Jonathan Gazeley

From Stu’s Tuesday Challenge:

Take a bunch of photos without using any kind of viewfinder or checking the images on the rear screen afterwards. Post your best one of the week!

I had a barbecue with Hana and a couple of friends on Bristol Downs today. Seemed an ideal time to take photos, and when I saw the sun shining through the trees and the smoke, I got my camera out. Without using my viewfinder, I managed to get Hana in the first one.

This last one is probably my favourite.

What with the sunny weather this bank holiday, this glass of orange juice was most welcome.

Bank holiday weekend finds me mooching around in my parents’ garden in the evening. This old goal net has seen better days, but I loved playing with it as a kid.

Last night I went for a walk around the Clifton downs and suspension bridge around sunset. The BBC forecast sunset at 9:04pm, and here’s what I came up with.

In the first picture, the sun was above the horizon but the light was lovely and golden, and allowed me to take this picture of the bridge.

8:44pm - Clifton Suspension Bridge

I got bored of taking pictures of the bridge, because it’s hard to take pictures of something very large if you’re also standing on it. So I walked up onto the hill where Clifton Observatory stands and took this picture – still in relatively bright light.

9:03pm - Clifton Suspension Bridge

Finally this last shot was taken a bit further down the downs, but not as far as the ice cream van (for those of you who know Bristol). I’m looking away from the bridge, down to Avonmouth. It is now well gone the official time of sunset, but still light enough to take photos.

9:24pm - Avonmouth

… over Barton Fields…

… and over Brandon Hill

I didn’t take this photograph. This is a self-portrait of my grandfather, taken in Korea in 1955. The one thing I can accept credit for is scanning in and restoring the image after the slides were passed onto me this week. I suppose in that way, I created the image you see before you in its current form, but I did not compose the shot.

For me, this is a very touching image. While I knew my grandfather well as a grandfather, this picture represents a man I never met. A man who didn’t have children, let alone grandchildren. In this photo he is the same age as I am now – I’m fascinated wondering what he would have been like.

You might not imagine that the Cribbs Causeway retail park in Bristol would be the most romantic or picturesque venue for photography. But using the same filters and settings as I described in my previous post, I managed these shots.

Today I decided that I wanted to go out and take a photo of blurred pedestrians walking down a street, using a slow shutter.

I’d never tried this before but I thought I knew what to do. I used both of my ND filters (an ND4 and an ND8) to limit the amount of light coming into the camera. I didn’t know which settings to choose on the camera so before I set out I had a fiddle with the settings in the well-lit office. On my trusty camera, a Fuji S9600, using the lowest sensitivity (ISO 80) and the smallest aperture (f11) I was able to get a shutter speed of 25 seconds without overexposing the shot. I reminded myself that outdoors it would be brighter, and perhaps I would have to use a shutter speed more like 5 seconds.

It turns out in the end I wasn’t able to have a longer shutter than one second. I’m still reasonably pleased with the photo, though. Shame there weren’t many people about.

The moral of the story is: The sun is much, much brighter than you think!