David Naylor: Blog

Getting up at 5 am can have its benefits, even if its hard to see the benefits just as the alarm goes off.

I took a nice long walk yesterday in the Sundbyholm nature reserve. I was hoping to see some kind of wildlife. And I did see a woodpecker, but that was about as wild as it got. Still, I got a few other shots that I consider reasonably interesting.

The road leading up to Sundbyholm looks good in almost any kind of weather or light, thanks to the rows of trees along it. The above photo was shot with my Sigma 10-20mm @ 10 mm.

There was a wedding party at the Sundbyholm mansion. (The Swedish name Sundbyholms slott suggests it’s a castle, but that gives completely the wrong impression in English. This building is definitely more like a mansion.) All the guests had gone inside and the steps up to the front door were covered with petals. Taken with the Canon EF 70-300mm IS @ 75 mm, f/4.

Here are two other photos I got during the week.

Here I used my Canon EF 70-300mm IS with a close-up lens attached to the front. This combination works quite well if you avoid using the very longest focal lengths. This was shot at 160 mm.

Jenny had left a glass of water in the kitchen and the oxygen was beginning to settle in bubbles, as it tends to do. Canon EF-S 17-55mm IS @ 55 mm and f/4.

This winter has been like no other here in Sweden. The first snow fell a few days before Christmas and we haven’t seen the ground since then. The temperature stayed below freezing for two months straight. At most there was just over 50 centimeters of snow in Eskilstuna and Uppsala.

Only now in March has the snow actually started melting. The other week I heard massive rumbles from the roof where the thick snow was sliding off in miniature avalanches. And all of a sudden, there are snow drops appearing along my way to work.

I’ve been low on photographic inspiration lately, but today I felt a slight urge. So I stuck my 50 mm lens on my camera and headed out for a walk through Nyfors. I also ended up using my 17-55 mm.

The other day, Mikael Barani showed me some photos he’d taken in Kronskogen. That inspired me to go outside with my camera the same day. But the weather wasn’t really that good for shooting in the woods.

Today though, with a nice coat of frost, the woods sounded like a better deal. So I had a go at catching the silence and cold.

I stuck to using my 50mm and my 10-20mm. I did try a hand-held HDR which came out ok, but I didn’t like it as much as the rest of the photos so now it resides in my Windows recycling bin.

By the way, two of these shots are total rip-offs of the ones he showed me.

Since the photos were fairly uninteresting straight from the camera I tweaked the contrast and added a split toning effect. (When a photographer says tweaked he means mashed it so hard it looked ridiculous and then brought it back down a bit.)

My colleague inspired me to go out and shoot in the snow, so I headed out today even though the weather was rather dull and overcast. But dull can also make decent photos, if you use the contrast slider a bit a lot.