A trip to Chirk castle

Chirk Castle

Chirk Castle

Sorry for the delay in posting this last week or so i have been very busy with work and traveling to new places for you all to see :). I have been to 4 new places which i will be blogging about over the next few days to keep you all entertained. The first on this list is Chirk castle situated in the Village of Chirk unusual name i must say but it is quite a beautiful place, this medieval fortress was a nice day out seeing as the weather was deceiving. We arrived at the castle which is national trust owned and it is placed in a very beautiful setting, surrounded by gardens and lots of countryside. Luckily i have recently joined the national trust so all these marvelous places ill be visiting will keep the cost down quite a bit as it was £13 each for adults to enter the grounds and castle itself. The architecture of this castle was quite beautiful and was converted into a grand house at some point, some of the rooms you will be able to see here. I took this opportunity to try out a new lens i just acquired, The Samyang 35mm F1.4 and my it is a beauty. All the images here where taken with this manual focusing Beast, For old places such as these where the rooms can be very dark the large aperture and 35mm F.O.V make it the perfect combo for walking these old halls and also creating silky smooth Bokeh in the gardens. The rooms of this Old Fortress where lavishly decorated with beautiful chandeliers and ornate furniture, my favorite room in the house the study which can be seen above was absolutely stunning and rammed full of little details giving it a really old but used feel. The main room in the house was splendidly decorated throughout from floor to ceiling there where many places to cast you eye and admire its intricacy. Now onto the gardens and they where quite beautiful unfortunately the weather had other plans for me as there was hail and large amounts of rain lashing down while i was inside the keep luckily the weather and clouds broke and i got a clear spell for an hour to wander around and take some stunning floral images, which i hope you agree with :). The gardens where quite large and it was nice to walk through them as all the little flowers where on the spring bloom and beautiful ornate statues dotted around added much interest to the already scenic landscape. All in all i would definitely recommend this place as a place to see, its rich in history and covered in art and architecture followed by a natural beautiful landscape around and is worth seeing. One More addition to this post, i have just purchased a Drone so hopefully i will be able to bring an extra dimension to these beautiful venues :). enjoy your day 

Taken in Chirk Gardens

Taken in Chirk Gardens

A trip to a monkeys paradise

Monkey World

I recently Took a trip to a place called Monkey Business its attached to the Trentham estate in Stoke-on-trent, it was a good day out but be warned make sure the weather is going to be good before you go as it is very open. At first i didn't know what to expect but i was pleasantly surprised by what i found there, i didn't see much within the first 5 minutes the odd monkey hidden in the tree here and there. Once we i walked a little further on however it became clear as to why that was. Feeding time in the main area and they where everywhere, on the tress running up to you and then off with others i found it quite entertaining.So time to get the camera out and to be honest i had my canon 70-200 lens on but it was no where near enough to capture these little monkeys dotted about, so i swapped over to my Sigma 400mm f5.6 This lens well what can i say if you have £60 yes that`s right £60 and you want a prime for wildlife get this lens. As you will see in the images price/performance its a real bargain, so i changed over and the world of difference it made. It was quite a bright day so luckily it did not affect any image quality in camera the manual focusing was quite difficult though so if you can get this little beast for your camera and it will auto-focus as well get it. So anyway we continued down the trail and it started taking us into miniature jungle environment that had been built for the monkeys including artificial streams and play areas for them. You could see however how the recent severe storms had impacted the site there where felled trees all over the place that had clearly been blown over, but this made for a more dramatic view in my opinion. The only downside to this place that i found was that it was rather small, it took around an hour to walk around with my girlfriend. If you have kids then that would be great they could be entertained for hours here and i honestly think they would love to gt up close and personal with these little critters. Luckily however with it being attached to the much Larger Trentham estates it makes for a all round great day out as this was a lovely walk which ill go into a little more detail in my next post. Hope you all enjoy the images and have a good day.

