This is an image that I have sat on for a year now, and a personal fave, BUT, the sky was blown to pieces, despite some amazing golden hour side light. Not a filter in the world, or software package could have salvaged the featureless sky, and so what to do. Well in the end I dropped a substitute sky in after lots of soul searching, from an earlier shoot in the Yorkshire dales, the light coming from the same direction, shot by me, shot at the same focal length and exposure, same mate alongside in miketonge

And so the result, 2 of my images combined, heresy I wonder?

Obviously, the same can be said of the similar pano crop from a few days ago, but I did not declare it at the time as a little experiment. It certainly will not be habit forming, but the foreground and mid ground was just too good to waste gathering dust on a hard drive.

©johnbleakleyphotography #JohnBleakleyPhotography

Copyright: © 2024 john bleakley photography. All rights reserved. All images protected by Pixy. No unauthorised use.

A pattern in our activities seemed to be emerging. On one day, we’d lounge about by the pool, reading, swimming and dozing until lunchtime, before heading down to the beach, where we’d read, swim and doze until sunset. On the next we’d lounge about by the pool, reading, swimming and dozing until an hour before lunchtime, before heading off in the car to examine the fare on offer at some local hostelry and then spending the rest of the daylight hours exploring the volcanoes, or one of Cesar Manrique’s island masterpieces, or driving around in a desultory manner until we found ourselves somewhere interesting. It was the sort of pattern we like – not too challenging as we made the most of that long break under warm blue skies while at home our loved ones shuddered and shivered as the long dry spell gave way to days of deluge and plunging temperatures. Lanzarote was treating us well and we were content to soak it all up without over exerting ourselves.

A week into our low octane adventures and by Saturday afternoon we hadn’t even managed to drag our lazy carcasses as far as the local beach. If we were following the pattern then we ought to have been somewhere other than the poolside by 4pm, but then again perhaps we hadn’t realised there was a pattern yet. Still, there was one local spot I’d wanted to investigate that was just a little too far away to walk to, and now seemed as good a time as any to go and gaze across the handful of miles that separated us from the neighbouring island of Fuerteventura, whose bulk sat appealingly on the horizon whenever we glimpsed the sea here at Playa Blanca. Throughout each day, competing ferry services chased back and forth across the divide, transporting passengers to Playa Blanca’s sister resort at Corralejo, whose lights would glow across the dark water each evening. Another mini world, so close at hand; another untamed landscape waiting to be explored. Each time we left our resort in the car and drove past that patch of undeveloped ground towards the roundabout that leads away from the town, the uplifting view of Fuerteventura, with the small island of Lobos to one side filled the windscreen and drove the imagination. I’ve seen worse views across patches of wasteland you know. And if we could see it so well from here, how would it look if we plonked ourselves down at the most south westerly viewpoint available to us down by the lighthouse of Punta Pechiguera? It was only ten minutes away in the car and on an afternoon where sloth had threatened to steal the day entirely, today seemed like a good time to make that short pilgrimage.

Disappointingly, I’d already realised that the sun itself was setting well away from the jumble of dark slopes and features in the hinterland behind that distant shoreline. What I didn’t really have much idea about was whether we were going somewhere to sit and enjoy watching the sun go down, or if I’d find some photography to entertain myself with. While I hoped for the latter, I wasn’t certain that the silhouette of another land mass ten kilometres across the breach would in itself be enough. But what I found brought promise, initially in the form of rocks and pools where bringing the tripod low would reduce the featureless middle ground in my compositions. While some of the better results included that setting sun, what I really wanted was the Fuerteventura story, the one that spoke of the bond between these two stunning islands in the latitude where it’s always summertime. And a little while later I found a foreground that worked and at the same time removed the empty space between the subject and the unconditionally beautiful background. Well, a series of moving temporary foregrounds in fact. It would just be a matter of timing.

I’m not sure whether it’s a coincidence, but this, my third post from the November trip to Lanzarote is also the third that was taken with the long lens. In fact, looking back to that holiday, the 100-400 seemed so enjoy at least as much time in use as the “go to” 24-70 lens. I’m starting to wonder how on earth I ever managed without it, and both here and in Iceland a couple of months earlier the investment repaid me with results even better than I’d dared to hope for. Easy to think of these lenses as being designed exclusively for wildlife and sport you know. It even does a good job as a macro lens although that’s not a discipline I very often apply myself to. But as a landscape tool, the possibilities are ones I was still discovering here, as lazy rolling waves idled across the scene in front of me on a petrol blue sea and the colours intensified in their descent into darkness. And just to finish things off, a brilliant white yacht added a splash of brightness against the dark surrounding tones. Half a second was just enough to catch the motion of each wave without turning the yacht into too much of a blur, and behind them the mountains of Fuerteventura sat contentedly beneath a soft peachy glow, reminding me that it had been almost twelve years since I’d last roamed across them. Our sort of place Fuerteventura. If Lanzarote is laid back, then Fuerteventura is almost comatose. The perfect hideaway for lounging about by pools, reading, swimming and dozing in equally generous measures. For a couple of weeks now I’ve been hovering over the button on the app supplied by my friendly travel agent, and the prospect of another Fuerteventura story is pulling hard at the emotional chains in the darkest damp depths of early January. I’m sure Ali wouldn’t mind going – she regards our Cornish winters with the same level of enthusiasm she used to reserve for that first day of a new academic year in front of a room full of recalcitrant testosterone fuelled sixteen year-olds during her teaching days. She still has sleepless nights. There, I think I’ve convinced myself. Didn’t take long, did it? Push the button time I think!

Facing the well is a stone altar with three figures, their featureless faces worn from pilgrims scratching crosses on them.

Printed and showing at the 'Valid World Hall' gallery Barcelona, Spain 24th January 2019.

Digitally displayed at the 'Valid World Hall' gallery Barcelona, Spain January 25th 2019

Ashness jetty captured early morning, the sunrise never really happened mostly windy and clouds streaming across the sky, quite a dull start to the day with lack of light and distinctive colour and on the right day can be good with the mirrored lake and blue sky.

