....and Chesterton Windmill

Chesterton Windmill is an imposing structure on a hillside close to the Fosse Way and to the east of Warwick. Information and some photographs here:
http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/Web/corporate/pages.nsf/Links/155D9C8F3E61BDB6802571020049F89D
When we were arriving we just caught the end of a wedding photoshoot - a photographer taking shots of people posing with one of the wedding cars with the windmill in the background. There was also someone taking picures from a point in the adjacent field. Other than that, we had the place to ourselves.

Compton Verney.....

Last week I visited Compton Verney in Warwickshire with Rachel, my youngest daughter. We're both keen photographers so it was a great chance to take a few pictures each and see what kinds of subjects appealed to us. Interestingly she tended to notice the small details of colours and textures, and I tended to be looking for landscape shots of the buildings across the lake. Compton Verney's grounds are beautifully landscaped by Capability Brown and the house itself includes an art gallery and a very fine cafe. The parkland and woods were well maintained and the house remarkably free of outside clutter, so altogether a very pleasant visit indeed.

An unofficial wedding photographer

Jamie and Amy's wedding near Buxton a month ago gave me a great opportunity to put into practice an idea I read in Amateur Photographer recently - basically to enjoy taking interesting

wedding pictures without any of the major responsibility of the official wedding photographer: in other words, to be something of an 'unofficial' wedding photographer looking out for the interesting candid moments and trying to capture the spontaneous and the unusual.,

On the whole I was happy with the results - out of around 220 exposures I saved on the camera ended up with just under 100 that were worth using, admittedly with a fair amount of cropping and brightness correction at times. Partly this was due to having to shoot at unusual angles and partly at having to adjust to the changing light throughout the day.

At the end of it all, though, I think I'd really like to carve out a niche as a wedding photographer, if only I had the nerve.

Exposure considered

The Exposure photography exhibition has been and gone. A learning experience for both of us, though I did sell two pictures and Teresa sold one, and we also sold a few postcard size prints for a few pence each. Interestingly both photographs I sold were from my collection of images from the historic covered market in Porto - maybe I should make these the focal point of any future exhibition. I've already planned to return to Porto in May next year and I think I'm going to have to spend a couple of hours at the market next time.

We did learn how to cut mounting board, looked at various different ways of hanging our photographs, and thought about how others had gone about it. Certainly the process has made us think through what we are trying to achieve, and why. We bought and restored second hand frames, sand on the whole this was successful. Here's one of the images from my short list(Livraria Lello bookshop in Porto) that didn't quite make it into the exhibition this time.

Things move on, and I've been rather preoccupied with sorting out a set of wedding photographs and sifting through photographs of Norwich's medieval churches for a competition entry. I will put something on the blog as soon as I can. I've also been providing photographs for some people at a church where I just wandered in......and ended up being co-opted as the official photographer for an award ceremony. Occupational risk of being seen with a decent camera, I suppose.