• Kinder Stones on Pots’n’Pans Hill

    Today I’m preparing a new talk for Harrogate PS and it will include some local pictures of Saddleworth. I love being up high just before the sun sets and I found, in my back catalogue, some pictures of the Kinder Stones on top of our local hill, some of which I hadn’t really looked at before. The hill of Pots’n’Pans is easily accessed on foot from our back gate and takes my husband about half an hour to reach the top. I take longer! and I linger for long periods to take pictures as I go. There is a small abandoned quarry near the top and the remains of stones standing at…

  • End of Year round up of some of my favourite images from 2014

    My end of the year round up is a selection of some of the pictures I have enjoyed making the most over the past year. To share their blushes, I have left out family portraits…naturally they would be at the very top of the list – pictures that bring back memories of the events of the year, from the birthday of my grand-daughter in January to the birth of my second grandson in July and the birthday of my first grandson in November – moments to treasure…along with the photos of my father with his new great-grandson only a week before he suffered a stroke which took his life. These…

  • Tone Mapping in Lightroom

    What is tone mapping? Tone mapping is simply a way of re-mapping (changing) one set of colours/tones in an image to another set. So many times I hear people say that they don’t like tone mapping, but anyone who is using photo-editing tools to change/improve the tonal range of their image is actually tone mapping it, just as when we burn and dodge an image in the darkroom process – that’s tone mapping too. Tone mapping copes with the problem of too much contrast in an image but how much you tone map an image is a matter of personal choice and taste. Go too far and it looks grungy…

  • The Making of the Media City Panoramas

    I haven’t done any really low light outdoor photography in some time, so John and I made our way to Salford Quays in the late afternoon so that we could pick the absolute best time to start taking our photos. At this point I should say (as most of my photographic friends know) that I hate using a tripod. But for this outing a tripod and a good firm head were required. I couldn’t find the quick release plate for my favourite head, so I had to make do with a ball and socket head, which is not ideal, though it does have a rotation facility and a scale at…

error: © Christine Widdall - Kirklees Cousins