Used my trusty firecrest 16stop ND filter to smooth the ripples in the lake as it was a bit choppy that morning and setting the f stop and iso to get 7 minutes of exposure, not sure why 7 minutes seemed like a good idea at the time but after reviewing the image although it exposed correctly it was a bit featureless and lacking in colour. Realising 7 minutes with the current wind speed causing the fast movement of clouds that morning was a bit much.

Thought I'd give it a go at processing this one anyway in LR again although it was ok the colour image just looked flat and being a dreary start to the day probably didn't help.

Transforming it into Black and White almost giving it a silhouette look to me seemed to work much better. The Jetty itself had that nice light shine to it and the cloud detail came through and leaving the hills and mountains almost silhouetted suited what I was trying to get out of this image...

Any comments anyone wants to offer is most welcome...

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. . . taken from just below Ben Donich's summit ridge.

From afar, Donich appears fairly benign. A uniformly grassy pyramid that sits rather shyly amongst more illustrious neighbours. No hint is given to those below of the rocky chaos that lurks in various corners. House-sized boulders & yawning rock crevasses are a fairly startling revelation having plodded up some featureless slopes!

For once I was a tad disappointed a fellow early-riser didn't appear in the scene as I took my photographs. Lending some scale to the foreground jumble of rock would have been handy. (They're massive, by the way!)

Okke, that's a recent one and it had, again, more like a scouting flavour. It was midday (as you can tell by the shadows), sun was hammering down, very harsh (great for IR though) and the sky appeared almost featureless with the naked eye so I had not much expectation.

For one, going wide with a plain sky can get boring quick, but also, 1000nm seems to aggravate any hotspot issues that might be present (that would not even show up with, like 500-600nm) and therefore not easy to go clean and minimal with compositions. I would not go as far as calling it a 'prima donna' filter, but it has it's challenges, yet overall, very satisfying and intriguing.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprise by what showed up in the sky, it was a bit hazy, but with some nice patterns in deep IR, it appears. There are also other nice details / IR feature in there, so I might share some crops, but I wanted to not lose and show the 360° view integrity. (Haven't done or shared any panorama stuff since, ..well, last year it seems.) I did a second panorama with 24mm, maybe that's better for crops, we'll see. I also was drawn to classic straight b&w this time..

This is a 14 piece panorama, 29226 x 6560px, ~192MP, full 360° angle of view.

Nikon D3300 (APS-C / DX, fullspectrum mod)

Tamron 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5 Di ll VC HLD

heliopan Infrared RG 1000 (87A) 800x filter

ISO400, 18mm, f/6.3, 1/50sec

(thus 27mm full frame equivalent)

tripod, panorama head, remote (ML-L3)

A day spent at the beach with family, it was good to catch up after so many months of lockdown.

I spent some fruitless time chasing orange tip butterflies for Macro Monday, but the featureless beach turned out to be ideal for some ICM (intentional camera movement) on the FF "Parallels" theme.

This is pretty much how the image came out of the camera; I've simply stretched the contrast and exposure sliders to increase the impact.

Derwentwater, Keswick, Lake District

The drive up was as predicted by the weather forecast - grey, dull, with periodic showers en route, but once we reached the lakes the snow covered peaks did their best to convince us we hadn't chosen the wrong destination. It was still overcast, although the sun was doing its best to lighten the greys as we parked up at Keswick's Lakeside car park. However, first priority of the day, breakfast in town and although it was now 9:30am very few eateries were open but we found one - a local shop for local people! A compulsory Cumbrian breakfast was duly ordered and consumed forthwith.

Afterwards Mrs R decided to potter about the shops and market stalls so I headed back to the car for my gear. My initial jetty shots from the first hour were bland and have already been consigned to the archives. As I'd already seen plenty of images of the submerged gate at the north end I decided to head there, but with the sky being so featureless, it was time to dust off my filters and have another crack at a few long exposures.

Now I know some of you are experts at the "wing it" method of calculating exposures, but I thought I'd play it safe and use the app from a well known filter manufacturer. What a waste of time... literally! All of the app calculated images were underexposed and so on to Plan B... wing it, and I must say a lot more fun.

This just happens to be the last image at 2 mins (I was aiming for 4 and pushing the ETTR theory) before the sun finally broke through and began dispersing the blanket cloud, although that didn't really matter... it was the flock of Canadian geese that photo bombed the shore line and put paid to any more tranquil shots.

This is either the same curlew as in yesterday's post, or its mate. A huge, featureless white sky is a huge problem in landscape work, and in general is not my preference for birds in flight. But I'm not going to pass up a close-circling curlew because of some stupid rule rolling around in my mind.

Can we turn disadvantage into advantage? Weakness into strength? I try to think of a sky like this as an outdoor studio, with perfect seamless background paper and perfect soft bright diffused lighting. And the curlew's feather pattern is remarkably intricate and beautiful. Those amazing wings; that incredible bill.

Frank Lloyd Wright: "Form and function are one." Exactly. So let's celebrate the perfection of a curlew. Our largest shorebird on its northern breeding ground.

Photographed near Val Marie, Saskatchewan (Canada). Don't use this image on websites, blogs, or other media without explicit permission ©2024 James R. Page - all rights reserved.

Meall a'Ghiubhais on a wintry morning. Not a really enticing composition as it's perhaps featureless due to the amount of negative space, but I quite liked the light here, or at least enough to awaken it from the archive.

First of the day from a trip to Torridon with Iain this morning. We had intended to stop on our way for sunrise but it was depressingly obvious that there would be no colour of any sort in a flatly grey sky. We arrived at Loch Clair early enough to try a new viewpoint but in the end settled for our old favourite location. The return of some spring snow on the slopes of Liathach was a welcome surprise, contrasting beautifully against the featureless sky and the perfect reflections on Clair made for a stunning scene.

Second Incarnation...

