Photowalk 65 - Fort To Explosion!

It was a grey and cold day today, but I had the crazy idea of doing a Photowalk, recording a podcast while I was doing it, and to visit the Explosion! museum as well.

It actually turned out to be really good - especially in the museum where I had to experiment with different flash techniques to try and get decent pictures in challenging (dark) conditions.

Weapons Detail, Explosion Museum

As usual, I've mixed up the order of the shots, the above probably being my favourite of the day. Taken inside the Explosion! museum, which is a collection of Naval Ordinance from the last few Centuries, I couldn't use a tripod so was forced to try some different techniques with my on-camera flash.

I was shooting in Aperture priority mode, forced flash, then playing around with aperture and flash compensation. When I was close to the subject, as above, I had to play around with the aperture and flash power compensation to get a decent shot.

The problem was that with normal settings the flash was creating too much glare off the metal, so I had to back off the power to get a more subtle look.

The Sharp End

There was some great coloured lighting in the museum, but as I was having to ramp up my little Fujifilm S5700's on-camera flash to its highest setting to cover the displays, so most of that lovely colour was getting washed out.

If you're faced with this situation, where you want to capture the ambient background lighting, but need some fill-flash to light up your main subject, then slow-syncro flash can help, which is what I used on the above subject.

With slow-syncro, the camera uses a longer shutter speed to capture that background light, but then also pops the flash to light up the main subject. The difficult bit is that you should really use a tripod, which I couldn't, so it took a couple of goes to get this one.

Private Pier, Hardway

This one's a simple HDR, from 3 exposures then Tone Mapped in Photomatix and finished off in Photoshop.

Highland Cow

One of the last photographs I actually took, I finally got close to one of these huge hairy beasts, just wish the bar hadn't been in the way and you could see his eye...

Weapons Detail 2

Another macro from the Explosion! museum. I took quite a few shots, but it was hard to get decent ones - the backgrounds were too busy, or I couldn't get far enough away to really get the "big picture", so I went in close.

Firepower For Freedom

Not a great shot, but I like missiles... (Also, the one in the bottom left corner, with the weird looking tubes, is a Sea Slug anti-aircraft missile, and my Dad used to be in charge of the 901 Radar on a couple of County Class Destroyers, Fife and Norfolk, which was the guidance system for the weapon).

Moat Through Branches

Ahhh... a bit of abstract for the soul....

Explosion Museum Buildings

Bricks. Walls. Just needed a bit more light...

Industrial Unit, Hardway

Well, that's it for today, thanks for looking,

Cheers, Rob.