Sunday 25th April saw my local team, the Watford Cheetahs, begin their 2010 BAFACL season campaign in an away game with the Milton Keynes City Pathfinders.

Watford have played the Pathfinders several times over the last few years. They played their season opener against them in 2009 also.

It was a pretty hard fought game. Both teams’ defences dominated through most of the match with neither side able to get any appreciable lead over the other. Right up until the last part of the 4th quarter. Defensive Cornerback, Dyann Lewis (#21), in his first ever game of American football, managed to intercept three MK City passes & return all 3 for touchdowns, leaving the final score 28 – 8 to Watford.

This is a section of photographs with the theme of hidden in plain view.

Wherever we go we are surrounded by photographic opportunities. Sometimes it’s just a case of looking for something that’s already there & turning it into somthing which pleases. I was quite pleased with these.

The first two are simply reflections in glass buildings next to the River Thames. The 3rd is a building just outside the tube station we used to get to the Thames. (I can’t remember which station it was now)

The orange building is a set of flats which front the river by the bridge which leads across to St Paul’s Cathedral. The second was some flats on the Cathedral side of the bridge. I think the third was a car park for flats just off an alleyway which leads you away from St Paul’s.

Then we have the flats above the aforementioned car park & a simple door number.

And lastly, I think the yellow lines should have been taken at an angle as they look a little static. I just loved the graphical element of the hoarding around some building works.

In the middle of April I took my youngest down to London for the afternoon to take some photos. I normally stay away from the city if I can help it & have never really been there with the express intention of just taking photos.

Fortunately the weather was fine, it was probably the hottest day in April.

All photos were taken with the Canon 5D MkII & Canon 100-400mm zoom.

Not being a regular visitor, I have no idea whether the empty pod in the photo on the right is normal or not.

On the 13th March the Hertfordshire Hurricanes took on the Portsmouth Destroyers when Portsmouth visited Hertfordshire’s Hatfield ground.

As usual, lighting was variable throughout the game changing between sunlight & dark cloud cover.

The Hurricanes went behind with an early safety but ended up eventual winners with a score of 12 points to 8.

The second of the following shots was taken remotely with the camera on top of a monopod held high in the air & triggered with an radio shutter release. It was taken while the teams warmed up prior to kick-off.

You can see the rest of the shots from this game on my old website.

Posted under Photo Shoots

I bought the Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens in February 2009 but not had a chance to properly try it out. Spurred on by a recent article in Amateur Photographer, I got the lens out & collected a few insects to try it out on.

The wasp was a dead example I found in the shed. It was placed on top of a small perspex box in the light of a window. Radio shutter release was used, I think the shutter speeds were around 1/2 a second.

For each of the images I took 20-40 photographs all taken at a slightly different focusing range. All the shots are then loaded into image stacking software – in this case Zerene Stacker – which goes off & takes the sharp part out of every image, combining them & deleting the rest. Thus you end up with a photograph with a much wider depth of field than is possible with the lens in a single shot.

Taking 40 shots of an insect is only possible if the subject is really still. In the case of the wasp, that was fine as it was dead. With the spider, I put it in the fridge for a couple of minutes. I’m told that no harm is done to the creature & it goes into a state of sleep as if in a cold night, though you do have to be careful not to cool it for too long.

The ant is in  the state of waking up from its brief winter sleep. In fact on the second shot it was preening its antennae so I wasn’t able to get a series of shots to focus-stack. This is a single image, you can see how narrow the depth of field is with just one shot.

The woodlouse was a dead specimen found in the garden.