Onegav

Today during a little errand to go to the shop for some eggs and chicken, I took the opportunity to walk two minutes down the road from the shop and down a stretch of canal I haven’t been down before.

I kew it would hold some interest, as the canal goes under the motorway and there is a spot where boats moor up, and there is a boat yard repair shop type thing there too.

Just before the canal, the path crosses over a railway, and with a chimney (I think from the Guiness factory) puffing smoke in the distance it made for quite a nice composition.

I had all my gear with me today, but to start off with I decided to use my 18-55mm lens and mainly hand hold the camera, reason being I tend to find better compositions when I don’t use my tripod, I think its because I just shoot more images and my eyes are free to look all over the place for things to photograph.

Once I had found a composition I really liked though, I could easily set my tripod up and capture the image as sharply as possible.

I like the images of the rail tracks, though I didn’t get the exposure quite right and the sky is a little blown out in the highlights.

Onto the canal, and with the water being perfectly still it made for some nice reflections! In the shot below I used the reflection in the puddle too, to mirror the passing lorry and add a bit of extra interest. Its still a bit of a dull photograph, but fun to capture all the same.

As I got nearer the bridge that carries the motorway, it became easier to pick out and isolate elements to photograph, making for cleaner results.

I really like the two images here, above and below, and I very nearly picked one of these as todays main photograph. In the end I decided that they didn’t quite hold enough interest, and again the highlights were just a touch too bright on the boat windows.

Just at the other side of this bridge, was a little off shoot from the main canal, something I didn’t even know was there. Also another bridge, that had a gorgeous curve to it, all made out of brick unlike the concreate motorway bridge.

Looking back the way I’d walked and I found some really interesting reflections, and took a couple of photographs; one that I chose for todays main photograph, and this very similar one below.

I really liked the composition below, with the almost layered leading lines. Unfortunately though, the leading lines all pointing into the frame didn’t really point to a subject of note. I managed to frame up a refelction of the smoking chimney from earlier, but it just wasn’t a strong enough subject.

I do however, think this composition will look amazing at first light and with a boat just passing under the bridge, so maybe I’ll try again one day for that shot.

I wandered around the brick bridge a little more, to see what I could see, and again had some fun with reflections. This time I captured the reflection of the motorway bridge, the boat and a passing lorry. I framed it so that you couldn’t see that actual lorry, only its reflection. This image doesn’t quite work, it needs more coud in the sky I think to dull it off a little, the reflection is just a little too heavy in the bottom centre of the image, again it was great fun to capture though!

With that, I packed up and headed off home. A fun little outing and I have definitely found a new location for some photography! I can imagine this spot holds some really nice images, especially at sunrise.

Learnings – today was all about composition, and using refelctions and lines to build an image. Even in the railway shots its composition that was at the forefront of my mind. Not so much a learning today as an exercise in training my eye for a composition, I had good fun doing it too!