It's been ages since I've posted any new photographs on Lightflows, but was prompted back into action this week.

It was my great pleasure to appear on BBC1's Countryfile program this evening to help Chris Packham and Jo Brand launch the programmes 'Wild and Wonderful' Photography competition.

The photography section of the CountryFile programme was partially filmed at Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, a location famous for being the home of Winnie the Pooh.

Filming took place in the last week of April and I was pleased to arrive on location just after sunrise to capture these early morning mists. A number of the shots taken on the day made it into the final show. All in all it was a fun afternoon and the production team and presenters, Chris Packham and Jo Brand were a really good laugh.

This Episode is available to view on the BBC iPlayer here until next Sunday 17th May.

I found this shot sitting in my archives, it was taken last year at Goodwood. The 'Goodwood festival of speed' is an annual hill climb held a Goodwood park and features sports cars from multiple generations and genres.

Sitting in front of the stately home, this amazing structure, constructed from girders with Landrovers mounted on them was a sight to behold, it has a really surreal quality to it, an angular monolith.

This isn't normally the sort of shot I would post on Lightflows and it wasn't what I was intending on photographing this day, but this little chap landed alongside me whilst I was framing up a landscape shot. He was only a couple of meters away and I couldn't resist taking a photograph, so I've decided to post it!

I've been busy working on an update to the site. I am changing my hosting next month and felt that with that upgrade I would re-vamp the site a bit - It was coded when I was new to html and css and I've learned a bit since then. That said, it's not going to be a radical change, I'm going to add some new features, like a 'collection browser' , groups of images that work well together as a collection. The blog will pretty much be the same with maybe some graphical additions here and there. Should be up next month...

This is definitely one of my favorite shots of the year, the recent hoar frosts have created simply the most spectacular cold weather I have ever seen in England. On days like this I feel grateful to be a photographer, and appreciated how lucky I am to live in the beautiful countryside that surrounds Guildford.

This image is actually a stitch of 3 separate exposures, the widest lens I had on me was a 24mm , and that didn't quite show the whole panorama that I was seeing, so I re-constructed the shot using PTGui to stitch the images together. The color's have been slightly enhanced, with a warm cast removed from the snow.

Update

I've just been looking through some of the other shots taken on this day and realised that the pictures I stitched were taken on my Canon G10 not the Nikon D300, I've updated the EXIF info accordingly

Continuing with the cold theme, here's another shot from the weekend. I can't describe how truly beautiful the frosts have been here, maybe even more beautiful than fresh snow. I'll be putting up some more landscape shots in the next few days.

I'm taking a break from the Moroccan series as we've had some amazing weather over the past days and I've been out shooting quite a bit. It's been an unusually cold winter here in South England and the last few days have seen extreme hoarfrosts, beautiful white crystals covering everything. It is truly beautiful.

Another shot from my recent trip to Morocco, this one was taken in one of the souks, or markets, that can be found in Tangier.

O.K. so after a little detour into Spain, I've returned to the Morocco series I had intended to post.

This shot is from the dusty little village we visited just outside Asila in Northern Morocco and must be the local taxi rank. This shot was taken from the car window on our way out of the village, and again, what attracted me the the subject, is the texture and colours of the building and the colorful character sitting on the chair.

I was going to post another one of the shots from Morocco, but we travelled to Ronda today and I shot quite a bit of new stuff. We spend a few hours in the town, which is fantastic btw, and also visited this place, the bull fighting ring. Personally I am against bull fighting, but whatever your position on the subject, it is a beautiful place to visit. It's one of the oldest and most famous bull fighting rings in Spain and is steeped in character.

A storm had just passed and the light was creeping out from behind some brooding clouds, the bull ring half in and half out of shadow, I couldn't resist shooting a panoramic sequence. On returning home, I decided to try a 'little planet' creation. It's the first time i've tried one of these and, although not technically perfect, I am happy with the results of my first attempt. I hope you like it.

This is another shot from the dusty mountain village in Morocco and was taken shortly after shooting the Mercedes that I posted yesterday. Again, the main thing that attracted me to these gas canisters was the beaten up texture.

As for the processing, I have enhanced the foreground/background separation by increasing the defocusing of the background using a mask, in addition the canisters were originally blue, but I adjusted the hue to a rusty red to suit the surrounds and overall toning. Although simple, this is one of my favorite shots of the whole trip.