First photographed in 2013, this image was assigned a five-star rating due to the 1-1-3 configuration of the elk, but the original has little going for it in overall image quality. Much progress has been made since in terms of post-processing software and my ability to use it.

Recently I have been working to master the tools in Photoshop that allow me to create appropriate frames for my images (it's not a picture unless it's framed, and it's not a "photograph" until it hangs on a wall) - or so somebody once said.

Early on I used Topaz ReMask to seperate the foreground from the featureless gray background, but since Photoshop introduced Sky Replacement that's no longer needed.

The tule elk (Cervus canadensis nannodes) is a subspecies of elk found only in California, ranging from the grasslands and marshlands of the Central Valley to the grassy hills on the coast. The subspecies name derives from the tule, a large New World bulrush on which it feeds and which grows in the marshlands.

With an expansive migratory range, the wandering tattler lives up to its name. ‘Ūlili, the Hawaiian name, resembles the wandering tattler’s alarm call. On tropical islands it prefers probing crevices and crannies on intertidal shorelines and exposed reefs for invertebrates, often dodging breaking waves. ‘Ūlili were considered messengers and scouts of the gods.

A magnificent navigator, the tattler annually migrates from Alaska and Canada to tropical Pacific islands on a high endurance non-stop flight of 3 to 4 days over thousands of miles of featureless open ocean. Using the stars and the earth’s magnetic field (perhaps visually with quantum entanglement) to find its way. Tringa incana, non-breeding plumage.

A magnificent navigator, the kolea, or Pacific golden plover, annually migrates from Alaska to tropical Pacific islands on a high endurance non-stop flight of 3 to 4 days over thousands of miles of featureless open ocean. Using the stars and the earth’s magnetic field (perhaps visually with quantum entanglement) to find the exact same nesting and wintering locations semiannually.

A car drives along a dusty road through the featureless volcanic ash fields counterpointed by stark and scarred mountains somewhere near Bláhylurin, South Iceland.

A male kōlea in his breeding plumage tuxedo is about two weeks from migration. Kōlea migrate from Hawaii to Alaska for a five-month breeding season. The trip spans over approximately 3,000 miles of open ocean requiring a rigorous, energy intensive effort of 3 to 4 days and nights of nonstop flight at elevation ranging from 3,000 to 16,000 feet. A superb navigator with territorial fidelity, kōlea use the stars and the earth’s magnetic field to find their way over the featureless ocean to the same small patch of territory every year. They may use the earth’s magnetic field visually with the magnetoreception molecules of cryptochrome in their retina.

The physiological changes in migrating shorebirds, like this male kōlea, are astonishing. The necessity of increasing fat load for the sustained energy demands of long-distance migration has been compared to, in terms of percentage body fat, larding up to morbid obesity in humans. The surge in heart and lung capacity and increase in pectoral flight muscle are driven by hormonal changes (without the drudgery of exercise!). This one winters in Hawaii. Some will migrate north from the southern hemisphere. Pacific golden plover, kōlea, Pluvialis fulva.

A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the silhouette is usually presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all.

Established in 1966, the Coorong National Park is a spectacular saline lagoon stretching 140km along the south east coast of South Australia. The National Park is separated from the Southern Ocean by sand dunes of the Younghusband Peninsula, and is internationally significant under the Ramsar agreement as a migratory wader and waterfowl refuge.

I drove across salt flats that lay between the coast and the dunes. The salt flats are sometimes submerged, the road is nothing more than a path across the salt bed. Four wheel drive vehicles can traverse the salt flat all year round, the road is marked with red topped posts, without which the landscape is featureless.

The Coorong is a wonderland of bird life and unique vegetation. I took this shot on the road crossing the salt flats.

“Come to Crosby,” they said. “See the famous statues, brainchild body casts of one of the world’s leading sculptors, eye catching and thought provoking as they gaze enigmatically out to sea. Then take a photograph of the sewage pipe instead.” And there was the word “No,” emblazoned upon the object of my attentions. What can it mean? Obviously I haven’t troubled myself too much in seeking the answer with the assistance of Google - that would almost spoil the fun wouldn’t it? What were we doing here? An equally valid question that I was having trouble answering as another blast of wind came hammering down the beach from the direction of Blackpool and beyond, carrying a billion droplets of cloudburst in its fury. This was a tough outing back at the coast, after four relatively agreeable days in the gentler climes of the Peak District. Just last night we had enjoyed a glowing sunset at Roach End Barn, soft orange light filling the horizon as the first instalment of our adventure came to its conclusion. But this morning all of that had changed, a steady drizzle building into something rather more forthright as we approached the Merseyside coast. By the time we arrived at Crosby, the warm May sunshine of recent days had fizzled out, extinguished by a weather system that marched in from the north, sending temperatures plummeting and raincoats rustling as we took our chances on the beach.

I love moody conditions. I don’t even mind a white featureless sky if I think I can use it. Rain is often an ally if tackled with the right mindset. Often, but not always, and this was starting to feel like one of those “not always” moments. I’d made a conscious decision to use the telephoto lens for this shoot, and once that particular bargain had been struck, there was no going back. And while this was giving me the compositions I’d been hoping for, the wind and rain were combining to make taking photographs very difficult, especially long exposures with a hefty focal length. I’d already lost a lens cloth, which had ghosted away on the wind without me even noticing its urgent departure, and the makeshift bin liner rain protection had failed at the first attempt to use it. With my back to the weather I could shoot directly south with reasonable results, but pointing the camera out to sea was going to be a bit of a challenge. Especially when the lens hood was going to be needed to have any chance of escaping with something more than a collection of drizzly smudges for my efforts. A big tottering assembly on a windy beach with a grumpy old soul doing his best to protect it with his not very imposing bulk. A portable brick wall or the front row from the local rugby team might have been handy here today. Even one of Mr Gormley’s sculptures, if strategically placed, might have helped, but none of them were willing to abandon their positions and lend me a hand. I asked one of them whether it was a case of upsetting the aesthetics, but he ignored me and carried on watching whatever had been holding his attention out there on the Irish Sea for all of these years. He didn’t even blink. It was taking a while to get into a rhythm here, but despite the conditions, the possibilities seemed almost without limit.

