Roddy's thoughts and pictures at the close of the day
When I first went to Iceland in June of 2013 I was interested in tracing Dad's wartime footsteps there - something he very rarely talked about - and I wrote about what I managed to find in my blog. Here’s an example: Alfred Fox, Iceland 1940-42, some detective work finds Skipton Camp. Little did I realise... Continue Reading →
Picture poems - that’s what I think these are best called - they are short poems in dialogue with a photo I have taken. I started off trying to make the words fit into a haiku/haiga format but found that was quite a challenge and detracted from the dialogue aspect that I have found very... Continue Reading →
I say revisited because my first shot of Sólfar was way back in 2013 when we were in Reykjavik for a conference. We had attended a late concert at Harpa and were walking along Sæbraut Road enjoying the grey light over the fjord. We stopped to admire Sólfar (the Sun Voyager) - as most people... Continue Reading →
I thought I would try something a little different with this Chronophotography sequence that I took last week. A Long Crested Eagle had been perching beyond the trees in the old orchard on our plot in Hogsback and eventually settled on a branch just behind the trunk of a dead eucalyptus tree. In spite of... Continue Reading →
It’s been such a long time since I did a light painting shoot with a model - and though it’s something I really enjoy, it can be hard to find a model and then the time and place for the shoot. But early this week the stars aligned and I put up a small set... Continue Reading →
Chronophotography - taking a sequence of images to portray motion - has been around since the mid-nineteenth century. More recently though Spanish photographer Xavi Bou has been making wonderful composite images of birds in flight: he calls them Ornithographies. My own experiments with this style started in early 2020 at the start of the COVID-19... Continue Reading →
Pep's unique style depends on the photographer circling the subject and taking images from all sides before combining them in post processing to form a composite that keeps the recognisable characteristics whilst producing a shimmering, ghostly effect. I like it because you make an image that is both distinct and indistinct at the same time: anchored... Continue Reading →
Svårdsjön Panorama with PlantWave is a one minute movie clip that pans across an autumn panorama of morning mist lifting off Svärdsjön, Dalarna, Sweden. Svårdsjön Panorama The PlantWave midi recordings were from Horsetail Grass beside the boardwalk and a Young Sycamore Tree along the lakeshore - the grass plays the flute part and the sycamore... Continue Reading →
One big problem with the energy crisis is visualisation. I keep reading names and figures but until they have a geographical context I can't really understand the problems. So I've put on my Geography Professor Emeritus hat, sourced appropriate data from Eskom and done some GIS work to establish: Where are the power stations; How much... Continue Reading →
Cloudscapes have always been one of my photo passions and lately I've been extending my skills using the Olympus Live Composite mode. These dawn and dusk shots of the Hogsback skyline from Wild Fox Hill are the longest I've taken. They're 15 minutes of one second exposures, so each picture is a composite combining 900... Continue Reading →
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