June 2009        Photographers Resource - Monthly      Edition 66

Britain's Canals, plus Macro,
plus Magical Depth of Field with Slicing

In this Issue:

• Photographers Diary

• June Wildlife Photography

• Woodpeckers - the 3 species resident in the UK

• Feature - Canals and Waterways of Britain

• Turning Time Detective

• Photographic Feature 1 - Macro Photography

• Photographic Feature 2 - Magical Depth of Field using Slicing

• Nikon Camera Software Updates

• Changes and enhancements to the system

Before we look at these, lets take a look at the range of photographic opportunities now open to us. Over the last month we have had a lot of nice weather days and a number of photographic opportunities, from wildlife to crazy events to railway steam festivals.  The number of opportunities increases greatly through the summer months with a vast array or festivals, shows and all types of events. In addition to this the countryside is green and everything growing, walks are pleasant and the coastline just waiting, refreshed by every tide, for you to take your camera along.

Getting out into the countryside, opens up so many possibilities and there are a lot of opportunities that include this, take for example photographing a preservation steam railway, or walking along a canal, both transport you to another time and world but will also usually take you into the countryside. Then there are the events, of every type from historic re-enacted battles to racing to crazy events, events are on all year round but growing in number greatly through the summer months.

As we enter June and look forward into July we are spoilt for choice. Our monthly photographers diary of events and activities, that you will find interesting, has continued to grow and to now make it easier to find the type of events or activities that are of most interest to you, we have added colour coding. The concept being to colour code items together that are likely to appeal to the same people. This should make checking what is coming up and planning which events to look at in more detail, that bit easier.

We have within the photographers Diary Section the June, July, forward highlights and wildlife diaries up to date, plus a new article on what wildlife and nature you can photograph in June . It's interesting to see many of the birds and animals we have highlighted being featured in the BBC Springwatch programme running the last week of May and most of June on BBC2.

 

Green Woodpecker Green Woodpecker Gallery

Please remember to let us know of events that you would like to see included and major events you are aware of that we have not found. We don't attempt to put every event in the calendar, it would be just too large if every small local event was featured,  but do try to cover the main events, unusual events and a sprinkling of others. UK Woodpeckers Britain has three woodpeckers, two of which are not too difficult to photograph. In the article Photographing Woodpeckers we look at this in some detail. We have continued to expand the information on bird species, and this month have added pages on the three British woodpeckers, the larger Great Spotted, smaller Lesser Spotted, and the Green Woodpecker plus galleries of our own photos, on the Great Spotted Woodpecker and Green Woodpecker Gallery.

Feature

The Canals and Waterways of Britain

We would like to encourage more photographers to get out and see what they can photograph, and suggest a walk along a canal would open up all sorts of opportunities, a chance to photograph country views, wildlife and much more besides the canal and boats. Canals are in most places fairly level, so the walking is not hard and while a map is useful you cannot get lost. Canals offer many an ideal pathway through both countryside and urban settings.

We have an enormous network of canals, and there are more boats on them now than at any point in history. More sections are being renovated, and the canal system is growing still quite fast. Like steam railways, what started with enthusiasts devoted to their cause, is now big business, accounting for many millions within the economy, and with mammoth projects to restore and often to also build new canal features and attractions. With government quango's and agencies involved and access to lottery funds, we are going to see this continuing with many new and interesting developments and re-redevelopments. Waterside apartments, and marinas also provide a drive towards restoring many urban sections of the canals, including sections that do not lead anywhere and except for this would have been lost over time. Birmingham alone has more miles of canals than Venice, with cleaner water in them as well.

The canal system and navigable canals link together to form a national network allowing boats to travel through much of England and into Wales. With additional unlinked waterways in a number of other areas and in several areas of Scotland. On some routes a fairly quick journey can be made, while to get from some other places to somewhere not that far away can involve several weeks travel.

We have an article looking in more detail at the Canals,  and a second article Canals for Photographers,  looking at both what is of major interest to photographers and how to go about photographing them.

We have created a new Canals and Waterway Section, with its own Canals and Waterways Doorway.

The first parts we have added to this have been a complete set of listings:-

• Major Canals and Waterways - all the major canals and rivers that boats can travel on in the UK, a fuller listing is in the listings below.

• Major Canal Features  - from major aqueducts to staircase locks to major lock flights, these are the major features within the canal system.

• Canal Tunnels  - a listing of all the major canal tunnels in the country.

These follow the same pattern as our other listings with the first column being linked to further pages within this site, while further along we have linked many items to information elsewhere, allowing you a single source index to find information on any feature on the canals or waterways.