And if you don’t keep trying, you won’t get anything at all, so without the assistance of anyone or anything else, I persevered. Twenty of thirty failures would be fine - only one of them needed to pass the blur test. Just a brief pause in the Arctic blast and things might be ok. By now the rain had done everything it was going to, and I wasn’t going to get any wetter. But I was getting hungry - we hadn’t stopped for lunch on the way here from Buxton and the afternoon was ticking by on this freezing cold expanse. I carried on for as long as I could, conscious that Dave and Lee were almost certainly waiting in the car. Eventually the time to retreat had arrived. It was difficult to tell from the back of the camera, but hopefully at least some of the shots I’d taken would be passable.

Happily, it seemed that persistence had paid off. Somehow, but don’t ask how, I managed to come away with one acceptable long exposure of the rickety old structure and the mid-tide ladder to the sea. I never even noticed the simple one word command on the subject itself until reviewing the raw files later on. Does it say “yes” when the sun is shining? Does whoever drew the short straw from among the bright eyed young apprentices at the local council have to paddle out and change the sign each time the weather takes a turn? Why does the sewage outlet temple vaguely resemble a large plastic water bottle? On reflection, I don’t want to know - I kind of like the mystery.

Don't put away your camera (or neglect to take it with you) when the clouds come out. Unless it is an absolutely featureless slate-grey sky (and even then, maybe), the creative possibilities are endless! Just looking and seeing are two different things. I'm trying to improve my seeing, both during the outing and after in PP.

Have a great day, my friends, and remember, the best camera in the world is the one that you have with you!

And no prizes for spotting what caught the eye of miketonge and myself as we approached the summit of Place Fell to observe a glorious sunrise. Mike has basically the same shot in colour, but I opted for mono with a featureless sky and a lot of the white stuff hogging the limelight.

Copyright 2024 john bleakley photography. All rights reserved. All images protected by Pixy. No unauthorised use.

The figures are said to represent St Brendan, Bishop Erc and St Ita, their featureless faces worn from pilgrims scratching crosses on them.

@ Tobar na Molt / Wethers Well

Prato della Valle

is a 90,000 square meter elliptical square in Padova, Italy (Veneto region, northern Italy). It is the largest square in Italy, and one of the largest in Europe. Today, the square is a large space with a green island at the center, l'Isola Memmia, surrounded by a small canal bordered by two rings of statues.

Prior to 1635, the area which would come to be known as the "Prato della valle" was largely a featureless expanse of partially swampy terrain just south of the old city walls of Padova. In 1636 a group of Venetian and Veneto notables financed the construction there of a temporary but lavishly appointed theater as a venue for mock battles on horseback. The musical entertainment which served as prologue to the jousting is considered to be the immediate predecessor of the first public opera performances in Venice which began the following year.

© All rights reserved

I took this a year ago while visiting the Zuni Indian pueblo to witness the Shalako dances. This particular rock formation is very close to but not on the reservation, but is the private backyard of a friend.

The rock face is oriented south-east so the sun hits it full on as soon as it comes over the horizon in the winter.

I had overlooked this photo and was looking for something else when I noticed it's potential.

There are some other shots of these rocks earlier in the photo stream that I posted last year.

The clouds are composited in, as the sky was featureless that morning.

In the pub at the foot of the hill, men in overalls were gathered outside in the warm sunshine, enjoying hard earned pints of golden lager at the end of the working day. Today had brought a very early start for a dawn shoot at Hitter Hill after a long drive up from Cornwall the previous evening, and the middle of the day had been spent catching up on sleep. And while the thought of beer and chips seemed very appealing, we had plans that lay up on the ridge above the village. It was with a small sense of trepidation that we drove up the narrow road and arrived at the compact car park by Curbar Edge. A warm and sunny Saturday early evening, just a handful of miles to the southwest of Sheffield’s considerable sprawl, we were expecting it to be pretty busy, and with only a couple of spaces left in which to park we wondered whether we might be struggling for compositions. We’d deliberately chosen a wide open location such as this for the weekend, where we hoped we might find some space in which to spread out and look for our images. With more than three hours until sunset, we could take our time and soak up the atmosphere in the early season tee-shirt weather.

But even on a beautiful day such as this, it seemed that Curbar Edge had space for everyone. Quite why we’d chosen this location when there are so many gritstone edges in the area I can’t really recall, but it seemed as good a place as any of its rivals for a sunset adventure. Moving slowly among the boulders that hung over the landscape, we could consider foregrounds at leisure without feeling hemmed in. Below us lay forested slopes, filled with birdsong, splashed with the fresh greens of spring. Not for the first time I imagined how a place like this would shout its colours in the autumn, but we were here in the middle of May and there was still much to embrace. In fact it’s difficult to imagine a lovelier and more peaceful place to be on an evening like this. There were plenty of people about, from the two rather disarmingly underdressed young ladies, to the lone mountain biker, to the pair of eager trail runners hurtling along the path. From time to time, the animated chatter of unseen climbers could be heard from the rockface below. On a big flat slab sat a group of three youngsters, each of them clutching opened bottles of real ale. Why hadn’t we thought of that? All I had was a flask of mint tea. At one point I very nearly found myself among the wrong group of togs, almost catching up with the four earnest looking men, who despite being a decade younger than we were, moved along the edge just like us, individuals breaking rank, stopping here and there to examine a distant view through a rocky frame, before hurrying to join the others again.

