A stunning afternoon on the Blorenge, a mountain near Blaenavon.  I was fascinated by this sign with its one-way-to-cold, one-way-to-warm suggestion, (and no, I didn’t knock the icicles off one side for dramatic effect!).  With the vast range of tones in this shot, I had to resort to HDR to make it look as it did to me when I was there.  There were some amazing ice formations around this afternoon, but none caught my eye as much as this one.  Below are my two favourite shots of the day.

I love this shot.  It was the result of a lot of patience and lying in the dirt around one of the buildings on the south bank of the Thames in London.  The shot itself is one of many, most of which were too blurry to use.  The art with this is catching the skater when they are at the top of their jump, almost still in the air, and getting ready to drop again.  I wanted a shutter speed that was fast enough to partly freeze the action, but still slow enough to register the movement required to give the shot life.  It ended up being 1/80th sec at f4.5 with a 10mm lens.  These guys love the attention, and as long as you don’t get in their way, you seem to be able to snap away all day without bothering them.

I’m creating this post as my first with the new site layout. This shot was taken at Ruperra Castle in South Wales, and is a particularly menacing image of what I believe to be a Tube Web spider, a species originally from the Mediterranean. They were introduced into the UK during the last century, and have spread northwards from the south coast ever since. They are one of the few UK species that can actually give you a nasty (though not fatal) nip. This was taken with my 50mm Macro, and lit with a torch (I was in the basement of the castle at the time).