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On The Road In Iceland by Alpha Whiskey Photography

As well as all the beautiful waterfalls and glaciers and mountains Iceland also had wonderful views just driving along its roads. Often empty for ages at a time, always long and winding, they led to views of mountains and lakes and great vistas in the distance, too attractive to resist but too many to stop and shoot individually.So, whenever I was in the vehicle, I mounted my camera (EM-5) onto the dash in front of the steering wheel close to the window, with a polarising filter on the glass...
to cut out reflections. I set the vehicle in cruise control so that I would have only the steering to focus on and whenever a pleasing scene came into view I would hit the touchscreen on the camera to take a photo. Sometimes I would zoom in or out but usually I would simply wait until I was the appropriate distance. Instead of zooming with my feet I would zoom with the vehicle. The last shot was taken by the roadside; I couldn't ignore the aurora, after all. Virtually all the rest were shot from the car travelling along the roads. All images were shot with Olympus gear.

Snaefellsnes by Alpha Whiskey Photography

On my final day in Iceland I cruised around the north-west of the island in the Snaefellsnes Peninsula. Perhaps it's a testament to how much I saw and shot during my circumnavigation that I'm still posting images from the trip almost a year later. It's also a testament to how quickly a year flies by these days. I still have a few more images left from the road which I may put into another post. Anyway, this part of Iceland was rocky and windy, especially on the coast, with volcanic rocks...
strewn over the land at the foot of high cliffs and mountains. I had started my day watching some Icelandic horses walk home along the highway after sunrise. That was a truly eerie and bizarre sight. The weather wasn't great during my time there, mostly overcast and gloomy which an occasional intermission of blue sky. The coast offered some interesting rock formations as well as some wildlife such as seals and birds. One highlight of the day was the Rauðfeldsgjá gorge, with its small closeted waterfalls and shafts of light. I finished the day, and indeed my trip, where had I started it at Kirkjufellsfoss. I spent a couple hours here in the evening, hoping the clouds would clear to reveal some aurora, but it wasn't to be. So I finally headed back to Reykjavik in the early hours of the morning to return my vehicle and fly home. Eight long days and a ton of photos later I was ready to hang up the camera, eat some wholesome food and sleep in my own bed. It was both an exhausting and exhilarating trip and one I intend to repeat, albeit with wiser and even more selective choices about the places I visit. Almost all the images were shot with Olympus.

Pistyll Rhaeadr by Alpha Whiskey Photography

This was a lovely surprise suggested to us by our friends and a stunning location to visit. Natalia and I had a great time exploring around the waterfall and hiking to the top to soak in the spectacular views. Photographically, however, these images demonstrate why light and being able to control it with filters is so important, in that the sun was behind the falls during our visit in the afternoon and I had left my filters at home. I tried to capture the water slow shutter speeds...
(necessitating higher apertures) while not having too many blown highlights but these are not the greatest shots taken in the greatest light. I imagine that I will return here someday soon to shoot it in better light.However, I'm ever so grateful to my friends, Nat and Rob, for bringing us to Wales's highest waterfall and to Natalia for insisting we hike to the top.All images taken with the Olympus, except the two of the Milky Way at the end, shot behind our friends' home with a DSLR and wide angle lens.

Banger Racing - Part 2 by Alpha Whiskey Photography

A few more shots from this event. There were just too many that I liked. One should always endeavour to place a limited number of only their very best shots but as this is my blog I'm happily indulging myself and I doubt anyone will mind seeing more of the action from the race. Again these were all shot with the Olympus 40-150mm F/2.8 with MC-14 teleconverter attached. I have processed them to my taste, mainly for contrast, but in some cases I have again dialled down the saturation to...
emphasise the action and the mud. Whatever one shoots one should not just think about capturing the subject but revealing something too. In other words, the images should always try to have artistic merit where possible. Just my view. Enjoy the action!

Bettws Banger Racing by Alpha Whiskey Photography

Natalia and I had an absolutely thrilling weekend in the company of my dear friends Nat and Rob up in mid-Wales, especially at this local demolition derby event. We were joined by Frank, Isobel and of course, young Harry. I haven't been photographing much lately owing to a busy schedule and the necessary rest after intense volume in the gym. But this was a great opportunity to experience and shoot some vehicular carnage.Mud and dust were whipped up and hurled at us in the frenzied race as...
cars that looked like something The A-Team constructed after being locked in a shed careened around a dirt track, fenders and bumpers flying off all over the place. Wheels detached as axels twisted, and shards of metal and splinters of headlights littered the track. The incessant and glorious revving was matched by the dust clouds in their wake, some so thick that cars smashed and rolled in the fog. Hopefully the pictures below will do more justice than mere words. Most of were taken with my Olympus mirrorless gear, namely the EM-5 with the 40-150mm F/2.8 mounted to it. Some were taken with the DSLR and 70-200m F/2.8 as the phase detection autofocus proved useful in certain moments. Overall, however, the EM-5's contrast detection did a fine job keeping up with the cars. Cameras were set with burst shooting in shutter priority at around 1/500secs, occasionally using 1/80secs for panning shots. The main difficulty was finding decent positions to capture the action in, and a few wooden posts had to be cloned out of the images. I processed the images with simple contrast adjustments, using a desaturated or B+W treatment to emphasise the swirling hurricanes of mud, itself often as much a character as the cars. Tribute must be paid to the excellent drivers and organisers for hosting an excellent and enjoyable event. To be honest, I could have volunteered my own car in the races and it wouldn't have looked much different! Many thanks, too, to Nat and Rob for their kind invitation to see this event.