Location guides have been added for a number of the major features along the canals, most are new pages but a few existing ones updated. The new location guides are:-

• Falkirk Wheel   - A new development that lifts boats up or down within a large wheel.

• Devizes Locks   - An impressive large flight of locks up a hillside.

• Hatton Locks   - A picturesque flight of locks that, if you catch them just right, has a waterfall over the lower gates.

• Crofton Pump House  - (Kennet and Avon Canal) two steam driven pumping engines.

• Foxton Inclined Plane and Locks  - The site of a railway up the hillside that used to take boats from one canal level to another, that is gong to be rebuilt. Also staircase locks.

• Watford Flight (Locks)   - More staircase locks.

• Hay Inclined Plane   - Currently the most complete example of an inclined plane, railway up the side of a hill taking boats from one level to another.

• Pontcysyllte Aqueduct  - (Llangollen Canal) Britain's most impressive aqueduct, still in use and accessible.

• Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct  - The first of its type and Pontcysyllte Aqueduct  followed in similar design, now just an aqueduct standing empty in a field.

Plus updated location guides for:-

• Anderton Boat Lift, nr Northwich, Cheshire

• Pocklington Canal, Yorkshire 

• Ellesmere Port, Cheshire - On the Shropshire Union Canal

• Black Country Museum, Dudley, Worcestershire - On the Dudley Canal near the Dudley Tunnel.

• Blists Hill Victorian Town, Ironbridge, Shropshire - Home of the Hay Inclined Plane

This is a start, we can develop this now further and welcome your involvement, could you produce a location guide for another feature or location, or a route guide identifying all features along a canal? How about a gallery of photos that is on a canal or some other theme.

Turning Time Detective

There are occasions when you read something and you feel 'that's not quite right', and it then offers you the chance to find out more, becoming a time detective. The canals, their history and its occupants is one of these areas. It had its own culture and some even their own, now nearly lost, religion and belief system, its share of problems, including the forcing of families to settle in houses instead of living on the waterways or have their children taken away. So don't believe everything you read, including on official sites. We all make errors, and we welcome you pointing out any of ours that you spot. One I came across  recently was on Waterscape, the official waterways site, when looking at Hatton Locks, its says "Today, this stretch of waterway is part of the Grand Union Canal, but when it opened in December 1799 this was the Warwick & Birmingham Canal, built to carry locally mined coal to the power stations and factories of the Black Country."

Now you may not initially see anything wrong until you look at the dates compared to what they are saying. Power stations in 1799 would be somewhat unlikely as Edison's first light bulb prototype was developed in 1879, the voltaic pile, the early ancestor or the electric battery, was not first invented until 1800. According to Wikipedia the first Power Station was in 1881 and George_Westinghouse, who developed much of the concepts of power distribution, was born in 1846. Wikipedia says that it was on September 4 1882, that Edison switched on the world's first electrical power distribution system. I am not being critical of Waterscape just pointing out that when you read anything historical you may need to look at it yourself and see if you can accept the version you are being given or need to look into it a little further. Of course Waterscape may be correct in which case a lot of the history of electricity and power distribution, as we understand it is, wrong.

Macro Photography

Getting close up photographs of many items, including plants and wildlife, is something that many find exciting, and it often opens up a world around us that perhaps we have not been aware of. We had some articles in this area but have extended the coverage with a major new article on Macro Photography, and while for many a macro lens is all that they need, we have also, in two other articles, looked at Close-up Lenses, allowing most other lenses to focus closer and Tubes & Bellows, often used with a macro lens, but can be used with other lenses to get far closer and into the miniature world around us that routinely we just do not see. We have also produced a small project that involves the construction of a very useful mini studio that can be used for macro photography, flower photography and small product photography. This Macro Background System, you will find useful generally and very flexible in use. Existing articles, some now updated, that relate to the macro area include:- Macro or micro photography - taking things close up. Advantages and effect. Differences in terminology between manufacturers, example images.    Novaflex Castel-Mini focusing rack. Stepping Rings  - allowing a holder, adaptor or other filters to be used across a range of lens sizes. Comparing Nikon Flash Units.  Photographing Snails Project.

Tubes & Bellows   Macro Background System

The second subject we are covering this month was going to be a single article on overcoming depth of field limitations in macro and flower photography, using slices, but it grew and we thought it would be better treated as a related, but separate theme.

Magical Depth of Field with Slicing

With macro photography, extreme close up and flower photography, as well as in many other areas of photography, it can be extremely difficult to get everything that you want into focus, and at other times to get a deep enough depth of field that then has a sudden drop off of focus.

