Yorkshire Weekend

Fire Extinguisher
Originally uploaded by Nostromoo

Just came back from a nice long weekend in Yorkshire staying with my girlfriend's parents. It's quite a long drive, took nearly 6 hours there and a bit shorter coming back, but was most enjoyable.

I downloaded over 660 images from my memory cards (around 5GB), so I have lots to go through. I don't imagine I will actually be uploading anywhere near that amount. Some of these images will be duplicates, same subject from a different angle, blurred, blown out or too far underexposed to rescue. Or just rubbish. But my hit rate is getting better so I might be able to get a good return.

We were in Yorkshire for 3 and a half days. The first morning we went to Nunnington Hall, which is National Trust. Not much scope for photography in the house but I did get a couple in the garden. The vast majority of pictures however came from a session of what I call Guerilla Photography or Guerilla Shooting from a narrow boat. Basically standing on a canal boat and just shooting anything that looked interesting as we cruised past. I don't know if the term guerilla shooting actually means anything other than this, but I've using the term for this meaning.

It was quite a good exercise for me because it was so fast paced. It's not just a question of putting the camera on high speed and waving it around randomly. In fact, I forced myself to shoot on single frame only, and to frame the image before I captured it. Also because I shoot exclusively with manual exposure it meant I had to make some quick decisions as we cruised through light and shadow. Luckily we did turn the boat so I always had two attempts to capture something, or explore it with more angles, assuming I remembered it on the return leg. But it was very fast paced as the boat never stopped and if you saw something you had to make a quick decision about how interesting it was, what was interesting about it, then how to capture it then quickly set an exposure that would allow you to do so.

I realise the D80 has auto exposure, but to be honest I think it's crap. It isn't 100% reliable so it's no good for me. And I'm getting better now at just seeing a scene and dialing in an exposure that is pretty close to begin with. And using Lightroom, pretty close is often good enough.