David Bennett

The weather has been changeable – first sunny, then rain, then some sun again and then more rain – all in one day. Then in the late afternoon the sun came out again and we went for a walk in Middleton Wood, which is near Ilkley in North Yorkshire.

The woods were carpeted with bluebells, which looked especially attractive with the sun slanting through the trees in the late afternoon.

For a close-up photograph of an English bluebell showing how the flowers all grow on one side of the stem, see our bluebell article here. In contrast, the flowers of the Spanish bluebell grow all around the stem, so the plant grows upright.

We will be adding these photographs to our ecard collection within the next week.

We will also be adding photographs from our India trip to our ecard collection, so look out for those also.

This photograph of ours has been featured in the 2010 issue of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Visitor Guide, which is published by the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority. The publication is distributed throughout the region and is available at tourist information offices and local libraries, as well as at the National Park centers.

The photograph shows David Wellock at Hurries Farm in the Yorkshire Dales National Park helping one of his ewes to bond with its newborn lambs. David and Wendy Hoare run the farm where they raise Aberdeen Angus cattle as well as rearing sheep.

We saw the lambs being born only a few minutes before we took this photograph, and in fact we spent an hour or more there, taking a whole series of photographs showing the whole gentle business of birth from beginning to end.

The sheep in the background of the photograph are all expectant mothers, so the hormones in the barn are quite heady. Therefore, the farmer encourages the mother sheep to get close to her offspring so that she gets the correct smell. Then she will bond with them properly.

The ewes were all sired on the same day so the farmer knows that if he brings them all into the barn, he can watch over them all as they give birth over a very short period of a day or two.

It’s a tough and tense few days for the farmer.

The Guide In Print And Online
The National Park Visitor Guide gives details of the events taking place in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, events that include walks, talks, and courses, as well as farm visits.

As well as the print version, there is also an online version – so if you want to catch up on what there is to see and do, click the link for the details: Yorkshire Dales National Park Guide 2010.

You can read more about our visit to Hurries Farm in this article, and I suggest you take a look to get a more complete picture of life at Hurries Farm.

Check out the ecards featuring our photographs here at Quillcards.

A couple of days ago a few inches of snow finally reached us here in Leeds, east of the Penines in the north of England.

It was very misty when I finally went out and I couldn’t help but think of those oft-repeated words to photographers – It’s all about the light.

Well, there wasn’t much light around that afternoon.

This tree is in Soldiers Field in Leeds, a local landmark where local football teams play on a Sunday, and the goalposts were all that could be seen looming out of the mist.

Save for this lone tree.

There are trees along the boundary of the field, but the field itself is an expanse of close-cropped grass save for a very few trees. On this day this lone tree was king or queen of all it surveyed.

Meanwhile, off in the distance, these boys were dragging their sled across the field.

Technical
For this shot of the boys with the sled, I set the exposure compensation to +1.33 to compensate for the black cat at night problem that all cameras face – that is, knowing what they are pointed at.

The question the camera cannot answer is whether the subject is mid-grey or black or white or a mixture of light and dark tones. It’s a question I looked at in this article on digital cameras, though the question applies to film cameras also.

In brief though, the problem is that if a subject is all white and the camera doesn’t know it (which it doesn’t) then it will expose it as though it is a standard scene, which is mid-grey. So to compensate for that and make the subject brighter and whiter, the thing to do is to over expose the shot.

This is done by dialing in a positive amount of exposure compensation – in this case +1.33. Even that wasn’t enough and if I were to shoot in similar circumstances with the Nikon D700 again, I would probably try an exposure compensation of one stop more – say + 2.33.

Luckily, this was shot in RAW, so I could increase the exposure in Adobe Photoshop after the event.