A Night Under The Milky Way by Alpha Whiskey Photography

Hoping to catch sight of a few meteors from the Perseids shower, my friend Natalia and I headed to a dark site in the south of England. Catching any of the falling meteors was always going to be luck of the draw, but I think I managed to register one on the first image. With our own eyes we saw quite a few of them streaming across the sky. We found a barn/distillery of some kind and decided it would make a decent anchor for the images. I wanted to capture the Milky Way with my fish-eye...
lens, hoping it would show the galactic arm arching across the night sky. Admittedly, it was a trifle difficult shooting at higher ISOs with the micro-four thirds sensor and required some agricultural processing to bring the galaxy out. The nearly full Moon also didn't help with the exposure and changed positions a few times trying to exclude it. But I'm showing what I managed to get below, and I happy I got something. The second image in this series was taken with a DSLR and Toking 11-16mm F/2.8.Before long the clouds started moving in and their invasion concluded our excursion. But not before I took a few shots of the cloud patterns blanketing the sky. Overall, a fun and spontaneous excursion to the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. Although, note to self: perhaps not the best idea to be up all night after spending two hours in the gym.

Haifoss To Oxarfoss by Alpha Whiskey Photography

I'm still plundering my Iceland trip from last October for more images, having seen so much in so many places. This set is from the lower centre part of the island, which I traversed on my penultimate day there, starting with the sunrise at Haifoss and ending with the sunset at Oxarfoss in the Thingvellir National Park.In between the weather wasn't particularly cooperative and thus I only spent a marginal amount of time the much-frequented haunts of Geysir and Gulfoss. Having visited them in...
the past I wasn't too bothered and will surely visit them again in the future. Bruarfoss was a revelation, hidden away and a bit of a walk to find, but the beautiful cyan rush within its flow was plenty reward. I also visited the Gjain Gorge, but the shadows were too deep and the vegetation a little dead. I imagine it looks better in the summer. En route to the gorge I found an interesting variety of terrain with equally enticing light, including a rainbow, no less.Generally a good day spent but perhaps the images demonstrate that fatigue was catching up with me by this point in the trip. And I still have my final day's images to go through. They'll be posted soon.

365 Project - June Highlights by Sandra5

June was an interesting month. The weather was nice and all sorts of things happened to me and around me. My city got a big new fountain, to name one. After May that was very busy, June was much more exciting and me and my camera spent much more time together.In June I noticed one big change in the way I make photos. While before I used to insanely take photos of everything I see, now I'm much more focused. I still make many photos, but I'm much more clear about why I want to capture a...
scene.I also discovered the magic that separates photography from other types of visual media. By looking at the thousands of photos I made during these six months, I noticed many repeating scenes. Many times I photographed the same or similar places and now I have some kind of a document that shows how they change with time. The changes I've captured would remain invisible to me if I wasn't consistently photographing. I learned (on my own example) how photographs not only capture space, but also time and the power that photography has in representing time that goes by. Working over a period of time gives photography a new dimension and depth, and I finally see how my work has moved me on a brand new way of thinking and looking at things.

365 Project - May Highlights by Sandra5

May was one busy month. Meaning, I had very little time and energy to invest in photography. However, I did manage to make that one shot every day. Those were not such a spectacular scenes. Something on the street. Or something in the house. Sunset from my window. Anything... I notice now that there are a lot of clouds, skies, suns. Stereotypical scenes but far more interesting than ground level where everything is the same day after day. This was pretty much a survivor month. Most of the...
time, I had to find something interesting on the way home or at home. Only a few times I was intentionally going for a walk in order to take pictures. Also, all those days I skipped from the beginning of the year added up, so I needed to cheat a little to collect enough pictures (some pictures are from the same day, some are from June). Looking at the collection now, it's not as bad as I thought it would be. Late spring is interesting by itself, and almost every time something outside could make a decent shot without too much effort. For example, many of the pictures below were made just by taking a shot out of the window at the end of the day while the sun was setting (for the sake of having something for that day).

Royal International Air Tattoo 2017 by Alpha Whiskey Photography

I'm not altogether fussed about air shows but I hadn't shot one in a few years and it was rather fun having one's eardrums pummelled by the roar of jet engines shooting past above one's head. The show was much like the last one, and much like all of them, I'm sure, in that I had a sense of deja vu seeing many of the same aircraft performing many of the same manoeuvres as last time. It was also an opportunity to dust off the old DSLR and 70-200mm F/2.8, neither of which were getting much use...
these days. For comparison I also shot a few images with the Olympus 40-150mm F/2.8 (with the 1.4x TC attached). While the contrast detection focusing of the Olympus body struggled to keep up with fast moving aircraft, whenever it did nail the focus the results were always dead on and sharp, certainly more so than the DSLR. Kinda wish I'd shot a few more with the Olympus but there we are. A lesson for next time, and perhaps by then they will have refined the phase detection system on their bodies.All told a decent enough show and plenty to see. It's the season for air shows so if one is happening near you then get out and see it.

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