Onegav

And a packet of crisps! Yep, this is the actual pub from the series “Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps”, the only difference is its no longer called The Waterloo, and, its no longer a pub!

It’s actually now a Thai Temple, with links to its main base in Thailand going back over 650 years. Beyond that, I don’t know anything about it, but I thought it would make a nice photograph.

Although my style is kind of soft and muted, especially in the shadows, I paid as much attention as I possibly could to make the image as sharp as possible.

The image above I think portrays that best, and to achieve it I used my tripod, two up two down exposure bracketing, 2 second delay on the shutter button and I even set the mirror to lock in the up position when I took the image, to eliminate every scrap of camera shake possible. I focused on the left corner of the building, and settings were; 20mm – f/8 – 1/13 second exposure and ISO100.

The shutter speed I actually pushed as long as I could for this image, to just flatten the ripple of a little on the water, and give it that glassy effect. Also using my polarising filter helped that, along with cutting some glare and pulling the colour in the reflections through.

I also spent a good amount of time working on the composition, so the building was the main focus in what is actually quite a busy scene, so that the lines of the image flowed in to it, the road, the canal, the boats and even the branches on the trees.

Quite a lot going on then, for what was intended to be a faily straight forward photograph of a pub! In Lightroom, I then added a graduated filter to the sky, to recover all that moody detail.

I had Livvy with me today, my little super star, and for the image above it was a little less technical, hand held, and more about capturing the moment than anything.

The only thing I didn’t like, was the massive flag pole in the middle of the frame, and for the shot above I actually edited some of it out to reduce its weight int he image – though I’m not a fan of editing bits out, and only really ever do it if its absolutely necessary.

Learnings – I’m really pleased with todays images, and Livvy and I had a bit of fun capturing them – she wasn’t even embarassed this time! I’m pleased I took my time, explored every scrap of possbilities for clarity, detail, mood and sharpness of the image I wanted to capture.

I think this scene would be awesome at night too, I might give it a go one day!