Somewhere behind me, Dave and Lee were taking turns to pose enigmatically on boulders for each other’s cameras. They spent much of the trip doing that when they needed a focal point. I video called Ali, over three hundred miles away at home, just to share the views and be sure that we were having better weather here. Then for a while I joined in with the hero poses, before our three paths diverged, gradually absorbing the landscape and beginning to see possibilities among the stone giants that gazed out over the valley. The sky was pure blue, with barely a cloud upon which to hang our shots and nothing to stop the sinking sun blowing highlights. I’d have to work with that rather than try to fight it. In time, and just before it seemed the edge might begin to curve away from the light, I found the place where I’d settle into the golden hour and take my shot. Here, I allowed the rocks to tower above me, closing me in and shutting out the rest of the world. Gradually the sun made its final journey over the hazy high ground in the distance. Over the course of an hour I shot more or less the same composition over and over, varying the focal length and settings for the green riot in front of me, and the clock had advanced well beyond nine by the time I emerged from my hiding place. Now, in the cooling air, most of the day trippers had left. It was just us and a handful of others, including the beer party on the slab.

It was only later as I viewed the raw files that I spotted the bird perching over the precipice. Funny how you don’t notice these moments when you’re in the field sometimes. If I’d only taken the shot once, then the odds of having a tiny subject would have been reduced to all but zero. On reflection the featureless blue sky was also a good thing. There were so many textures in the frame already, that they needed a bit of empty space in which to breathe. And of all the images from our time in the Peaks, it may just be the one that most readily transports me back to the adventure and that beautiful evening, when the jackets were off, overlooking the green valley as the birds sang their springtime chorus along the edges of the Curbar glow.

B-29 Superfortress at the 2022 Wings Over Houston air show

The sky was pretty featureless when I made this shot, so I added the background sky in post processing. I think it came out pretty well.

Amazing butterfly action in the mistflowers now...

Full disclosure: I processed this with Photoshop's "sky replacement" tool. The photo had a featureless light brown background because of where I took it, pretty blah. I've resisted sky replacement because it just didn't seem "right" somehow. I decided to give it a try here, though, and liked the result. So I'm posting it. I guess the question is - depiction of nature as it is, vs. make pleasing image. The goal really is to do both, I guess, but in this case I decided to accept a rather unrealistic transormation. I can understand that some (most?) would be opposed to this kind of manipulation. I don't do it very often.

The cathedral and town of Ely are built on what was once an island surrounded by the vast marshes and boggy wetlands known as the Fens.

Its watery past is remembered in its name; 'Ely' means Isle of eels.

Attempts to drain those wetlands known as the Fens that cover a huge part of eastern England began in the 17th century, but weren't really successful until the early 19th century when steam and then electric pumps could be used.

The cathedral can be seen for huge distances across the flat, featureless landscape of the fens and it is indeed reminiscent of a ship in full sail, sailing above the rich black soils of the area.

I saw this for myself travelling to our BnB in a village on the edge of the fens near Newmarket, but at first I thought it was a power station far in the distance, visible on the flat horizon. I was thrilled to find it was the cathedral, still dominating the view from all around as it has done for nearly 1000 years.

...And, rather fancifully, it was a religious power station of its day, at a time when belief was the only explanation for everything.

Viewed from the gardens of the Almonry in the Cathedral Close. A destination café selling teas and light lunches in a pillared and vaulted 13th century building.

Taken on a walk between Sawley and Shardlow. After a miserable and dull day, and boring and featureless walk, I was offered a glimmer of hope for a photo from a last few minutes of the sunset breaking through the cloud to give a slight light show.

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"The high-ceilinged room – replete with a large studio window – in wich a featureless mannequin-like figure is sitting in a reflective pose has a decidedly eerie feel to it. Clad in armour and wearing a helmet, an alarmingly tall futuristic ironman figure looms outside the window menacingly surveying the lifeless room with his penetrating, eyeless stare. This surreal situation is reminiscent of the magical defamiliarisation effects of pittura metafisica. By means of this device, Dischinger is able to communicate the prevalent experiences, emotions and the altitudes to life during the rise of National Socialism. The emptiness of the lifeless room is in itself spectral, everything has been depicted soberly and starkly, even the faceless person on the chair appears to be an object. Rudolf Dischinger, who is numbered among the most important artists of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) at the end of the 1920s, met Julius Bissier in1934 who likewise developed surreal defamiliarisations during the 1930s alluding to the impending menace of Nacism in the form of new, highly individual compositions."

(Text for the exhibition)

Mono Lake Moonrise. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Early autumn full moon rising over Mono Lake, California.

This is a photograph of that magical moment when an early-autumn full moon rises above the mountains to the east of Mono Lake while there is still a bit of sunset or early twilight light in the sky. I’ve experienced this here quite a few times, and I often time my arrival at this point for this hour when it is full moon time. On this evening it all worked out perfectly: intense color in the sky as the moon appeared, plus sky color reflected on the surface of the lake, interspersed with blue areas where surface turbulence broke up the reflection.

Photographing a full moon is a bit trickier than it might appear at first glance, especially if you want to include the landscape in the scene, too. Once it is dark or close to it, the difference between the light on the landscape and light of the moon is huge — the moon is essentially a daylight exposure, while that landscape is much darker. Even with a camera that had enough dynamic range to capture both of those extremes, you would either end up with a well-exposed moon and a nearly invisible landscape or a nicely exposed landscape and featureless white disk of a moon. One approach is to time the photograph so that the moon in in the sky before it is fully dark. Ideally, this means photographing the moon a bit before it is truly “full” — or photographing at a time of year when there is still light on the landscape when a truly full moon rises.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Fellow photographer Mel Hopwood marches tirelessly away from Erjing Mine in the Sandouling area of NW China.( behind us ) towards the next photo opportunity. Such a vast barren open place, flat and featureless as far as the eye can see and further. Power lines disperse in every angle as nearby power stations devour the coal supplied from the mines to keep the area supplied with electricity.

We were in very sub zero temperatures about -15. As we stomped across the plane a JS 2-8-2 passed with a loaded coal train bound for Nanzhen Yards where a diesel will take it forward to nearby power stations.

The shot just really appealed to me.

