surrey

As any one in the U.K. will know, this has been one of coldest winter spells we have had in a number of years ,with temperatures set to drop below -5c this evening the media are dubbing it 'The big freeze', and rightly so! There is widespread snow and ice and as a consequence everyone is complaining about traffic problems especially in the lead up to the holidays

I actually love the cold weather - especially the snow - as it makes a change from the usual grey damp weather we usually experience here around Christmas time.

For one thing the landscapes around here are stunning at the moment and I got the opportunity to get out on Saturday and take a few shots.

Today's post is a subject I have photographed before in the summer ( see Oak 1 and Oak 2).

It was interesting for me to revisit this spot and see the tree without it's leaves. I did manage to get a couple of shots from a similar angle to the previous 2 and tried compositing one over the other - which was cool. I may post a comparison next.

Moving on from that, the obvious next step will be to take another couple of shots in Spring and Autumn and complete the series.

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.

This is a shot of one of my favorite trees, albeit a background feature in this image. I've been struggling to keep up with posting recently as my photography and web business has really taken off, which is good.

One of the other shots featuring this tree can be found here... Oak 1 and here Oak 2

On the way back from shooting the sunrise, we stumbled upon these dew drop coated spiders webs. I've only isolated one here, but the whole area was covered in them, it was quite an amazing site, very hard to capture well on camera though.

Well, it's seems i'm finding it harder and harder to find time to post at the moment. My VFXY ranking is slipping all the time, if anyone cares to add me as their favorite maybe I can climb back up :-)

The reason for the lack of posts is i've started a new business, which is going well, I just happen to be spending more time building other people's blogs that posting on my own.

With all that out of the way , I can talk about this entry. We've had lots of rain this summer in England, the only positives I can take from that are : there have been some fantastic cloudscapes to shoot!

This is the calm after the storm and I have resisted processing this one much, i'm trying to focus on natural colours and improve my photography in camera.

Last one in this series. A close up of a young head of corn. Don't have much time to write this evening, I'm packing to go on holiday.

Hopefully have some nice shots to post when I'm back in a few days.

Thanks for all the comments on the Poppy shot, much appreciated feedback. This is another photo over the Guildford fields, and not as naturally beautiful as the others, i'm happy with the colours.

I have one more shot to post from the series, and then we're away for a few days in Austria, a big party, so I'm hoping to get some good portraits :-)

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Another shot from the fields near Guildford. This is one of my favorite photos from the series.

I wanted to catch the beautiful back light of the poppies in the hedge row being lit up by the sun going down, I'm happy with just being able to catch a glimpse of the rays without the sun blowing out.

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This is the second shot I'm posting from the session I had yesterday, and was photographed in the fields near Guildford.

This is one of the many rural footpaths that cuts through farm land.

Not much processing on this one, just a little saturation boost to combat the RAW desaturated look from the D200, I wanted it to feel as natural as possible.

Scratch the above, on reflection and a little fiddling I decided a mono treatment worked better on this one! If you're interested the original post is here Corn field original

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Wow, I just noticed that this is my 100th post! Happy Birthday to me :-)

Firstly, thanks for all the comments about the dog, he really was having a whale of a time and was a pleasure to shoot.

I actually got out and shot some new material today. I'm lucky that now i'm working from home for myself, I can pop down to the local coffee shop and work from there. Our local council have been kind enough to provide free WiFi for a year so I'm making the most of it.

My ride to town involves cutting through some fields, which are full of young corn and look amazing right now. I've got a bunch of pictures i'm happy with and will be posting them in the coming days.

I was going to post another shot from the coast and then I caught this shot the other day and thought i'd put it up. We had some amazingly voluminous clouds the other evening and the light was incredible, really showing the shapes off in the clouds.

This is a close up of one section of a big tower of clouds, personally I find the shapes really beautiful, like you'd imaging heaven or something like an italian fresco. Didn't notice the 2 birds enter frame at the time, but I like them in the shot that's why I chose the title. This is pretty much straight out of the camera as well, just a small constrast adjustment and that's it.