The Gear i use Now

The Gear i use now

Now after all the previous gear in my possession i pretty much got rid of it all and started again, now having a little knowledge of photography and how cameras work i decided to get myself a Sony a7. Its a lovely camera it does have its faults and they are pretty annoying BUT!, in the types of photography i have been doing more recently it has been a joy. So the faults well..Make sure you take plenty batteries as they are very poor and it also has some pretty Poor lens choices and this is a widely agreed view of this camera series and the ones that are available are pretty damn expensive, now i know that Sony has just released the G master series and they have also announced a native 50mm F1.8 lens which will be affordable for us mere mortals, I will be getting this for definite i need a walk around lens with good auto-focus to capture certain scenes, now i could get the Zeiss 24-70mm F4 or even Sony's Kit lens But the first is to be honest to expensive and from the vast majority of reviews UN biased ones that is, it does not have that typical Zeiss image quality and is just a little sharper that the standard kit lens Sony produces for this camera. So why not the Kit lens ? Well i had the kit lens when i first got the camera and i thought this looks okay build quality was not the best but image quality was decent, the auto-focus worked fast and it seemed a good stop gap. Key word there Seemed! it broke within 2 days, now maybe i had a lemon and maybe it was a fluke but i just cant have unreliable kit like that so that went back and i had to ponder on what to do next. I liked the camera but at the moment i did not have a single lens so i started to do some research into what lenses and such would fit, to my surprise basically any lens ever made will fit this camera with the relevant adapter of course. so i started shopping around for used gear and i picked up a Minolta 50mm F1.7 for £30 bargain and a Minolta 28mm F2.8 for £25, now this i could get used to vintage lenses for the price/performance had massive gains over more modern lenses. It gave me a chance to experience different types of focal lengths at a reasonable price and led me onto the lenses i use today, they are Samyang 14mm F2.8, Vivitar 55mm f2.8 macro, Canon 70-200F4 L this is my main walk around lens at the moment, sigma 400mm f5.6 Prime and last but by no means least a Voightlander 21mm F4 color scopar lens. This is the choice i made and honestly it very well may change in the future i currently use all these lenses FULL MANUAL that is the camera settings, focus,and aperture selection. Everything i do currently is my own choice because i am enjoying using the camera in this way and i am getting some fantastic results from it also. In my next post ill be detailing the first real trip i took this camera on and the challenges i faced in the process, Hopefully this will help some of you choose what lenses and maybe Bodies you want. 

Now i am still getting used to this Blogging Lark and would love some feedback on ways to improve what you all want to see and hear about.

Swapping to the Nikon D7000/Sony A7

The D7000 i had a love hate relationship with this camera i found that compared to my D3200 the images where not quite as crisp, obviously the d3200 is higher resolution and slightly newer but i could use the older lenses i had previously bought to the full extent with only minimal sacrifice which was a win win, wasn't it ! i found myself making the biggest learning curves with this camera. It did cost quite a bit over the previous model so i wanted and felt like i needed to make it sing for me and i did get some really nice images from it, i would say it was this camera that made me think now i am getting somewhere. i started to focus more on my landscapes with this camera and i think that is pretty much where i am at now to be honest but it did open up that world with some nice shots. Dont get me wrong if you go to particular places at the right times of day, i.e the Golden hour sunset and sunrise for those who didn't know  then you can get some stunning shots with most cameras, but i started to use my tri-pod more and started to finally use manual settings and manual focus on the camera to get sharp shots, this was mainly because the auto-focus on this camera was was absolute Garbage. It very frequently missed its mark and the image was unusable. I spent the next year taking images with this camera some of which are shown here i used a variety of lenses and i was enjoying it but primarily i was using it for landscapes and it was quite clunky, i decided to look a little further a field and try a different brand. I was not disappointed, i ended up with the Sony Alpha 7  now this camera is not perfect not by any stretch of the imagination it was a real pain for me at first considering the lenses are an absolute fortune for it, i ended up with older manual lenses so i had don the complete opposite to when i started from full Auto to basically semi-auto to Full manual and manual focus. sounds a little like im talking about guns there but i digress, Now that i have given a brief History of where i started and what i up-to these days i can go into more detail about individual trips and how i took some of the photographs you will be seeing including the gear ill be using the lenses and setting that where used to capture the images.if you have any questions or advice you can give to me as i am forever learning then please feel free to comment or get in touch.

