Stuart’s Photography

This view from atop Caerphilly Mountain will be on display as part of the slideshow of the Freedom 2008 exhibition.  Organised through Flickr, Freedom 2008 is part of Photomonth - the East London Photography Festival running at the Dray Walk Gallery, Old Truman Brewery during 29th October – 9th November 2008.  

There’s a discussion thread on Flickr where everyone selected for this exhibition is currently posting their shots.  If, like me, you can’t actually make it to London to see the exhibition for yourself, check out the thread.  Congrats to everyone who had a photo selected!

If you drive down the A470, over the Gabalfa fly-over and into Cardiff city centre, you’ll be familiar with one of the peculiarities of the roads in Cardiff.  I’m not talking about the continuous experimentation with partially-closing St Mary’s Street; I’m referring to where four lanes of traffic goes down to just three as you reach Blackweir.  On the right there’s the long, thin car park with the beauty of Bute Park beyond, and overhead the direction of traffic is controlled by these new digital signs.  That car park has been built over the top of the old Glamorganshire Canal.

The new signs were installed either in 2007 or 2008 (I didn’t make a note of exactly when), and they replaced older mechanical signs that sat on top of the same gantry.  (I have a similar shot of the old signs that I’ll dig out and post later).  You’d have thought that they could have given the gantry a lick of fresh paint at the same time, wouldn’t you?

The most common advice given to new photographers is this: always have your camera with you.  You never know when you’ll come across something worth taking a picture of. That was certainly the case in March 2007, when Kristi and I enjoyed this beautiful scene on the way to work.

This is Cardiff City Hall, opened in 1904.  The tag-line for Cardiff is that it is Europe’s Youngest Capital City, but I wonder how many people realise just how modern its magnificent civic centre is?

Like most drivers, I hate speed cameras.  Too many of them, especially over in England, seem to be sited in places where they are most likely to generate revenue.  This camera in Cathays, Cardiff, is one of the more sensibly located cameras.  It’s placed outside a private nursery / school, on a road that has a major cycleway down the opposite side.

The car park on the opposite side has been built where the Glamorganshire Canal once ran, and the lane disappearing off into the distance is approximately the route that the canal used to follow up towards Gabalfa.

Last summer, I hiked up the Little Garth to take some shots of the remains of Walnut Junction Viaduct.  It’s normally a very easy walk (provided the ground is dry!), but this time the rains had brought more than just mud down onto the path … just don’t tell the missus that I scrambled over this thing both on the way up and on the way down

With the car in the garage for its M.OT., the quickest way on foot for me get to and from the garage is down Merthyr Road, through Treforest, and then up the A473 to Power Station Hill. It’s a fair walk, but it’s worth it for those times of the year when the leaves are green and this stretch of the A473 is empty.

If you live or work in South Wales, then the chances are you’ve enjoyed a pint of Brains at some point.  And if you work in Cardiff, you’re very likely to have smelled the beer brewing from their new site on Crawshay Street.

It might be a long way from Merthyr Road, but the sea front between Swansea and Mumbles is just as historically important.  It is the site of the world’s first passenger railway service, just three years after Richard Trevithick started the ball rolling with the world’s first steam-powered railway journey.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing left of the railway today.  It was dismantled in 1960.  But at the end of the route stands Mumbles Pier, and from the end of the pier I took this lovely shot of Mumbles Lighthouse at the end of the bay.

View all the photos from this shoot as part of my Merthyr Road project on Flickr.

South Wales is blessed with some of the most peaceful places around, partly thanks to the River Taff that flows down from Merthyr Tydfil to the old docks at Cardiff Bay.  Perhaps the most tranquil of all of this route is the Taff Trail stretch running north out of Pontypridd.  Just moments away from the busy market town, the river wanders through a wide (and largely unspoilt) flood plain.  It’s the perfect place to get away from it all and to take time out to wind down a bit.
Thoughts On The Day

In between running the cats to the vets for their annual booster jabs, and the gas board turning up for the annual service of the boiler, I had a couple of hours spare to wander along the Taff Trail north of Pontypridd. With the light holding the promise of some excellent colours in the cold November air, it was an invitation that I couldn’t turn down

I’m going to come back when I’ve more time and do a more comprehensive photoshoot of this stretch of the Taff Trail, and to discover more about the history of this particular area. For this outing, my aim was to try and snag the best shot or two I could of the river and hills beyond. I’ve tried this before - most notably back in 2003 when I first got my Nikon D100 - but with four more years experience, a fantastic 10 megapixel camera, and the benefit of HDR, I was hoping to do quite a bit better this time around!

For a change, I remembered to bring the tripod, because I wanted to try improving the sharpness of my photos by using the mirror up feature of the D200 (big thanks to my friend and work colleague Gareth Newns for showing me how that works). I’ve been having more and more success with the HDR shots, but if you zoom in on them, they don’t look anywhere near as good as they should - because I’ve been combining 5 separate shots that were all taken handheld. By using the tripod to ensure the camera stays in the same spot for each frame, and then using the mirror up feature to further reduce camera vibration, the result should be five frames that are exactly the same view.

There’s been a lot of interest in the office in how I create HDR shots. I’m thinking of creating a ‘5 steps for HDR photos’-type post about it soon. Let me know if you’re interested in reading such an article by leaving a comment below.

The Photos

Here are the photos from today’s shoot.

Post Processing

All of today’s final photos have been built by combining five separate frames into a single shot. Each of the five frames was taken with a different exposure, so that the range of shots together cover a wider range of light and shadow than the Nikon D200’s sensor can cope with in a single shot. It takes a few goes to find the right settings for each of photos, to preserve the right level of contrast whilst still bringing through the rich colour and detail that HDR photography is great for.

After generating each photo using Photomatix, the JPEG is imported back into Aperture, where I do the final adjustments of brightness, contrast, and sharpening. Although it’s sold as a professional photography tool, Aperture is perfect for novice and amateur photographers like myself. It provides adjustment tools rather than editing tools, so it feels more like photography and a lot less like the fantasy work that sometimes comes from Photoshop.

The final step before uploading the photos to Flickr is to decide which photos to upload. My wife is always reminding me to try and publish less quantity and more quality! That’s easier on shoots like this - where I’ve gone out to get the best photos I can - but I still find it difficult on the more photo-journalism-type shoots

Found On Flickr

It looks like there aren’t many folks posting photos of this stretch of the Taff Trail to Flickr, but one chap who has is Areopagus. His photo of the Taff Trail in Late March shows the stretch where I took most of today’s photos from, and his shot of the footbridge gives you a good idea of the northern-most spot that I went to today. Look out for more information about this stretch of the Taff Trail in a later article in my Merthyr Road series

When I’m discussing my Merthyr Road project with friends and colleagues who share an interest in local history, I’m often heard to remark that I’d love to be able to take my Nikon D200 with me back in time to take shots of what these places looked like in their heyday.  Alas, we don’t yet have a time machine (and current thinking is that, when we do have one, we’ll only be able to go back in time to the day the machine was first switched on), but we do have Photoshop.

Fellow Flickr user Capt’ Gorgeous has been busy with Photoshop, creating a tantalising shot of what the old bridge at Pontypridd might have looked like when it was first built, before the more modern (and flat) road bridge was built alongside it.  I think it’s a fantastic piece of imagination, and a great piece of work.

Here’s hoping that someone does build a time machine, so that we can go back and capture shots like this for real one day