Blogs

Photography Exhibition Lampeter Ceredigion

I will be displaying a selection of my favourite macro shots from 2011, in the town hall cafe Lampeter, for the whole month of april.
if your in the area pop in and have a look.

cambrian news

nice article about me in the Cambrian news south today.

Local photographer wins National Geographic competition

Perly Freeman, 31, beat thousands of hopeful photographers when she scooped first prize in a photography competition judged by a National Geographic expert.

Competition Win

Im thrilled to have won the national geographic bowmore 2011 photo contest

The national geographic competition, sponsored by Bowmore Distilleries in Islay, runs annually and has three categories: People, places and nature.
I entered the nature category with my image *A Place To Rest*
and was awarded first prize as well as over all winner 2011

national geographic Judge, John Burcham, said: “ I love the way the ladybug is delicately perched on the edge of the mushroom. The shallow depth of feel really makes this image really standout. It's very fantasy like."

The love of Macro

I started exploring macro a few years ago after getting my first SLR camera. Up until then I’d always used wet film cameras, and experimentation was kept to a minimum due to the cost of developing films.

In Search of The Perfect Bokeh

Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with different types of background blur (the bokeh affect).

In order to achieve great macro you need to be sure that nothing in the image is there by mistake and every part of the image is pleasing to the eye. What looks like an insignificant speck to the naked eye, can be a huge dark shape in a macro image.

Different things I’ve experimented with include water drops (see image 1: Dill After the Rain); fizzy water (see image 2: The Poppies are Here); Trees (see image 3: White Fox Glove).

Good Bokeh?

In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light." Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—"good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

Jimmies Farm butterfly House

Last week I visited the butterfly house at Jimmies Farm in Suffolk.

The Butterfly House offers an incredible chance to see rare and imported species from as far a field as Asia and South America.
It was raining in the butterfly house when i arrived, they turn on a irrigation system at intervals through out the day. Keeping just the right tropical environment is essential for the butterflies' survival, all the plants were so beautiful covered in little droplets of water.
I spent a lovely two hours photographing the butterflies.