A Slow summers end

I’ve been going through a distinct purple patch when it comes to my photography in the last few months, not helped by the worse summer apparently, in 18 years.  It’s not that it’s just been cooler and we’ve seen less sun than a ‘usual’ summer, but it’s also been winder and completely unpredictable, and by some freak of chance, the weekends this year seem to almost be guaranteed to be worse than the weekdays weather wise!  Combining this with few successes when I have gone out, my moral has been at a low ebb, it’s like nature herself has just shutdown for a while. I did think of leaving the blog until I had some real success – only two of the last five outings has even resulted in my taking any photographs – but that could be another month at this rate, so I’m posting ‘the best’ of the last six weeks or so.

A rare summers day

Most of the typical days (if dry) have looked like the image below – flat and grey but also very windy, making photography more difficult as, from a technical point of few, I’ve had to up the ISO (typically 1600 – 6400) had slow shutter speeds and wide open apertures. You can see the narrow depth of field this has created with some of the bird images below with barely the head in focus.  The lack of decent light has made the images look very flat and dull.

I may just work on my landscape photography for a while until I get my ‘mojo’ back.  Already the leaves are changing colour and although 30-40 mph winds aren’t good, grey skies can actually work in your favour and at this time of year with the mornings getting darker, you don’t have to get up so early to catch the golden hour and yet it is still reasonably mild.