Tag: Yvelines

Walking with a macro lens

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

The bright sunny days in Spring are ideal to go walking with a macro lens. The sun is relatively low, the air clear, the plants all nice a new. I took all the following buds, flowers and seeds in a radius of a few kilometers. The fact that I was walking with a macro lens meant that I saw more. I was looking for original seeds and new growth. Unfortunately it meant that my walk took a little longer than expected.

This local park is typical of the scenery this time of year in the Yvelines in France. It is the only photograph that wasn’t taken with my 100mm macro lens.

There are new flowers and buds in the garden in Spring alongside the leaves and seeds from last year’s growth. There are more photographs of flowers and plants in my gallery.

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Natural gardens help protect nature

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

More and more we need to leave our gardens to grow unhindered in spring to help nature – birds, insects and plants. Natural gardens help protect nature in contrast to the over tendered lawn, fertilized flower beds and treated plants. This year I have been resisting the temptation to overwork the garden and I have tried to leave it as a natural garden.

Could I have a rarity?

This May may have been the warmest on record and it’s taken it’s toll on the lawn. It’s also meant that I’ve had to water some of the plants that I have planted. My potatoes, strawberries and tomatoes in particular. However there are some other plants that I never see normally that are thriving. Most impressive are 2 plants in the middle of the dry grass that must get mowed every year normally.

I am not an expert but a bit of research leads me to think they might be Pyramidal Orchids ( Anacamptis pyramidalis) Apparently, quite rare if it is. You can read more about it on Wikipedia (opens in a new tab).

Touring the garden

Having may curiosity piqued by such a find I set off to tour the flowers in the garden on a random May afternoon. I have planted tomatoes, fuchsias, geraniums, honeysuckle and roses. But there are many others. The hot sun kept the daisies closed but below are the others.

There are chives, some sort of tiny pea, wild strawberries and climber in amongst the honeysuckle.

Hopefully I can get as much pleasure from the natural garden, maybe save some time, money and back ache at the same time give nature a boost which in turn should help us all. Some of the wild flowers are discrete and you need to taker a closer look, but small is not necessarily less beautiful. We shall see how the garden develops. In parallel I will continue to look after my potatoes, strawberries and tomatoes.

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There is the Flowers and Plants album, and there are 3 blog posts relating to flowers

The role of white balance

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

This March has seen a wide range of weather, more than usual I think. Early Spring warmth and late winter coolness. Spring weather photography can inspire and to benefit we must always have a camera handy. There was even a good coating of sand from the Sahara giving exceptional sunsets. In March the sun is still relatively low in the sky which helps with the lighting. So why am I talking about the role of white balance? Because as I mentioned, the early spring warmth and winter coolness, and white balance is all about the warmth and coolness of light. Here are three examples where different lighting can make a big impact on the results.

Let me draw your attention to a camera feature that you may rarely look at: White Balance.

What is White Balance?

It can simply be put as the colour of the light, and this is defined by its temperature. If we use the noon sunlight to be the standard some light appears more orange, for example candles, and some appears bluer, for example modern car headlights. These are also referred to as being warmer, being orange, or cooler when bluer like a cold tap.

White balance values

Your camera, and phone are, by default, set up to take pictures using an automatic setting for white balance, AWB. You will find it in the menu, or expert menu. The role of white balance is to adjust the camera to compromise lighting conditions to take a good image in most circumstances.

The setting of white balance is creeping into everyday life too. This should make understanding it much easier. When you purchase LED lights they are defined by their temperature. Temperature is defined by 3 scales: Celsius (C), Fahrenheit (F) and Kelvin (K). Ice is defined as 0°C, 32°F and 273.15K. LED lights and White balance use the Kelvin temperature scale. For your cameras, a little counterintuitively, warmer candle like orange light has a lower temperature than the bluer clear sky. Typically the light from a candle will be 2000K and a cloudy sky 6500K.

How to set white balance

Why modify the AWB setting? Simply we want a white sheet of paper to look white when we photograph it. If we take the photo of the white paper in a candle lit room the paper will appear orange. The role of white balance is to tell the camera that this orange colour, the 2000K, is in fact white, which is about 5500K. The camera then has a simple addition/subtraction of some Kelvin to do to make our whites really white.

In the menu of the camera you may not find the Kelvin scale, but terms which relate to the typical light source for that temperature. So 2000K will be referred to by incandescent. 6500K as cloudy.

