Day 13 - Jazzy B and the Blustery Day

JazzyBoy

I've been wanting to get a good photo of Jazz into my blog, and today offered a great opportunity. 

It's very windy, and again there's been bad weather across the country.   Here in the Midlands, we seem to have missed the worst of it.   We've done this a lot lately - all the big, troublesome weather systems have slid by fairly quietly for us, and we've only caught the more benign edge of them.

And so it is today...we've had a little light rain but not much.  Since lunchtime, it's been lovely and sunny, although there's bite to the wind and it's not as warm as it looks.

We took the rare winter chance of a nice walk in the daylight.   The fields opposite us are used as part of a rotation system by a local shepherd for his fairly large flock.   The big one we come to first down our little lane is empty at the moment, and there's been sufficient time and rain since it was last populated that it's not currently full of sheep poo.

With a food-obsessed Labrador in your company, you quickly learn to avoid a plethora of poo when possible, especially herbivore poo (rabbit, sheep, horse, cow, deer are all abundant in the Warwickshire countryside).   

Look at it this way...consider how lovely fresh food, once processed through a mammal, comes out the other end still fresh, but definitely no longer lovely...now imagine taking this output, and putting it through the same process again...it's basically shit squared, and just the smell of it can clear a house in a minute.  

Jazz is something of a Master Chef of this style of cooking, so we have to take care to limit his opportunities.

Still, today there was no poo to speak of, and the field is much kinder on Jazz's legs and feet, so we had a lovely walk around the perimeter in the low sunshine and the blustery wind.

I got a book on photography tips for Xmas (thanks Anna, what's your point?!).   I've always been a point and click photographer - I just carelessly take loads and hope that occasionally one turns out alright (which they often do).   

But now that I've made this commitment to take a photo every day, I can't take such a chance - I need to at least try for a half decent photo, rather than just leaving it to random chance and hoping for the best.   

So I've been reading up and trying to learn a bit about what I'm doing.   

Out in the field, I did some experimentation, particularly with HDR mode.  Apparently this is good for landscape and other still shots.  I like it, it produces some nice colour and contrast, but you do have to be careful when you use it.

Which brings me to the latest instalment of my short-running series, Today I Learned;

When the book says don't use HDR when there's movement in the shot (for example Jazz's ear flapping in the wind in this photo), it actually means it...

Whodathunk!