Day 20-something now since the village was inundated with heavy snow. The shock has largely worn off now, replaced with a feeling of resignation. You can put it aside for the most part when indoors. But outdoors, movement continues to be hampered by the sheer depth of the snow in unplowed areas. That limitation has since been compounded (and even surpassed) by treacherous icy patches that result from daily snow melt and nightly refreeze. One misplaced step can take you down in an instant. The result is a low grade anxiety while walking that only subsides when standing still. What helps sustain me now is the thought that we're heading into mid-February rather than mid-November. There's much more winter behind us now than ahead. In about 60 days I'll be mowing the lawn again and this wintry landscape will have melted away.

In the interim I'm still fascinated by the visual impact of the transformation. There are scenes such as this all through the village. Houses and places I know so well appear totally different and somehow out of normal context. The snow creates shadows and textures that simply do not otherwise exist. Reflected sunlight fills in areas normally pitched into deep shadow. New fallen snow highlights tree branches creating a frosting effect. It all contributes to a tremendous feeling of structure and depth.

Walking about on a sunny day such as this requires some imagination. The eye perceives the landscape as brilliant white. It's the snow blindness effect where your pupils constrict to tiny dots. The landscape appears largely featureless as a result. So much so that photographic endeavor seems pointless. But the camera interprets these scenes as they really are. Short exposures are the key to coaxing out the infinite shadows and textures. High drama indeed, and well worth the walk over ice to experience it.

Gleno Waterfall, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It was a dull, grey-sky day in County Antrim, to-day: a pretty featureless sky. What else to-do but shoot waterfalls! I hope you like this image.

Overberget fort built 1682-1699

Fredriksten fortress - Halden - Norway

What is the nub of such a plain grey day?

Does it have one? Does it have to have one?

If small is beautiful, is grey, is plain?

Or rather do we sense withdrawal, veiling,

a patch, a membrane, an eyelid hating light?

Does weather have some old remit to mock

the love of movement, colour, contrast –

primitives, all of us, that wilt and die

without some gorgeous dance or drizzle-dazzle.

Sit still, and take the stillness into you.

Think, if you will, about the absences –

sun, moon, stars, rain, wind, fog and snow.

Think nothing then, sweep them all away.

Look at the grey sky, houses of lead,

roads neither dark nor light, cars

neither washed nor unwashed, people

there, and there, decent, featureless,

what an ordinariness of business

the world can show, as if some level lever

had kept down art and fear and difference and love

this while, this moment, this day

so grey, so plain, so pleasing in its way!

― Edwin Morgan

•*¨♪ღ♪ ¨*•

Texture: Shadowhouse Creations

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I really can’t remember exactly where we were now. Only the folder in which the raw file lives gives me a clue. Taken three hours after we stopped at a lonely mountain pass in the mysterious east, and at some point later in the evening we parked at Hvalnes lighthouse in the rain, where we boiled some pasta, threw in a few mushrooms before dressing the pesto slathered results with a couple of fried eggs for good measure and additional protein loading before opening a couple of cans of Viking lager and pulling down the shutters for the night. When food is at a premium, you eat whatever’s available to keep your attention focussed on the task at hand. Maybe we were an hour away from the end of that day’s driving. It had been a long journey, and a very wet one at that. I’ve looked at the map, and I can’t quite work it out. And I’m obsessed with maps – I regularly lose myself in them for long periods of time. In the writing of this tale I’ve examined the one of the area several times. We might have been near Starmýri, home to a handful of farms and not much else, but I can’t say so for sure.

Seven hours earlier, we’d returned to the photography trail after playing truant on the good ship Salka in the far north beyond the sixty-sixth parallel at Husavik, where the appearance of four Humpback Whales repaid our spur of the moment investment. After that, the whistle stop tour had taken us on a seemingly endless journey through grey mist that fell softly on the windscreen and clung there determinedly, no matter how much we used the wipers. It still galls me to think of what we missed; what remains there waiting for another visit. We drove carelessly past the enormous Lake Myvatn, barely registering it, while the geothermal pong of Hverir and its multicoloured lunar surface detained us for no more than a few minutes, such was our sense of urgency to head in a south easterly direction. After all, this was day four of a week long adventure. At Egilsstadir, we were but a few miles from the sparsely populated eastern fjords, yet we pressed on, often seeing little through the mist. At times we crept slowly along the seemingly deserted ring road with water to our left, while the opposite side of narrow inlets stayed hidden from sight. Strange to think we’d driven that silent corridor and seen so little of it. It sometimes feels as if we passed it in a dream.

One thing that had caught my eye – that always catches my eye in the flat empty spaces between the mountains and the sea here, was the electricity pylons. They stretch for miles, hundreds of miles and thousands of pylons, going somewhere, seemingly going nowhere. All of these distant corners of the big landscape filled with nothing yet remaining connected by silky threads held aloft by stoical shapes in the gloom. And here, somewhere in those lonely miles between Djúpivogur and Hvalnes we drove past these. And then we turned around and drove back again. The trouble is you can’t just pull up at the side of the road anywhere – not unless you want the driver of a thirty-eight ton lorry to tell you exactly what he thinks of you in his very worst Icelandic.

But I’d seen a pull in before I’d registered the pylons. It’s something you do here if you’re always thinking about opportunities, watching the roadside for somewhere to park safely. Half a mile further along the road we’d found another pull in where we’d turned a hundred and eighty degrees and retraced our tyre treads. And what I do remember is running. Running along the quiet road with my camera bag on my back. The view I’d coveted from the window of the van was going to require some effort to get to, but it would be worth it, I felt. Worth this trot along the ring road in the manner of the marine cadet who didn’t make it through the first week of induction.

I wasn’t there for long before beginning the jog back to the van. Just four handheld snaps, one of which was completely out of focus. That was the first one – maybe I was still recovering from the effort I made to get here. But the elements held promise. The white featureless sky contrasting the darker textures of the land. The waterlogged marsh decorated in a tapestry of white cottongrass that stretched away in all directions. The still pools adding light and presence to the foreground of the frame, and the mountains disappearing into a veil of cloud and mist at the edges of the darkening hinterland. And those wooden sentinels, constantly watching the landscape, marching across the space yet rooted to the ground, no two of them exactly alike. An Icelandic scene to remember. Even if it did take nearly four years to tell the story.

