Bangour village – Take 1

Bangour village, Scotland:

Every now and then we get surprised by what is on our doorstep. Bangour village was one of the biggest surprised so far for me as I have been living 5 minutes away for the past 7 years. At almost a 1000 acres it’s a very big site of derelict buildings all boarded up and spooky enough to give anyone the willies.

When I was told of Bangour village I immediately researched it. Here’s a few website to look at if you are interested to know abit more about Bangour village:   Wikipedia,  undiscovered Scotland, Bangour.co.uk and Bangourvillage.co.uk. The site is over 100 years old and was used for the movie ‘The Jacket’ in 2005.

The photos below were taken a few days (May 2012) after I was informed of the village, I dug them out today to go through as we are planning to revisit Bangour village this week and we popped in today for a walk.

These photos are my 1st attempt at black & white, I will be doing some research before we go back this week for tips and tricks to get the best out of a black & white photo. I think black & white does the site more judges than colour photos. As I was going through my coloured photos to decide which once I was to convert I found that photos you expect to be brilliant in black & white looks dull. There is a trick to it and I intend to work on getting it right.

After our next visit I’ll do a ‘Take 2’ post to show how I got on concentrating on getting the best out of black & white.

Photographs by Jacques…

Forth bridges at night – Night photography II

Night photosession at the Forth road and train bridges.

We haven’t been out for a while for a night photo session. After days of snow, rain and cloudy weather it was time to get out and get some photos done.

I used my Canon 1D Mark III with my new Canon 24-105 mm F4 L IS lens for this session. I think need to invest in a wide angle lens for photos like these in the future. At 24mm I didn’t get the whole of either bridges in the photos. Time to do some homework to see the best wide angle lens to use. I started at F22 to see how hard I can push it last night and settled on F10 with either 30 seconds, 15 seconds or 10 second exposure.

The wind plays such a big role in night photography. The photos looks great on the camera but once you get it on a large computer screen you can see what the wind has done to your ‘near perfect’ focus. Editing the photos afterwards gives you another level to change things if you aren’t 100% happy with the results.

It was great fun and I think I prefer night photography over day time. So much to do at night to force you to try new things to get the best out of the light and subjects. The best part of all is you can take almost anything that would be boring in daytime and transform it at night, having a famous and brilliant subjects like these on my doorstep is a extra bonus.

Forth bridges:

Probably the photo of the evening for me.

A few photos at different angles and spots of the train bridge.

A train decided to add some extra effects to the long exposure. Other than that it’s the same image as the 1st one.

I tried to cut the spotlights out to get a better image of the bridge, didn’t work to the extent I hoped but not that bad either.

One of the best scenes of the evening for me.

The road bridge at low tide.

From below the road bridge.

I hope you like these photos, I really enjoyed taking them.

Photographs by Jacques…

Blast from the Past Part II

Blast from the Past – Part 2, 24th Feb 2011

The second instalment of old photos, these were taken almost 2 years ago. How time flies and looking back on old photos sometimes makes you appreciate when you had a good day out. With the unpredictable weather of Scotland you take what you can get when the photographic withdrawal kicks in. If the sun is out and the sky is blue you better get out with the camera or you’ll regret it come tomorrow. I know I have many a times and yet I have not learnt from my mistakes.

The photos below were taken with my old Canon 450D and a stock 18-55mm lens. I was just starting to get the hang of the camera and I was probably shooting on Auto back then.

These photos were taken at the Viaduct in East Calder area.

Photographs by Jacques…