I was invited out on Friday night for another photography night meeting with other fellow Flickr-obsessed local photographers, Craig, Adam and Dan. I must admit, on a Friday night, walking around with my camera taking photos wasn’t the ideal Friday night since mine usually involves music, beer, and at a Pub somewhere, but I decided to join them anyway – and we had a great time!
We were planning on getting into a somewhat "forbidden" area in Portsmouth, where a multitude of signs telling us to "Keep Out – Guard Dogs" were placed. Although we decided to continue anyway!
I can’t really reveal where exactly it was we were trying to get in, but its a shame we couldn’t. We had a walk around the perimeter of this place only to find barbed wire and metal fence the entire way around. We decided against the idea of getting in and decided, instead, to take a trip down to the Clarence Pier, Old Portsmouth area.
Dan brought along his Peleng 8mm circular fisheye lens again, and we swapped cameras for a while so I could have a play with the fisheye. And Damn, its so awesome! You may remember me taking a few shots a number of weeks ago with his fisheye lens, which I also blogged about? The Peleng fisheye is a very old lens which is fully manual, with no auto-focus and with manual aperture settings. Getting a clean crisp shot was quite challenging, especially in the dark. I managed to get a shot of Dan with my camera though, which came out well.
As well as our crew for the evening.
The best thing about the fisheye lens is how much you can get in one shot, no matter how close to the subject you are. Take the photo below for example – it was shot literally inches away from the bench, yet you can still see the bench in the corners of the shot, even if it is heavily distorted. I think this gives the photo a great, unique angle on the photo.
After my fun, we swapped back and we continued over to the near-by abandoned church which I’ve shot so many times before. I find this church particularly difficult to take photos of at night and I’m not sure why. It may well be the amount of light pollution behind the church and the lack of illumination on the front of it, or the bright modern houses just behind it also creating a lot of light. Whatever it is, its difficult. This is my attempt from the evening and so-far, my best photo of this church I think.
To end, I took the somewhat-now-famous ferry long exposure shot, which has seemed to feature in many of my contacts photosteams on Flickr, where the idea originally came from me about a year ago (or so I think?!). Well anyway, I think this one came out particularly well.
Another great evening of photography.