Sometimes it takes that long to get over running three quarters of a mile up and down the road carrying a backpack filled with a camera and three lenses, but the fact that there are still new stories to emerge all these years later seems like a good thing to me.

This male kōlea is about two weeks from his annual migration to the Alaskan tundra. Looking fat and dapper in his breeding plumage, he will somehow sense the time to congregate with other previously solitary kōlea and depart collectively. The trip spans over approximately 3,000 miles of open ocean requiring a rigorous, energy intensive effort of 3 to 4 days and nights of nonstop flight at elevation ranging from 3,000 to 16,000 feet. Superb navigators with territorial fidelity, kōlea use the stars and the earth’s magnetic field to find their way over the featureless ocean to the same small patch of territory every year. They may use the earth’s magnetic field visually with the magnetoreception molecules of cryptochrome in their retina.

This owl flew by and gave me a glance. It was nice to catch it, but the owl was in fact in front of a featureless white sky, which wasn't very attractive, so here I have played around by substituting a sky I shot on a different day.

When you've got late afternoon, winter light like this, even our less glamorous hills can suddenly stop you in your tracks.

Driving north on the A82, Beinn Challum appears as a giant featureless grassy lump, & doesn't exactly beckon the hillwalker on. Its best side is when viewed from Glen Lochay in the north-east, where it adopts the guise of an elegant cone positioned at the head of the glen. This photograph was taken from neighbouring Beinn Chaorach, which rather depressingly translates as 'Sheep Hill'. Beinn Challum is quite simply 'Malcolm's Hill'.

I'm afraid that a compulsion to include 'Castor & Pollux' , Ben More & Stob Binnein, dictated the final composition, & an arguably better one shelved, with the subject matter more to the right in that. Sometimes the urge to convey the scope of the outlook from a certain spot overrules photographic sensibilities.

The approach of a thunderstorm reminds me in a way of the ball drop sequence that plays out on New Year's eve. There's such anticipation for the ball to drop and the clock to strike midnight. However when the moment is realized, the energy largely dissipates into thin air. There's no excitement for 12:01 am. It was all about reaching that point, the stoke of midnight. From a visual perspective, the intensity of the storm peaks in the seconds before it actually hits. I've witnessed this time and again, and the energy and pure adrenaline never seem to leave me. The purest form of storm atmosphere occurs in places like this...outdoors and out in the open. Better to witness the cloud structure from places with a wide vantage point. I arrived here last evening just ahead of a storm with which I had been driving on a parallel course. Pure luck put me here in the minutes before driving rain. I parked the car and ran out to the edge of this meadow. Menacing clouds rolled in from the west, quickly eclipsing the clear sky off to the east. Always an amazing sight to witness this squeeze play. Outflow winds raced out ahead of the rain, creating an eerie chilling effect on a day that had reached well into the 90s. I could feel alternate gusts of cold and warm wind, depending on the wind direction. The same winds created a frenzy of motion before me as the tall grasses and trees swayed. The clouds were spitting with lightning bolts and crackling with thunder. In the distance I began to hear the approaching rain. It arises as a soft hissing sound that gets louder as it draws near. All at once the rain arrives, and the proverbial New Year's eve ball has dropped. The brooding clouds morph into featureless gray cotton. The clarity of vision is occluded by raindrops. The storm will rage on for another twenty minutes. But photographically the show is over. I make my way back to my car. Soaking wet but still filled with the adrenaline of being here.

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The fantastic sunset last night looking from Great Sca Fell towards Skiddaw & Bassenthwaite Lake in the distance. On an otherwise featureless fell, I managed to find this wonderful set of rocks to photograph.

A small section of Markarian's chain of galaxies.

The two brightest objects are M84 and M86 both elliptical galaxies. An elliptical galaxy is a type of galaxy with an approximately ellipsoidal shape and a smooth, nearly featureless image.

Askar 120APO: 840mm f/7

ZWO ASI533MC Cooled Color Camera at -20C

Guided on ZWO AM5

20x180s with UV/IR cut filter

Processed with PixInsight, Ps

It was wet, cold and miserable at Lake Glenmaggie in Victoria, Australia when this photo was captured whilst sitting in the back seat of a car.

The photo shows a section of foreshore, water, a tree which is growing in the water about 30-metres from the shore, the other side of the lake and a grey overcast and featureless sky.

Some may question why the rain drops that are sharp are those in the centre of the photo and why are they in a band that crosses the centre of the photo diagonally from the top to the bottom.

The reason for this is the Plane of Focus that I used, more often referred to as the Focal Plane.

If you were to cut a circular piece of cardboard with a diameter greater than that of the end of your lens and on this cardboard mark the points of the compass N, S, E and W. Then place the cardboard flat against the end of your lens, the cardboard represents the Plane of Focus, thus wherever you point your lens and if you were to focus at that point, then the Plane of Focus at the time of focusing extends from N to S to E and W and all points of the compass in-between out to infinity.

This is now where the Focal Plane comes in – the width of the Focal Plane depends on how far the focus point is from the camera and the f-stop being used, and this is known as the Depth of Field.

As I mentioned, I was sitting in the back seat, and I focused on the area where the window glass meets the B pillar of the car. I then switched from Auto focus to Manual focus to lock in this focus point, this Plane of Focus, and being closely focused the Depth of Field was very shallow despite using f/9.

I then rotated my camera thru 90 degrees to frame the tree and take the photo and the diagonal band of sharp focus passing thru the centre of the photo is where the Plane of Focus was at the time of focusing which had been locked in by switching to Manual focus, being careful not to touch the manual focus ring.

This capture was taken for maximum effect as I wanted the tree to be blurred as much as possible whilst having only the central area of the rain drops as sharp as possible.

