Fresh Ground Photography

Cardiff

I live in a lovely part of the world. There are beautiful rural walks; strolls around the estuary; even chilled sessions in the back garden. But sometimes it’s just nice to go somewhere different. A couple of days ago we went to Cardiff to spend a few days mooching around the city. It’s a lovely place (lle hyfryd, yng Gymraeg) with lots of new opportunities for making images.

I’ll be honest, mentally, I wasn’t in the best place for photography when we went. But I thought that I’d take my little mirrorless camera anyway.

Cardiff is a quirky place. A mixture of old and new; modern and ancient. I particularly like the arcades. The image shown here is from the Castle Arcade … but please don’t restrict yourself to this one, there are many more. The bright sunlight from above nearly filtered all the way down to the lower levels. I’ll admit that I’ve had to reduce the ‘blacks’ and ‘shadows’ during post processing in Lightroom in order to create a more balanced picture. I think that I’d like to come back with my 120mm film camera to take some more shots of the arcades. Later on we went for a meal down in Cardiff Bay. There were musicians; street food; a funfair …

… and a Ferris wheel, with synchronised lights. I hadn’t brought a tripod with me but I wanted to take a long exposure photo of the wheel spinning. I tried a number of different positions and angles but settled for this one with my camera pressed against one of the  bins in the Bay. I was using a zoom lens at a wide angle (18mm) and set the aperture to f/22 which meant that I didn’t have to worry too much about focusing … both the deep depth of field and wide angle gave me a lot of leeway in the low light conditions. I set the ISO to 100 which left the shutter speed to 6 seconds. It gave a lovely blur to the wheel while leaving the night sky black.

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