Sime Photography

I've posted some new images on Behance. The project is called "Rotations" and features images created by camera rotation. Here's the link  http://bit.ly/1uwdSyF It's amazing the textures produced with varying speeds and and by slowing the speed at various points during the rotation. I hope you enjoy!

This is Frensham Common between the two ponds. It's been a while since fire reshaped this area. It still reminded my of some ancient graveyard where the burnt relics of trees lay about like skeletons.

From my bedroom window I can see over the small valley that is Lower Bourne in Surrey UK and yesterday there was a beautiful sunset. It was lovely as a village scene in Surrey but by moving the camera during this 2 second exposure it has given me this wonderful mystic scene reminiscent of some far flung mountains. I moved the camera down and at the same time from side to side forming the swirling shapes from the tree line. I enhanced the colours in post processing to bring out the warmth of the scene.

I visited The Photography Show, which was great, on Saturday and had a chance to take some shots in the town on Friday. I'm really pleased with this one of the Selfridges building in The Bullring. Rankin was at the Photography Show and I've entered the Launching People competition where he is a mentor. Would really appreciate your support here

I've finally finished my video fro my track "Singularity". The video features the same motion blur technique I use in my stills photography.   It was produced by taking the same shot many times and also incorporating slow pans into the shot taking process. Most of the sequences were from 60 to 130 shots long. I used my Ricoh GR with a 3 stop nd filter to allow me to use a shutter speed of up to 1.3 seconds. It was difficult to create the same shot many times so that it didn't become too jumpy and there was a lot of fine tuning once the shots were in the computer. Having said that the resulting video has still got a jerky texture to it but that is the sort of look I was after. The shots were then edited in Lightroom to create the look I wanted and then exported as jpgs. I constructed the video using Serif Movieplus 5. I did investigate doing in Photoshop but Movieplus seemed to get me far more quickly to where I wanted to go. Watch the video on youtube h

I've been looking into how I can use the moving camera and motion blur technique to create a video for a piece of music I composed using a single guitar note and some very cool software called Melodyne. The track is called "Singularity" find out more on my music blog  I am using the interval shooting option on the Ricoh GR to shoot 1.3 second exposures with an interval of 1 second. I have to create the shot over and over again and make slow general movements so that it appears like I am moving through a motion blur landscape. As with all time lapse type work it's time consuming although what I'm doing means I cannot just place the camera on a tripod and come back after a while I have to move the camera by hand for every shot and there will be a couple of thousand by the time it's done. I'm really excited by the early results and will put something on Youtube soon when it's finished.

Great weather for dramatic shots at the moment. This was in the Bourne Woods. A man out walking his dog. Tuesday 21st Jan up on the ridge overlooking Frensham ponds. The fog was so thick you could hardly see anything Both these shots were processed using Nik Software Viveza 2. I'm really liking this plugin for  Lightroom . Lightroom 5 is fantastic but I seem to prefer the results I get when using the Nik Plugins. The control points work so well and I like what structure does more than the clarity slider in Lightroom. Not sure whether they are directly comparable but they do seem to try and bring out detail. As with all these different pieces of software, they have the areas in which they excel  so I guess the secret is to use the best bits of all of them.

I went on a photowalk along London's Southbank on Saturday 18th. It was organised by Cameralabs Gordon Laing and also Chris Chabot. Great day spent with a really nice crowd of people. Check out some of the shots here  Here's a couple more of mine. I experimented with several moving camera longer exposure shots but didn't manage to get anything I liked apart from one that I uploaded to Google+ here  I'm going to work on developing a system of moving the camera in repeatable and controllable way using my tripod jig that I have made.....watch this space

When I was out walking the dog with my camera in the woods, I looked up into the tree branches and thought I must have a picture of that because it was amazing. For some reason I started rotating the camera during shooting. The resultant images were magical and captured my imagination. I experimented more and more and fell in love with the concept of moving the camera in different ways during a long exposure.