Another week has flown by. The theme for last week on Flickr was ‘Urban Wildlife’ which was always going to be something of a challenge for me as my windows of opportunity for photography are usually pretty small and wildlife photography usually requires time to find a location and wait for the wildlife to appear suitably in the frame.

In the end I got something that was reasonable given that I only had one lunch hour to get it.

A mixed bag of shots for my 365 project – one or two desperate days resulted in some basic food shots taken in my kitchen but I did manage a couple of nice shots.

Day 26

On Friday I drove through the villages close to home just as a storm was coming in. I managed to get up to a reasonably high point and take this shot of a green field with trees and the dark clouds in the background.

Then on Sunday we made a trip to Kent to visit my Mum and Grandparents. Vicky came up from Southampton to join us and I tried a simple black and white portrait set up with a single Godox 15″ softbox on a Yongnuo 568 flash. I was trying to recreate the work of Glynn Dewis and his portraits.

These were shot mid-afternoon on a sunny day. The room curtains were drawn but it was by no means dark. By setting the shutter speed to 1/160 and aperture to f/11 I was able to kill all the ambient light. This put me in complete control of the lighting. I then set up my flash with -2 stops exposure compensation to give the low-key feel.

The skin areas were given a bit of softening to and then the image had a slight tone applied through Nik Silver Efex. Not quite up to Glynn’s standard but I like the effect and it’s something I’ll continue to work on.

POST SCRIPT: The images appear very dark on this post, much darker than on my laptop – I’ll brighten them up a bit and repost them later.

I’ve now brightened the images by a stop – hopefully the’ll look brighter on your screen now.