Using RAW is better

If you can take your photos in RAW, rather than JPEG, you have the added advantage that in post processing you can modify the white balance easily. This can be very useful, for example, when you are taking a series of photos of the same subject. A wedding is a classic example where the bride is dressed in white and you are photographing her in the garden, in sunshine and shadows, inside dark a building, around a candle lit table, in camera flash. All very different lights and therefore temperatures. If you don’t modify the white balance the dress will change in colour during your day.

Learn more

There are many resources on the internet which can explain all this in more detail and go further to explain how to set the white balance manually using the white object that you want to appear white in specific lighting conditions.

Take a look here, photographylife.com (opens in a new tab) for example.

Other photos

I have some other different lighting photos on my site, for example: Evening sunlight and lighting and shadows.

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or the link in my fine art store (opens in a new tab).

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Reflections on water

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The early part of 2022 has seen a lot of rain. The river Seine is rising once again and puddles are everywhere. The wide well maintained easy walkways are turning into muddy cross country challenges. Water is an unpredictable medium and can give surprising images. On this day I decided to focus on reflections on water. I returned to the Étang de la Galiotte and walked around the parc du peuple de l’herbe. I have published a post about this park before when I visited in June 2021. This post is here and here you will find information on how to get there.

Today I was travelling light, no tripods, filters, spare objectives, and went by chance just to see what the river was doing at the end of the day following a lot of rain. As I have said before (in my post on Urban Settings) I like to set myself a theme so today it was reflections on water.

The Étang de la Galiotte

The lake is separated from the river Seine by a thin strip of land. This forms part of the walkways around the park. The first photo is taken from the viewing platform here looking away from the river. The second from the northern pathway looking towards the south and the floating buildings.

River Seine

Looking the other way, to the west is the river Seine. Paris is upstream (left) from this point. As it’s been raining a lot the river is rising and encroaching on the river banks and viewing platforms.

The parc du peuple de l’herbe

Heading back inland and trying to stick to my theme the paths were wet on sometimes underwater. There are many seating areas and picnic tables and these would be great for summer days out. But in winter after a lot of rain these chairs and their reflections should give you an idea of the general state of the park.

You will find other photos of reflections in many pages, for example Beautiful Landscapes, Using a zoom lens, Spring walk along the Seine.

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store or the link in the menu.

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Capturing birds in flight

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

My afternoon introduction to capturing birds in flight tool place at the Étang de la Galiotte. This translates to Galiotte Pond. When you visit you will see that is an understated way of describing a large mass of water in Carrières-sous-Poissy. Capturing birds in flight professionally requires specialized equipment. I need to verify that I am interested enough to make that investment. So with my existing equipment I see about capturing birds in flight.

You can see from the map the lake is quite large. The town of Carrières-sous-Poissy, which translates to Quarries under Poissy, gives a good clue to the origin of the Étang de la Galiotte. The Paris region is made up of layers of sand, limestone, mixed with various amounts of clay. Being by the river Seine transport of the quarried sand was easy. Subsequently the Étang de la Galiotte was filled with river water to make a lake.

The lake is a major feature of the new park du peuple de l’herbe which covers 113 hectares.

Today, the lake and surrounding park are the host of birds, fish and people. There is a small island in the centre to help birds nest and breed. Making it a good site for capturing birds in flight. This protected natural space hosts a village of about 30 floating homes on the southern shore of the lake. There is an active residents association.

The Yvelines region published a detailed study, in French, about steps taken to avoid the risks associated to natural disasters in the region linked to the river, the geology and other potential threats.

Now to my visit. What did I see and how did the afternoon go?

Getting There

First of all if you arrive from Paris take to the train or RER to Poissy. You can walk from the train station at Poissy. It’s a fairly level walk over the main road bridge. It will take 20 minutes, about 1.5km. If you arrive by car, then I suggest you park in the Parking du parc du peuple de l’herbe. There are several bus services which use the road bridge to get to the Poissy station. The town of Poissy has also a project to build a new footbridge (site in French) linking the station to the park.

For the less nimble on their feet, I would recommend sticking to the path that run along the river Seine, rather than those by the lake which end up as a narrow track in the woods.

Bright sunshine and water

Bright sunshine can make photography complicated. On the good side everything is brightly lit, but with that comes shadows. And the contrast can be hard to manage. Add to that water, and to a slightly lesser degree the bright blue sky, and you have bright reflections and dispersed light from the sky and water. This can make the blue sky appear grey, the beautiful water dull and opaque.

