before to get inspiration from, for when the skies are looking better. I got lost on my run along the canal the other day but it had the positive effect of giving me many ideas for photos when I return with a camera. I would just like to thank though, the people that were having a barbecue at the Thatcham Nature Discovery Centre on Sunday. Having to run (limp) past the glorious smell of a barbecue that I was not invited to, was not what I needed at the end of a tiring run!

Anyway, to try and get back the international feel (??) to this blog, I decided to post a picture from the Polish city of Wroclaw, which I took last year whilst visiting. I'm getting married in Poland this September in the hard to pronounce village of Krzeszow, which is a good hour or perhaps more from the city of Wroclaw in south west Poland. It is within stunning countryside though and I will post a picture soon of the Basilica we are getting married in, it is an absolutely stunning sight.

Oxford Sighs

The second appearance on the website for the Oxford version of the Bridge of Sighs. I was initially quite happy with my first iteration of this bridge (back in January) but it didn't have much impact on this website or any other ones. I started to lose a bit of interest in it as well, despite it actually taking me an age to process! I knew today's picture of the bridge (from a further back perspective) would eventually make it onto this blog, as I believed it had more interesting photographic elements to it.

I also knew that this was likely to be a monochrome HDR. Whereas I liked the colours the picture offered, I felt like I had already done that with my previous picture. Therefore, I wanted a bit more of a gritty, historical look to this version. After a fair bit of processing in Lightroom and Photoshop, I shipped it over to Silver Efex Pro 2 to get the monochrome look I was after. There are many great black and white options in there as you would expect (though I think Lightroom 4 can give you amazing control for your monochrome pictures as well) but I often find myself going towards the sepia/vintage look, as I have applied here.

The Clock Tower

Not the famous one from Back to the Future unfortunately but the one that marks the end of the high street in Newbury, Berkshire. With the dreary weather we have had in England recently, this is one of only a few shots I have taken. I missed a potentially good shot by about 3 minutes the other day, while I was driving back to my new home in Thatcham. I crossed over one of the bridges that runs over the canal and there was a spectacular sunset sky reflected in the canal along with the silhouettes of the trees. I thought about pulling over right at that moment but suddenly remembered that despite having my camera with me, I didn't have a tripod, which would have been crucial to getting a good HDR. I quickly nipped back to the apartment to pick it up but when I returned a few moments afterwards, the moment had gone.

There are of course many lessons to be learned there but with my half glass full approach, the one that cheers me up in those situations is I think to myself 'It's better to have missed the shot, than not know it existed at all'. At least that way you can capture it another time.