Lastly , I have my first professional shoot tomorrow, some fashion pictures , which i'm really excited about.

This was shot is in the fields near to our house, there was a strange weather system coming in that day, you can see the low lying mist on the horizon, as it was creeping over the green grass it looked really cool.

This is the last of the shots from the foggy series I had shot in February, seems like a while ago as Spring is now definitely in the air. These are some of the other shots from this series. here and here & here

I have some great news! Tomorrow is my last day as an employee, after nearly nine years in my day job, I am leaving to run Lightflows as company and it feels great! Through this site and from contacts i've made from it, I will be pursuing my career as a photographer and (part time) web designer :-D

What this all means is that the site will be updated far more regularly and the new features i've been planning are going to be added. I will also be displaying some of my work in a few exhibitions over the summer, more news on this to follow.

Very unexpectedly and pleasantly surprising, we had a reasonable amount of snow at the weekend! Probably the most i've seen in the South of England for 10 years and in April too!

Idoya and I popped out pretty early before everyone had chance to disturb the pristine white covering and got first tracks at the local hill :-)

I've got a bunch of pictures that i'd like to post, the first being the burnt common again, featured in other entries on the site. I tried to frame this one a similarly as possible to the others, but found it difficult to find my bearings in the flat light.

The forestry commission has actually started to chop down the bracken now , as can be seen by the stumps that pepper the landscape. There are still some interesting shots to be had though.

Thanks for the feedback on yesterday's post.

This shot was taken in a derelict building near where I live. There is a tunnel being built through our local hill and some major roadworks underway, partly in preparation for the 2012 olympics, but also to remove the current road which runs through a nature reserve, near to the place i've been taking the foggy bracken shots.

The upshot of all of this work is that lots of houses and buildings along the route have been ear-marked for demolition, and this has been providing me with plenty of shooting opportunities :-)

This is another of the shots from the foggy series I had shot last month, again these were taken at the same burnt common as these , here and here & here

This area is a small enclosure of bracken that was burnt badly, it has a really eerie atmosphere in the fog, and I really like the look of the landscape, it's very unusual.

On another note, i'm going to shoot some new material next week , weather permitting, fingers crossed :-)

Well, still got the cold, so haven't got much to say, sniffle , sniffle :-D This was shot last year in Autumn at a local lake to us, called Winkworth Arboretum.

This is one of the shots from the foggy series I had shot a couple of weeks ago now.These are taken at the same burnt common spot I have posted images of previously, here and here.

I knew I'd want to go and shoot this place when the fog came in, it had a really eery feeling with the mist and barren landscape.

As promised yesterday, this is the wider version of the shot, I'm torn between which I prefer, but I think this one edges it slightly.

This was taken last year in the fields near us, there is some beautiful rolling countryside around here and this tree always catches my attention when I take a shortcut through the backroads to our house.

I'm going to post a wider version tomorrow.

Hello again, i'm back, apologies for not posting the last few days , I've been busy with work and house stuff! Anyway, as it's late , I'll keep it short tonight.

This is one of the shots I took last week in the fog of which I'd been promising to post. So here it is.

Thanks to everyone on the feedback on the last picture,I know that style is not to everyones taste, but I enjoy the experimentation, it's good to hear different reactions.

For February the weather today has been amazing, sun all day long. We've been sitting outside on the deck for the first time this year taking pictures of the cats playing and just relaxing in general.

Being such a clear day, I thought there might be a good sunset , so we went for a walk at our local mount, Gibbet Hill, which overlooks the intriguingly named Devils Punchbowl an area of natural beauty.

Sure enough , as the sun went down, we were treated to a gorgeous misty sun set. Here's one of the better ones that I took today.

It looks like its going to be a great day tomorrow as well, so we are off the the coast with friends, I'm looking forward to the photo opportunities.