Polarization

The solution to this is a polarizing filter. You may will be familiar with polarizing sun glasses. The same filter on your objective will filter out light which is dispersed in all directions. It will leave nicely aligned light rays. The advantage that the filter has over sunglasses is that you can spin the filter to choose exactly which direction the light rays should be. This allows you to choose the blue colour for your sky and optimize the view of the water so you can see the fish etc. Unfortunately my filter was not with me on this trip.

Freezing motion

So I chose to focus on the bird-life. In June the young ducks and geese still look cute and fluffy. They become a natural subject for cute photos. There are also plenty of terns here. They fly quickly over the water’s surface before diving into the water to capture fish. And the fish don’t have much chance as they are so fast. This speed also makes them difficult to photograph.

Some starting steps

Time needed: 30 minutes

Capturing flying birds

  1. Before you go

    Empty the memory card, and take the fastest card you have. It might be worth checking what file types you are storing. In general I write RAW and JPEG files to the card. Doing this means writing takes longer and uses more space. You could just save high quality JPEG for this session.

  2. Select objective

    Use a zoom, I would say at least 135mm, preferably 210mm, or more

  3. Use auto-focus

    Set the auto focus to AI servo. You will not be able to focus manually on the fast moving birds, use the camera’s intelligence o track them in flight

  4. Choose the ISO setting

    Consider setting the ISO to 100, or 200, depending on the aperture of your objective. The smaller the aperture the less light will be collected and therefore a higher ISO can help.

  5. Set speed

    In order to freeze the movement of a bird, or anything moving rapidly, set the speed to a maximum of 1/800s

  6. Review and modify

    After your first series of photos review and adjust the settings. Too dark check the ISO and aperture. Blurred reduce the speed.

  7. Repeat

    There will be many missed shots so just keep going

SD Card speeds

There are many sizes of SD cards, but I would suggest 32GB or 64GB. Which gives plenty of room and not a totally unmanageable volumes of photos to sort through when you get home. When the technology was launched it supported a 12.5 MB/s speed. At this speed it would take 2 seconds to write a typical RAW image. Making continuous shooting for a bird in flight impossible. The technology now supports up to 3940MB/s however not all cameras support such speeds, nor do they need them. There are 3 common ways of describing the speed that the card can transfer data.

Look for card with the U3 class. These can support up to 30 MB/s which id ample for video and photo recording. There is more information on the classes on the SD card Association website.

Good luck capturing birds in flight. If you further inspiration try this external website.

Return visit

It’s a great park and I went back in the winter. You can read about it here.

I have other posts about my visits along the River Seine, for example Spring walk along the Seine

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Low light needs a tripod and patience

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Low light can bring a great atmosphere to any photo. However, low light needs a tripod and patience if you are to capture the subjects at their best. A tripod because you are going to be taking long exposure photographs and without it there will be movement. The slightest movement will lead to blur. Patience because those long exposures may mean people and pets keep popping into frame at the wrong moment spoiling the perfect shot.

Low light occasions easily present themselves at dusk and dawn and indoors. I am going to a local church to capture some of the atmosphere.

What equipment?

As I said, low light needs a tripod and patience. I have a small Rollei tripod. Some will say I am a bit short of patience but we’ll make do. Traveling light means I will take my Canon and 50mm objective. Why not a zoom you may ask? Really, I choose my 50mm because it has has a large f/1.8 aperture so it can let what little light there is into the camera body. It’s also a great objective for capturing a variety of subjects.

Making sure there was nothing else was happening in the church, and that we had permission, I was allocated 2 hours with the objective of 10 or so images.

The process

Initially take a slow walk around the building looking at everything. Focus on the lighting and shadows. You might not be able to get high up, check out where any choir or organ is situated. But certainly low down angles can give interesting images. If you have seen some of my photos of trees you will know I like looking up, for example. Contrasting shades and colours are good subjects. This can come from lights, or even better the sun. I was fortunate to have sun shining through stained glass windows which brings colour to objects which wouldn’t normally be coloured. Candles are also a source of light but the flames do move so can be tricky on long exposures or when creating an HDR, or bracketed, image.

After reviewing the site, set the ISO to 100. Why? we don’t want the camera software doing clever compensation for the lack of light and increasing the sensor sensitivity leading to noisy pictures. Although I have heard that you can reduce the noise, by merging several images. Not something I have tested yet but when I do I’ll add a link here. Because we have our tripod we can extending the exposure time to avoid any issues . Finally, set the settings to manual or AV, Aperture priority, f/1.8 and off we go.

