9th November 2013
Tehidy Country Park is the largest area of woodland in West Cornwall and is owned
and managed by Cornwall Council. Set in 250 acres of woodland and lakes, with
over 9 miles of paths, a café and a picnic area.
With 5 main access points and 2 car parks – North Cliff and
South Drive, Tehidy offers something for everyone. Accessible for dogs and
horse owners with bridle paths, it also has a nature reserve area with a lake,
swans and ducks, tame squirrels and a man made waterfall.
A trip was organized to Tehidy Park and an assignment set to
ensure practice of a wide variety of photographic skills including composition,
lighting, panning, macro, wildlife and landscape. The day gave us the
opportunity to be creative with our images and to spend time learning about
focal length, shutter speed, and apertures; it also gave the opportunity to
work closely with lecturers experienced in wildlife photography to help improve
skills and knowledge in this area.
I wanted to visit Tehidy to practice and improve my current skills
and knowledge especially in regard to slow shutter speeds when taking images of
water.
I also wanted to capture some wildlife images using a long
telephoto lens (100 – 400).
I spent a couple of hours in the Park and it has lots of variety
for the photographer from wildlife images to landscape and creative
photography.
On this visit I spent time mainly photographing wildlife, I took
some images of the waterfalls, and tried to take some creative images which is
an area that I feel I need to work on to expand my creativity.
For this image of leaves I
wanted to be more creative in my approach to the composition, using diagonal
lines, shadow and light to emphasize the colour, shape and pattern of the
leaves.
I am quite pleased with the outcome of the image and feel that I
have captured what I set out to do. The light gives emphasis to the pattern and
shape of the leaves and the branch gives a diagonal lead in line to the
picture, it does however lack something and I feel that use of strong contrasting colour and light would add interest and impact and this
is something that I need to improve on.
Artists as well as photographers have always inspired me and Claude
Monet is a particular inspiration. I have viewed his work both in London and
Paris and the L’orangerie houses his magnificent Water lilies.
My image of Water lilies was
inspired by Monet’s painting of
the Water Lily Pond and is my interpretation of this. I am pleased with the overall effects created
by the lilies and the reflections of the trees.
I think the image could be improved with more colour and so taking it
when there are more leaves and colour on the trees may have improved the
overall effect.
I wanted to create a shallow depth of field with image of leaves and set the
aperture to f/5, this has worked fairly well in placing the background out of
focus but still allowing you to place the branch and leaves in their
environment, which is what I was hoping to achieve. However, because the image
is quite busy and the branches and background are quite distracting for the
viewer I have cropped the image.
This
has allowed the focal point to become more prominent in the frame, I still feel
that the image could be improved by choosing either a different view point and
if this does not improve the overall composition then I would look to finding
another cluster of leaves to photograph with a less cluttered background.
Water
Tehidy Country Park has a wonderful water feature, this cascade meanders through the woodland and is ideal for using a slow shutter speed to give the water a smooth effect.
Capturing movement
Inspired by David Chapman’s images of wild fowl taken from a low
viewpoint – I decided to try this technique out whilst at Tehidy.
Using a 100 – 400mm telephoto lens with continuous shooting I took
this image of the gull preening. I have cropped the image as the gull was in
the middle of the lake.
I used a tripod to try to eliminate any camera shake and feel that I
have managed to capture the moment, freezing the droplets of water mid air,
which gives the image a sense of movement and impact.
One
of my goals is to improve my photography of birds in flight,. I shot several images using shutter speed priority and a
focal length of 400mm, the aperture setting was around f/4.5-f/5 and I feel
that I could perhaps have improved these images by using Aperture Priority to
give slightly more depth of field.
This may have compromised the shutter speed
causing blurring of the image so there is always a decision to make, on this
occasion, I decided that I wanted to capture the gulls in sharp focus if I
possibly could and this led to my decision.
I am happy with the overall capture of the gull in flight.
Technically it is not a good image of a bird in flight as the wings are in the
wrong position but I like the action that I have captured the gull has just
taken off and the water and droplets of water give the image impact.
Close Up
I have taken squirrel images previously but never encountered such
tame ones as those at Tehidy. I found this slightly challenging; using a 100 –
400 lens the squirrels came much too close at times. They did however; pose which made it easier
to focus on the eye to ensure this was sharp in the picture.
I chose his face as the main focal point of the image and cropped in
close to the subject to capture his quizzical expression. I used a shallow
depth of field to isolate him from the background, whilst including some of his
habitat (the tree trunk). I am really
pleased with the result and whilst compositionally he is in the centre of the
picture, I have tried to ensure his eyes fall in the top third of the image.
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