Durham Festival of Light

The Durham Festival of Light was intended to boost that city's bid to be the UK City of Culture in 2013 and was presented over four evenings starting last Thursday night. I thought of going on Thursday but the weather was poor and Friday worse. Fortunately Saturday and Sunday were better and I spent a couple of hours on Sunday wandering around Durham. I have never seen so many people in the city, coming down from the cathedral square after the Son et Lumiere display, stewards were marshalling people onto the right side of the road, to allow new visitors to use the left. All motorised traffic was stopped.



The castle and cathedral



Prebends Bridge



The cathedral seen across the weir at the fulling mill.



The cathedral reflected in the river



Part of the Son et Lumiere display.

Canon 5D 24-70L

Last of the Autumn Colours

The builders planted this cherry tree before we moved into the house over 20 years ago. I think that the variety is called Hisakura. It has a rather stark upright aspect, nothing like as pleasing as the form of our weeping birch, but the colours in the spring and autumn are superb.

Autumn Colour - Durham

First Light

The rising sun peeps through the trees into the Wear valley, near Penshaw.

I'm not a great fan of these so called high dynamic range (HDR) shots, they often look very unnatural, but there is a fashion for them in some quarters and the photos do sell. As with most techniques of post processing, if it is not possible to tell that there has been trickery, that is when the results are most pleasing.

In fact photographers have been using HDR from the very earliest days of the art, when the very limited emulsions of the day could not record a realistic range of tones, and it was necessary to use more than one exposure to adequately record a scene. I believe that it was first employed to capture seascapes with detail in the dark water and light sky.

In this case I used two very different exposures, one to tame the sky and sun and another to reveal detail in the foreground, They were taken hand held and blended in Photoshop. I like to think that this is not too obvious in the result!

Autumn Colour in the Lake District

A rainbow seen near Grasmere village



St Mary's church Rydal Mount



A view across Grasmere



Grasmere from Loughrigg Terrace

Canon 5D Zuiko 28mm f3.5 lens

Light Through Trees - Cox Green

I cycle to work through Cox Green wood. On this morning the light was streaming low through the trees, casting long shadows. It made me think that in a few weeks time it will be too dark for photography both in the mornings and when I return in the evenings. A tad depressing.

Canon 20D, manual focus lens.

Dolphins off Seaburn

On Saturday we went for a walk along the coastal path between Roker and Souter lighthouse. On the way we passed a couple of fishermen who pointed out a bit of a commotion out at sea. In fact a small group of maybe three dolphins appeared to be tracking a shoal of fish that were heading north parallel to the coast.

This was the first time that Carol and I had seen a dolphin in the wild, so we were pretty excited about it, although I am told that they are occasionally to be seen in Roker harbour. The only telephoto lens that I had with me was a 70-200mm zoom, not nearly powerful enough to capture their antics properly unfortunately!

We followed them all of the way from Seaburn to Souter, although they were travelling rather faster than we were. They appeared to be heading towards South Shields and the Tyne when we last saw them.