If you were to place your cursor on this photo and Left click, you will see an inverted image of the scene in each of the raindrops, even in the out of focus raindrops assuming they weren't blurred.

Another sandy bay on route to Sandwood and it gives you a picture of the path to follow. We reached here after about 40 minutes walk and we still had some way to go. People say it is a long featureless path but for me this was my first time and I enjoyed it very much.

By this time, only Lee and I were still here, in the company of our new friend Brian, who for avoidance of doubt among regular readers was not the same Brian who accompanied us on our previous visit to Iceland. This Brian was a human being rather than a yellow VW campervan, touring the area on a five night visit from Chicago. Somehow, and despite having a young family at home, he’d been given clearance by mission control to fly to Iceland and spend a few days alone taking photographs. When my children were the same age as his were now, I could barely make it down to the shop at the end of the road to pick up a pint of milk without company, never mind climb aboard a plane bound for somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean. And here he was, sitting alongside us on this far flung Icelandic beach. The crowds had long since departed - not that you really get crowds at Hvalnes, hidden away from the madding hordes as it is. Last time we’d been here, three years earlier on that gloomy grey morning, we hadn’t seen a single soul as the rain endlessly coated our cameras and foiled our intentions, whilst hiding the landscape in featureless clouds.

Now as autumn kicked in, things were rather different. We’d been here since the middle of the afternoon, absorbing the views, wandering over the beach and the headland by the squat, square orange lighthouse, planning compositions. The shot I’d come for three summers earlier was hopefully somewhere on the SD card, and there was a general feeling of contentment. Despite the increased number of visitors in comparison to last time, it was still very peaceful here. Eystrahorn had put right the wrongs of 2019 when moodily I’d perched on the slippery rocks, barely removing the protective plastic sandwich bag from the camera as it sat unused on the tripod. Everything was visible, from the emphatic bulk of Eystrahorn rising at our side, a symphony of bumps, crags and ridges adorned with heavy skirts of scree, to the distant Brunnhorn that sits back to back against its neighbour Vestrahorn. In between lay a hinterland of forbidding mountains that cloaked the monstrous Vatnajokull glacier, and before them, volleys of white surf danced across a narrow spit of black sand that stretched away beside the huge tidal lagoon into the distance and out of sight. Elemental joy, in whichever direction you chose to look.

There are no cities, towns, nor even villages here - you’d need to drive more than thirty miles in one direction before finding yourself at Djúpivogur, nestling among the south eastern fjords, home to five hundred hardy Icelanders. If instead you decide to head west, you’d travel pretty much the same distance to arrive at Höfn, a veritable metropolis in these parts with almost two and a half thousand inhabitants. Apart from that, there are farms, the odd shepherd’s hut, and an ever increasing number of cabins and bunkhouses to accommodate us tourists. All other compass points lead into the vast ocean or the mostly impenetrable mountains at the edge of the largest glacier in Europe. It’s a long way to go if you forgot to pick up that pint of milk, that’s for sure. You’d have to go and knock on a farmhouse door carrying an empty jug, unless you like your coffee black.

With all of that grand vista spreading away in front of us, the long lens offered possibilities beyond the capabilities of its companions in the bag, and in the golden hour it came into its own, especially in these unforgettable minutes when the pinks began to fill the sky, while the golds continued to linger. On the darkening sand, maybe half a mile away, a small group of visitors roamed the shore, taking selfies, playing beach games, gazing out towards the sea, totally oblivious to the three photographers lurking on those distant rocks. A rare moment when the colours of the golden and blue hours seemed to overlap one another and produce a sky that glowed with heavenly fire, drawing a frenzy of shutters rapidly opening and closing. These are the moments that stay with you, a timeless reminder of why you fell in love with landscape photography. A reminder of why a place like this gets inside of your senses and never leaves.

Our first full day in the southeastern corner had been a good one. We said farewell as Brian headed east to Djúpivogur, while we went the opposite way towards our rented chalet at Stafafell. And little did we know that just a few hours later we’d be out of bed, taking photographs of the Northern Lights. But that’s another story. And another unforgettable one at that too. Iceland keeps on making the stories write themselves.

This image was taken almost 10 years ago, in June 2011, the location is Grassington, North Yorkshire, this bridge goes over the River Wharfe. The original image was a little drab with a featureless sky. I removed some of the distractions such as a car and people on the bridge. I used the sky replacement tool, boosted the colours and also added a tilt-shift effect to focus more on the bridge.

I love the creative spontaneity of working with models in outdoor settings. I used to adopt a much more structured approach to these sessions. That's great insofar as I had a good concept. But more often than not I could not fully realize the look I had preconceived and my takeaway was some level of disappointment. I've gone more free-style lately. Things feel much more natural and less forced. I'm much more focused on including the model in the creative process rather than regarding her as simply a subject. The synergy of two minds leads to results simply not attainable by mine alone.

Late in a session with Carol near a drab soybean field, I happened to notice the field was suddenly aglow in the long rays of the autumn sun. The completely parched and featureless soy plants that had greeted our arrival here were now alive with warmth and brimming with light and shadow. I had Carol enter the frame, standing between me and the sun like a human eclipse. Instantly her physical form morphed into her shadow. The effect was an eerie silhouette cutout. I shared my review screen with her so she could understand my excitement over this eerie vision. She moved back into position and twirled about gracefully. The shutter clicked and this image was born.

Even on a muggy day with featureless clouds the summit and ridge of Liathach is a stunning and rugged place. Its locality is equally beautiful and thankfully totally unspoilt.

Yet another result of my masonry mania in Santa Fe. Why was I so taken with these walls? I think it started with seeing the hint of form and texture in what at first glance seems so completely smooth and featureless. But here there's some rather evident form in the dripping blue color and the dark shadow. Even more to follow.

During a period of dark and dismal winter weather, no colours grey winter skies rain and blustery winds I set out with Black and white photos in mind .

With this image it was all about the Seagulls playing in the windy conditions against a dark featureless sky . Embrace the weather no matter what it throws at you.