FALLING SOMEWHERE AS RAIN

 Like many things, good photo opportunities can be mercurial at best and there can be periods when I find I am snapping happily away for days, only to find I am amid a sudden and wide ranging drought. As I am not a driver, it’s not easy for me to get myself out there and visit a spot guaranteed to offer inspiration, so I am frequently at a loss for good material. So what’s a fella to do when faced with a dry spell? One solution I discovered was rather than shoot photographs, I could make them.  I watched the TV series, ‘The Terror’ recently, a fictionalised account of the search for the North West Passage, by the British Admirality Expedition led by the ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus. The Franklin Expedition left England in 1845 and was last seen in the area of Baffin Bay. Both ships subsequently became icebound and the crews attempted to abandon ship and find a way back to civilisation. Little was known of the fate of either crew until the wrecks were discovered in 2014 and ...

Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. With the advent of mobile photography and the digital image taking precedence over the analogue, more and more software became available to process and edit images on mobile devices. Whereas major editing and post production had long been the province of Apple Mac computers and the industry standard Photoshop application, the power of handheld devices meant that a multitude of 'apps' began to appear to allow users the one-stop-shop approach to shooting and editing on the fly, with a view towards getting the results online as soon as possible. Most of the apps were simple image maniulation affairs, allowing straightforward contrast and tonal corrections, but gradually they began to rival the creative power of Photoshop and other Adobe applications in their scope and ability. Probably the biggest change in image manipulation came with the introduction of the RAW format, which...