The results

I wanted to share the images capturing the architecture, the candles and the sunlight. They show that low light needs a tripod and patience. Whether it be waiting for the visitors to move away from the seating, the walkways or the pillars. or coming back to the same chair later in the visit as the sun made its way round to add colour to plan straw chairs.

Finally, if you are out and have no equipment or just out of patience, today’s cameras can do a good job. For example the final candle above. The downside is that it’s a little noisy.

Other posts that you may like

If you are interested in lighting, I have some other photos on the lighting page.

There is also a blog post on :

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store, via the link in the menu or directly below.


Walk along the Seine from the river Oise

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last week I walked along the river Seine towards Paris, starting in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. Walking the in the other direction, towards the sea, Conflans is home to the confluence of the rivers Seine and Oise. So today I decided to walk along the Seine from the river Oise. There are few parking spaces at the confluence of the two rivers.

Both rivers have a path so you have to choose, today I decided to take a short walk along the Seine. The river Seine is a major transportation route and large barges are almost always moored in Conflans. Important road and rail links are also a feature of the town. Alongside the river, the landscape and nature I wanted to capture the transportation links.

The cycle bridge is part of the itinerary from Paris to London. The segment from Maisons-Laffitte to Chaussy, some 48.71km. The rail bridge is part of the RER A line running from Cergy le Haut to Paris and in Conflans fin d’Oise the station also serves the railway line from Paris St Lazare to Mantes la Jolie. From the footbridge you have a lovely view towards the historic town centre of Conflans Sinte-Honorine. You can also witness local birds looking for a meal.

HDR photos to bring out hidden features

I wanted to compare a colour photo of the underside of the rail bridge with a black and white version. Industrial sites lend themselves well to black and white images. I also wanted to capture the clouds and the metal structure. This called for a high dynamic range. Something that many cameras offer today. It builds a single image out of several, often 3, images of the same object. Each image is taken with different exposure settings to capture different lighting and details.

I also took a walk this spring around Villennes sur Seine, which is just a short distance away, on the way to the sea!

Going the other way towards Paris, I have a post about Urban Photography at La Défense.

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store, via the link in the menu or directly below.


Spring walk along the Seine

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Spring is having a slow start this year. So when I took a spring walk along the Seine at the Quai de Gaillon, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine there was still a wintery look to the scenery. The trees were budding and the mistletoe was still clearly visible.

I was surprised to see a snail cross my path.

The walk down to the river seine banks is relatively steep. There are several routes down from the town to the riverside. This is the rue de la Fossé du Moulin. It is for the most part inaccessible to vehicles.

But the peace and quiet of an early morning walk along the banks of the river Seine is worth it. It was a great source of inspiration for the impressionists. Camille Pissarro did some painting there in the 1870s for example this one. This was probably painted in the summer nearby, rather than during a Spring walk along the Seine at Quai de Gaillon.

Here you can see mistletoe clearly in the tress on the far side of the river Seine.

There are also many areas to stop, relax, exercise. There is no doubt in my mind, in the summer it will be busier. Get there early if you want to avoid the weekend crowds.

Next week I will explore some other area of the town. The confluence of the river Oise and River Seine.

I also took a walk this spring around Villennes sur Seine, which is just a short distance away, on the way to the sea!

I have other posts about my visits along the River Seine, for example Capturing birds in flight, or going the other way towards Paris, I have a post about Urban Photography at La Défense.

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store, via the link in the menu or directly below.


A spring afternoon walk around Villennes

Posted on by SteveH
Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

A cool spring afternoon was the ideal opportunity to take a walk in the park. Walk around the park and capture the quiet atmosphere at the start of lockdown. New year’s growth is just appearing. As a result; it is not swamped by the profuse summer leaves and flowers.

The small Paris suburb of Villennes-sur-Seine, in Yvelines, France has some wonderful architecture and parks. So I stayed in the centre of town and visit the Parc du Docteur Fauvel, the town hall and its garden and the river Seine. The river runs very close to town here. This spring afternoon walk around Villennes was in April.

These were taken on my Canon camera with either my 50mm or 18-135mm lens. I would recommend a Spring afternoon walk around Villennes as it shows you don’t have to be far from the city of Paris to be in lovely countryside. It’s a short train ride from St Lazare station. When you get off the train I suggest you start by appreciating the architecture of the old station building. However, If you come by car, parking in the town centre is limited and short stay. The town is not far from the A13 and A14 autoroutes.

My next walk will be a little upstream on the river Seine at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine

Follow this link if you want to see more of my photographs of Flowers and Plants

Some of my photos are available for purchase on my Adobe Stock store, via the link in the menu or directly below.