Back to a regular haunt

Hello You

Hope you are well, thanks for dropping by. If you are a regular or even a subscriber, you will probably know that I have a thing for water in some of my pictures, especially moving water. However, I haven’t popped any of those types of pictures on the blog for a while, so I have looked through the hard drive and here are a few more for you.

In this instance, I had the opportunity to play about as there were some movements and colours from leaves in the waterfall area that made things a touch more interesting than usual. I did spend some time up at the top of the waterfall, but there wasn’t much interesting there. Another issue is, even though I was wearing my wellies, there were a few small trees blocking my way from a recent stormy period, so I took a “top down” picture instead.

If it looks like I am very near the edge, it’s because I was. In fact, one of the tripod legs slipped off just after I took the picture!

Heading down, I set up to take a few pictures of the waterfall itself. Not much water coming down this time (I have seen this fall in flood and it is a sight to behold, in fact I think I posted them on here a while back). Whilst I was fiddling about with shutter speed, I noticed a branch had lodged in the rocks to the right, was covered with lovely leaves and was creating a little eddy of bubbles now and again, so that became my focal point. Took a while to get that perfect full circle blur I tell you! I suspect if I went back today it would all be gone…eroded away by the constant movement of water. How poetic!

I suspect that this photo may have needed smoothing in Photoshop. However, if anyone wants a properly processed one by email, please feel free to ask!!

Further downstream, leaves came into play once again where set of stepping-stones ford the stream. There’s no danger in wading across but you would get pretty wet I suppose. Again, this is zoomed in because the undergrowth around the area was a mess so, apologies for the lack of context!

Now, this image WAS smoothed as there was a bit of fuzz. However, I would like to stress that the yellow leaf was not placed in any way, it was there naturally, hence the image working as well as it does.

Carrying on down you come to one of the quietest beaches I know of. On this occasion I was the only person here..again. Don’t get me wrong, I like Newgale beach very much but the barking dogs and people screaming at their kids can be a bit of an annoyance! As it was quite still, I have made my first attempt at blurring water to try to soften the waves coming in that were only a few inches tall. Anyone care to comment? I think it works quite well and to top things off, the sky was quite pretty too.

Some smoothing (by shutter speed and addition of a neutral density filter) of the waves with a nice pink reflection from the dusk clouds. Lovely afternoon.

Well, another instalment is done and I though the images are all pretty good, seeing all this jazz is self-taught.

Now the weather has calmed down and this funny yellow thing is hovering in the sky, I may be able to pass on some decent sunsets to you all, so keep coming back and subscribing! Thanks again!

Last of the holiday pictures and a local walk

Hello again all of you,

I do hope that you have subscribed to my YouTube channel. Well, I know that one person has…yes, it’s no fancy channel full of up to date topics but now and again I shall try to put a video of interest on there. I warn you now that my interest are quite varied, so it won’t just be weather. At the moment the weather is grey dull and damp, ideal for the Sunday papers, so I can’t think any videos will be coming for some time!

There weren’t too many pictures left over from my holiday, so I have put the one that I though was worth sharing on here, a little bit weather based. I think it was almost the last morning so I was up early to pack and there was a nice bit of mist and dew getting burnt off (slowly) in the field near the castle. Not often I’m up early enough or free to take a picture of this, so I got a few snaps.

Some mist burning off in the Monmouthshire countryside

Moving on, another visit to Newgale beach now in Pembrokeshire and I decided to explore the front at a very low tide. I didn’t realise that the caves I found were quite so extensive and that the rock was as aesthetically pleasing as it was. Usually, the tide is in enough to be wary of when I arrive, so I hadn’t ventured down to look around.

A monochrome conversion of some of the rocky folds on Newgale

Quite glad I did to be honest. Apparently, there’s the remains of a petrified forest around on the beach here too. I need to check out which end of the beach that is (as it’s a good long walk from one end to the other at low tide) and have a good look for it. There was no evidence of it here, but I did get some nice monochrome of the rocky waves, as you can see.