A trip to the lakes

A trip to the Lake district

Once back from Italy i decided that the Nikon D60 was not up to the standard i was looking for in a camera, it did fulfill all the basics but i wanted some more functionality, so i purchased a Nikon D3200 and that same year and we took it on a trip to the lake district. while there i tried a few different methods of photography to try and get a feel for which style i like. I had a 18-55mm kit lens and a Tamron 90mm macro lens odd combination but i had purchased it after seeing many images online of macro photography and wanted to give it a go. i started to try my hand at landscapes and a little bit of nature photography but when you see pros doing them online it seems a world away from the kind of things you take as an amateur, But the one key thing here is do not give up and practice practice. It is the only way you will truly get any better, there will be many people out there who have a very good eye and a natural talent for photography but most of us earthlings need to practice to get better. When  i was in the lake district i found some of my more steeper learning curves, i had watched a lot of videos on you-tube and guides on how to do various things and most of them recommend you shoot in aperture priority instead of auto. I spent the entire time in Italy shooting in auto mode and it took me a little while to shake it, but once i did it opened up a whole new world of possibility. so i did as many of the online instructions say to do! shoot in aperture mode and to some extent i spent the next year in this mode because i just found it easy to do, it required very little effort on my part it was quite like a point and shoot. Not to say that that mode is bad it is far better than auto and if i could use it now i still would from time to time. Basically i would just focus on object select the aperture i wanted and hey presto Blurred backgrounds or sharp front to back. I always thought of manual mode as something that only pros could do, but honestly once you have had some practice it becomes like second nature as you will see in some of my later images. But once i started getting the feel of the camera i wanted more, more lenses that is. I was no expert on camera bodies at the time but i had read in a lot of places that Nikon bodies where compatible with much older lenses, what i did not realize is that unless you buy a more Semi-pro Body I.e d80/d90/d7000 variants of the APSC sensors the older lenses do not auto-focus. most modern DSLR cameras these days have the motors that drive auto-focus built into the lenses them selves so all the camera does basically is provide power, older lenses on the other hand use in built Focus motors in the camera body much like a screw turning the focus backwards and forwards. This ended up being a problem for me as i went out on a whim and purchased 3 older Nikon vintage lenses, when they came i was kinda disappointed to say the least. So i started doing some research into what camera i should get next.

In the Beginning

In the Beginning

I started getting into photography about 2-3 

years ago, to be honest at first i did not know whether i would like it or not.So i purchased myself a cheap DSLR, well i thought it was expensive at the time it was a Nikon D60 quite a useful introduction into the world of photography. the main reason i bought it was whenever i went anywhere with my Girlfriend she would always bring her point and shoot and to be honest i felt a little left out, it was an extra dimension to a day out or a holiday and i felt like i needed that. so the first trip we went on to test my new Dslr that literally came at the last minute was Italy. (i must admit i cut it a little close with whether to spend the money or not) This opened my eyes to what was possible, i mean i was a complete amateur at the time but the first few images i took i felt like a professional. To the above right you can see one shot i took on the first day of being there and i could not contain my excitement just walking around snapping aimlessly it was a Joy.

So as the holiday drew to a close i must of taken hundreds of images of many a random thing, but in the randomness you always find some gold or hidden gems and honestly this excited me, i found myself wanting more so i started planning my days out and walks around photography. it was a trail of different cameras and lenses and types of photography that leads me to Today from crop sensors to full frame mirrorless cameras, i hope that i can explain the things that gave me headaches and share some of my images with you to keep you interested along the way.

(Image from St Marks Square Venice)