'Hunting High & Low'...

Yes, shows my age, the song from A-ha..

and refers, of course, to sunshine, sunlight, warmth in the sky, colour in the landscape - and to which, naturally, I failed miserably...

Out for a good robin shot, after my friend DBE's excellent robin shot on Blip, I was armed with the DX D7000 and 70-300mm + 1.4 converter. Within minutes, my plans were thwarted when a local footpath that crosses watermeadows (the wonderfully titled "Broken Bridges" that's also an essential short-cut to another part of countryside was under water. Waders (which I don't own) would do it but try walking 2 miles through town in waders just in case...?

My point about this is that I was unprepared for my final subject, camera/lens wise. St John's church in Lower Bemerton had this rather pinkish stone and this would probably go unnoticed normally but it really stood out for me, so thirsty was I for a bit of colour. After many shots getting in details with the long lens, switched to the 14mm and used this cedar tree to frame it.

As I became more attuned to my environment, the reddish browns of the bark and its scaly surfaces came more prominent and it then became the subject, the church in the background. The 14mm comes in at a more modest 21mm eqv on the D7000, so still wide and you get to within inches of your subject then. Maximum depth of field, at f22, using the lens' focussing/d.o.f. scale (something sadly missing on zooms) to get as much sharp as possible. Handheld - I was out to shoot robins, after all!

My first edited result is on my Flickr stream and I may still change it if this one is disliked....

Taking that edited one, which had fair amount of work in separate layers on the the bark, the church and de-saturating the vegetation, I then put it into a 'negative monochrome' - as you can see, the tones of the bark are exquisite and the white sky is (sort of) taken care of! It sort of looks night-time and then appears odd - for those of us who shot black & white neg film in the dim and distant past, one never had negs this big or shown in such large detail, so a bit surreal.

So, all in all, a fair, if somewhat not wholly satisfying Blip but I think many Blippers are really using their cameras and processes to eek just something a bit different, for all this drab greyness.