Clouds
The summer has flown by as per usual, however July and August were particularly wet and miserable. Even so, I have been busier than ever but seemingly not when it has come to my personal photography. Some trips to RSPB Minsmere on the Suffolk coast and a jaunt to Poland book ended a fairly unremarkable summer, after the excitement of Skomer, Morocco, and the Baltics in the spring.
I have been feeling pretty uninspired photo-wise, thankfully a trip to Iceland is coming up in September for work which should give me some more inspiration. In the meantime here is a bit of a mishmash of some images I did manage to get over July and August in between what seemed go be an ever present rain storm.
Surprisingly the weather broke just long enough for the Balloon festival to go ahead so I took to the skies to capture some of the balloons as they travelled across Bristol.
A really poor trip to prop house to see ‘submergence’ - a light installation that at £20 a head was wildly overpriced for what was a half an hour experience at the very most. I tried to get some interesting images of the lights but I was considerably underwhelmed with the whole experience and left feeling a little robbed.
I ended the month with a trip to Poland, so a chance to give the camera a proper run out. A trip to the largest zoo in Poland, some wildlife photography and some street photography was on the cards but again the weather, which seems to follow me around like a bad smell was not great for the first few days, destroying any chance of a good wildlife photo on my annual day in the woods trip.
I did manage to spot my first lesser spotted woodpecker however, which I got a quick shot of in the gloom of the forest. The Image is far from perfect due to how dark it was so I had to bump up the ISO higher than usual just to get an image. If only the weather was better and it wasn’t so dark I might have gotten a better image than this. It will have to do for now I guess.
The weather cleared however once I got to Wroclaw, giving me the opportunity to break out the trusty Fujifilm X100V.
With the weather on the up, the zoo visit gave me a chance to use the 100-400mm lens. I tried my best to get some interesting and ‘different’ images rather than the bog standard hots I see all the time. Some of the close ups I think work really well.
Finally a note on my film work which I really got into over covid, teaching myself to develop and scan both 35mm and 120mm medium format film. I loved the process even though it was frustrating at times, but my use of the equipment dropped off due to the sheer cost involved for buying film itself. When I started this film journey, film was about £40 per 5 roll pack of 120 film. Expensive already but the results I was starting to get were just about worth the cost. I Looked to get some film a few weeks ago and the cost had rocketed to 70 even 80 pounds for the film I liked to use, a cost I just can’t justify over and over, so the decision was made to scale back my film equipment. The first to go was my amazing Pentax 6X7 a fantastic camera but at over £1000 resale value, I could use this money for other things that I will use more often. I have got some amazing images from this
Below are a few of my favorite images I took with the Pentax 6X7
That’s all she wrote for ‘summer’ 2023 so lets hope as we move into autumn with a Cornwall, Iceland, Brighton and potential London trip coming up there are a few more opportunities to crack out the camera!
FIN
