Swinging Tyre over the River Bollin by Neil Alexander
As part of my final A-level project for this year, I’ve been spending a lot of time round one of my old play areas as a kid. The River Bollin meanders from the hillsides on the edge of Macclesfield Forest, through deepest darkest Cheshire, crosses the Manchester Ship Cancal near the Lymm viaduct and gets swallowed up by the Mersey shortly afterwards. As a youngster, it was a great playground. Whether it was bike rides around the valley, mammoth bridge building with the Scouts or just pottering around with an OM10, this place holds a lot of memories for me. So it was I decided to venture back there and make some photographs.
On this particular morning, there were a few clouds in the sky pre-dawn, but it looked as if I’d be set up for some nice dawn light over the particular location I’d chosen. I played with a few compositions, and tried different exposures and then waited for the sun to rise, which it promptly did. Followed closely by really dense morning mist! I’d set up a composition on a fallen tree about 50 yards down the stream. By 5 minutes after sunrise, and long before the sun had got up over the far embankment I could barely see my own hand, never mind my proposed composition.
So I decided to try to do something with what little I could see. I moved a little farther back up the stream and chose this shot instead of a tyre on a rope hanging from a branch over the river. I wanted to try and soften the water with a long exposure, but I also wanted a really shallow depth of field. To add to my woes (I had already waded too far into the river, and the water had breached the top of my wellies – I hate soggy socks!) & as I appeared to have misplaced my 77mm ND filter, I realised I was going to have to use the 72mm ND400 on a 77mm wide Tamron 70-200mm F2.8lens. Now I’ve tried this before and it works, you just have to make sure that the lens is pointing upwards slightly and rest the smaller filter up against the lens front inside the lens hood, and you may have to crop out a tiny bit at each corner. (The hood for this lens is really long, so there may be a few light leaks from the smaller filter, but generally I haven’t noticed any) The problem I had was that the tyre wasn’t far off the top of the water so to get my camera pointing upwards it was practically in the river itself! Thank heavens I had my little Nikon View Angler thingy as composing would’ve required a snorkel.
Anyway processed in SilverEfex Pro. Exposure was 1 sec at F2.8 ISO200.
Macclesfield Forest by Neil Alexander
For the final part of this year’s Photography A-level I’m working towards at the moment, I have been given the theme “Rhythms and Cycles”. I have chosen to make a series of photographs of the the River Bollin. I wanted to show the cycle of water from the rain falling around the start of a river, along its course to where it meets with the sea. I chose the Bollin as I grew up with the Bollin Valley almost as a second back yard, so revisiting it 30 years later felt appropriate considering the theme.
When I first became familiar with the river around the 70s, it was a stagnant polluted mess. I believe that industrial setups in the Macclesfield area used to discharge their raw waste straight into the river, and it just stayed that way. Eventually the Bollin Valley Partnership was formed and they managed to breathe new life into the river and its environs.
After extensive research I finally managed to chart the course of the river in its entirety (on most maps, it appears to disappear in Macclesfield and gets quite tricky to find again the other side), and worked out where the main catchment area lies on the edge of Macclesfield Forest.
Macclesfield Forest by Neil Alexander
For this first shot, I wanted to make an image of a dank wet forest scene to depict the catchment around the source of the river. Well I got what I wanted! In fact, I got a little more than I bargained for. By the time I was finished, I was absolutely soaked and having left the camera’s rain hood in the car it got increasingly difficult to get it out without drowning it.
I then decided that I wanted to produce this series in black & white. So these images are multiple frame HDR images processed in Photomatix and then converted to black & white in Silver Efex Pro. It may be a little overdone though – I’ve just printed them A3 so I need to get them up on the wall and digest them over a few days.
As I tweeted the other day, my latest little off-tangent project is to shoot something, anything, in a Chiaroscuro style. And this is what I’ve ended up with. Its pretty much as I’d envisaged from the outset, so that in itself is an achievement! Image has been monotoned in Lightroom with a heavy vignette. Strobist: [more] Shot with 2 SB-900s. One camera right, gelled, snooted and exposure compensated to -2 and the other up to the left shooting into a reflective brolly exposure compensated to -3.All this done tethered to my MacBook Pro thanks to a wonderful little free app called Studio & Lightroom Tether from www.mountainstorm.co.uk.
À Bientôt
Headed over to Kinder in the Peak District again on Saturday morning, slightly better equipped this time (I had walking boots & wide angle lens with me this time). The light was clearly going to be a vast improvement on the previous weekend, and my expectations were high. Laden with quite a chunk of kit, I yomped uphill for about 45 minutes eventually making it up to Oaken Clough shortly after dawn. The view was well worth the climb, and the peace and qu/wp-content/uploads/iet was lovely. I stayed up there for around an hour waiting for the sun to rise up over the top of Kinder behind me and begin to kiss the tops of the hills opposite me. I decided to really take my time, and play with a few ideas and was fairly well rewarded.
I also discovered, on the way down, that my new Tamron 70-200mm F2.8 has macro functionality. This was a really pleasant surprise and is actually surprisingly good, though had I discovered this at the top, I’d probably have done some more detailed work on the broken stone wall at the top of the clough.
OK. Enough of the crap, now let’s get down to some photography….. 
And here is the same frame after processing with Silver Efex – see the difference!! 
Jumped off the M6 around dawn on Tuesday and stumbled across this scene. It was bright, but very misty and even though I’d decided I wasn’t going to do anymore landscapes, I just couldn’t resist this. The first one (top) is shot with the D300 & 18-200 at 112mm. 1/320 sec at f8. Processing details below
And the second one is also shot on the D300 with the 18-200 at 38mm, 200 ISO and 1/640 sec at f8. I then added a gradient in Lightroom and edited in Nik Silver efex, adding a couple of control points – one to bring the brightness of the sun down a bit, and another to bring up the brightness of the foreground. Oh and I cloned out some telephone wires (but badly!)
That’s it for today – short and sweet 
Shot this in Manchester this morning. It was a very gloomy and miserable day, and the top of the Beetham Tower was enshrouded in mist.
Took this with the Sigma 30mm 1.4 (which I really don’t use enough) at F1.4 1/2500 sec. I’ve played with it a little in L/room – added a lot of vignetting and convert to gray scale. Would’ve been tempted to open with Nik’s Silver FX in Photoshop, but kinda ran out of time. May have another go processing this at a later date.
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This was taken on the corner of Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester using an ND400 filter. This allowed me to reduce the exposure by just over 8 stops to around 15 seconds. Long enough to blur all the wandering shoppers and leave the lone busker and his acquaintance in the frame.
This next image is possibly the start of a new project I am contemplating involving documenting the various different housing estates around Manchester. I’ve still to fine tune the details and this was just a trial shoot, but I liked this image nonetheless.
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