Have managed to pick up the pace a bit with my photography over the past week or so.

First challenge was Week 2 of 52 Weeks in 2016 with the theme of ‘Dark’ – set by me.  Given that it’s winter in the northern hemisphere I figured this would be easy for many people, but also simple to set up in an evening or indoors for those enjoying more clement weather.

I had a few ideas in mind, and tried a simple one light self-portrait with my new 85mm lens, but with no-one to assist it was very tricky to get the focus (in an empty chair) and the angles of light right when I kept having to get up after each shot to look at the results. I will try this again with the camera tethered to make the process easier.

In the end I settled on the shot above, taken while I was parked up by the green in the village where I live. I was trying to get a movie style shot but long exposure. In fact this was shot with the camera balanced on the door of my car looking through the window. The original didn’t have the right sort of colour cast I was after so I added some cross processing effect in post-production.

Last weekend I managed to get out for a stroll round the local lakes too.

My hope was for a sharp frost, clear skies and a nice sunrise but when I got up (early for me on a Sunday) I was disappointed to see grey and overcast. Then it started to snow and I got excited again.

Unfortunately the snow was short-lived and most of the time shooting was with sleet and drizzle. Despite this I managed to get a few images that I liked including this one which I’m calling ‘Beware of the Tree Dragon’

I found myself cross-processing quite a few of these shots. Partly because the scenes were fairly dull and flat, but also because I really like the effect it gives. This is beginning to be a bit of a style for me that I want to explore more in 2016.

I spoke about cross-processing in this post a few weeks back and will post some more examples from the weekend later this week.

Finally, as I write this, today is #WinnieThePooh Day so I’ve got a busy day planned for my little Pooh and Piglet characters – look out for this in a future post too.