I then moved along the front looking at the cliffs which had a very nice looking wave in them. when you watch the documentaries on TV talking about rock being folded around by extreme forces, this makes you realise quite what they mean. If I had a wider lens, I could have got a better shot of the entire part this picture is a part of, but you never know, someday.

Folds and caves under the road to St Davids. Most people passing through would probably never see this.

As the tide was coming in, I decided to move inland but stuck me head in one of the caves/holes nearer the “safe zone” where the tide wouldn’t catch me out. Look at these veins of rock. I’m no geologist, but I think the whiter bits and veins are quartz, as that is quite prevalent in this area. Other than that I’m stumped I’m afraid.

Funny to think that those little pebbles in the picture can create such a hole over time

Mind you, I was more taken by the effect that waves and pebbles (one of which I pinched as it was quite pretty…sorry) had been having over the years on what probably started out as a teeny tiny hole. The grey rock was as smooth as you could imagine rock could be. Very nice and well worth a picture.

Well, that’s the lot for this week, nowt too exciting I admit but I shall be moving on to a new card next time and I have some slightly different images of my favourite waterfall to post, so you should pop in and have a look if you have the time. Thanks for visiting!

YouTube up and running

Hello,

Just put some videos of the recent local weather (snow and wind) on YouTube for you…use this link http://youtu.be/YhK9wN8KLV0 to go to the most impressive one where 3 people get drenched at the end 🙂

After that, you can click my name to see the others

Thanks!!

If you like clouds, you’ll love this post!

Morning All,

Surprisingly, it’s rather damp here at the moment; unfortunately you can’t convey sarcasm too well in text, but that was a sarcastic comment. We have had a few lovely days of late with broken sunshine and temperatures rising to the point you don’t need three layer coats but it all seems to have gone downhill.

Mind you, I was lucky enough to be in Aberystwyth working the beginning of this week when there was a very impressive storm off the coast. The hotel I stayed in was right on the beach near enough so it was very different listening to crashing waves when I usually hear nothing, living on a hill inland! I popped out a number of time to get a few videos so if, and this is a big if, I can work out how to get the right ones off my phone and onto YouTube (yes, I have a YouTube channel too!) I may post the odd one. I shall post a message here if successful!

Anyway, onto the pictures. I took these at the end of November last year; basically it’s the birth of what turned out to be a massive rainstorm over Haverfordwest. I can’t remember why, but I was at home not work that morning and was, lucky me, able to get these beautiful pictures (although I had to remove a little digital noise in Photoshop as per my last post, sorry).

Incoming!

After, the first few pictures, things being to develop into a more visually stunning cloud with some lovely contrasting blue sky behind it.

A wider view…

I think this set of pictures is some of the best timing I have had of late with my weather pictures. Shame it didn’t come along in time for the WeatherNet photo competition!

Getting a bit lumpy there…

Down in the left bottom corner of the image above, you can see some brave birds playing chicken across the front of the incoming precipitation. Mind you, they’d be getting quite a view, I imagine…

More lumpiness (mammatus possibly) and the hills behind for context

If I had been in a plane, I would have been giving this are a pretty wide berth!

The upper part seems to be growing a bit taller now…or it could just be closer!

The storm continues to grow and get more striking by the minute almost….

Some very striking colours in this image

The image above is my all time favourite out of the 20 or so I took, for the mix of colour and structure in the clouds. As I said in one of the captions, I’m fairly sure it contains mammatus which you can read about by going here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammatus_cloud)

Some grey cloud coming in underneath now and the storm is upon us!

After I took the final image above, a lower layer of clouds was getting in the mix and things started to get a little too big to get in the viewfinder, plus there was the odd spit and spot of rain in the air, so I retired indoors plus I had to go into town to get to work. Sigh.

Well, there you have it, the best storm clouds I’ve seen for a long time and I hope that you like them too but apologies for the amount of them, I just though they were so pretty and looked so powerful, they all need posting! Next time, I will look to post my most recent waterfall walk or something, which has some nice lapse in it, so it should look cool.

Thanks again for tuning in and keep this frequency clear for storm videos on YouTube, I shall let you know here first!