I stopped today whilst passing a vinyard, attracted by the strong backlighting and the translucence this gave to the vines and the trees beyond. However, the shadows and highlights that I wanted to preserve were way beyond the dynamic range of the camera, especially as I was saving as JPEG.

I tried recovering these in pp using highlight and shadow adjustment on the best balanced JPEG from my bracketed sequence, but I've still introduced some noise in the shadows (albeit cleaned up...

Despite my well-intentioned resolution, I left the house today without my E-PL1. It's no excuse but my daughter had a doctor's appointment and I was in a hurry. As you might guess, on the way home I saw numerous photo opportunities. In the high street there was the comical sight of two people desperately trying to load an implausibly large sofa into an impossibly small car and on the drive home there were any number of autumnal trees backlit by the low, late afternoon sun.

Once home,...

Thankfully it's now the time of year in the UK where we can comfortably wear fleece jackets again, with pockets big enough to slip in an E-PL1 and Panny 20mm. I grabbed this shot of our local high street tonight while on my way to collect a chinese take-away, mainly to test the camera at high ISO.



ISO 1600, 1/8th sec @ f4, no in-camera noise reduction but Dfine 2.0 applied...

In my last blog entry I discussed the notion that perfection in nature, although much sought-after, is not necessary and that we should accept flawed beauty as individuality. Following on from that I'd like to question the desire many of us have to achieve perfection in our photography, which can become almost an obsession – a Holy Grail.

There is nothing wrong in trying to better ourselves, of course, producing the best quality work that we can and striving to improve, but it can...

Photographers naturally posses a desire to capture beauty in nature and strive to produce images that display it to perfection. We all want the perfect sunrise, perfect waterfall or perfect vista. When it come to smaller details we are no less demanding. Nothing in nature is more beautiful than a flower but we cannot photograph any old flower, it has to be a perfect specimen.

The same with leaves. Yesterday I spent a pleasant hour in a local park searching for fallen leaves, not...