There is a technique that allows you to get unlimited depth of field, allowing items in the foreground and distance to be in focus at the same time, allowing small items and flower photographs to have everything that you want in focus.

We start with an article explaining in more detail what we are doing, with some examples of the effects in Introducing Slicing, and a project that will allow you to get into this straight away in Depth of Field Magic. So that you can see for yourself, quickly, what can be achieved I have taken three sets of slices, and zipped these, as well as the result I created, into files that you can download, while also explaining the setup and showing you, with an animation, what is actually happening in each case. Read the projects first then use the supplementary projects information in Slices - Coins, Slices - Chips and Slices - Red flower.This uses a piece special software that you can download and try (30 day free trial) called Helicon Focus. We look at this in more detail in What we can do with Helicon Focus, although I haven't covered all its capabilities, perhaps we will come back and look at this again later. In Introducing Slicing there are also links to another piece of software that is completely free, although we suggest you start with the Helicon trial, and the basic version, that most will want, is low cost shareware.

You can capture slices in many ways and don't need anything special, however as we have equipment that allows us to do this with far greater precision, we thought you would like to see what we would tell professionals that they should be using, if using this for macro photography and other close up work. You also get to see how the slices that we have included were taken in Capturing Slices with a Nikon DSLR.

Although here we have concentrated on its use with close up items, flowers and the like, this can also be applied to property photography, landscape and far more.

We have updated the page on the current versions of Nikon firmware and software.  You can always find this page from within the photography topic area or within the reference section.

System Changes

As we continue to enhance the system and expand our capabilities we need to make quite a few changes, and this month we have made quite a few, most of which you will not see, they affect the way we can load the system and keep it up to date.

We have made some changes to the Photographers Diary Section including colour coding events to make it easier to find the ones of most interest to you, now that the lists have been getting longer.

On the menu bars on the left, under the choices we have put a short version of the keys (Legend) to our symbols listing, the most common ones, and linking to the full list. You can get the full list at any time by clicking on any symbol and its meaning by just holding your mouse over it.

We have also added a few new symbols, the most significant of these is  , this will appear near some photographs and means that if you click on the photo a larger version will be displayed in a new window. We write this in red type on loads of pages so people are aware of this facility, and adding the symbol will both eliminate the need for this and also make it clearer which photos do and which do not have larger images available. As with most changes it will be added on future pages and older ones when we revise or update them.

Another symbol, a star, will not be used on its own but with another symbol and will mostly be used in lists and sections to identify the most significant item of its type. In some lists, that are with grids, we have highlighted the most significant items by using a coloured background to the grid, but where there is no grid this is more difficult to do in a way that makes it clear what we mean.

The other new symbols are more for future use and allow us to work now on parts that will link to other facilities or systems not yet fully live. The full list of new symbols added is:-

• Magnify symbol showing which images will expand

• New symbol - Travellers Resource

• New symbol - connects to B&B/accommodation 

• New symbol - for Start Page

• New symbol - one of the most significant of its type  (always used with another)

We will be adding more from time to time, for example we are working on some at present to show the different formats that 3D images can be viewed in, that will be introduced when we look into 3D photography at the end of the summer.

Canals  

Canals for photographers  

Further information - canals  

Macro Photography

Close-up Lenses 

Tubes & Bellows

Macro Background System (Project)

Introducing Slicing

Depth of Field Magic (Project)

What we can do with Helicon Focus

Capturing Slices with a Nikon DSLR

Slices - Coins

Slices - Chips

Slices - Red flower

Wildlife photography in June 

Photographing Woodpeckers

Green Woodpecker

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Lesser Spotted Woodpecker

Major Canals and Waterways

Major Canal Features

Canal Tunnels

Lock Flights and Staircases

Canals in England 

Canals in Wales 

Canals in Scotland 

Canals in Northern Ireland 

Non Navigable and Lost Canals

Crofton Pump House, Wiltshire 

Devizes Locks, Wiltshire  

Falkirk Wheel, Stirlingshire  

Foxton Inclined Plane and Locks, Leicestershire

Hatton Locks, Warwickshire  

Hay Inclined Plane, Shropshire   

Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct, Shropshire  

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, Denbighshire 

Watford Flight (locks), Northamptonshire  

Devizes Locks Gallery

Falkirk Wheel Gallery

Hatton Locks Gallery

Hay Inclined Plane Gallery

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct Gallery

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Green Woodpecker Gallery