Week 2–Strong & Northern!

For week 2 of my one photo a week in 2021 challenge I had intended to make a stunning long exposure photo of the Henderson’s Relish Building using my new welding glass 14 stop ND filter.  In my head the image was a very striking photo of the building with a sky showing lots of dynamic movement in the clouds.  Unfortunately when I tried to make just that photo I got neither of these two – a washed out building and a white featureless sky.

So I next thought I would take a photo of St George’s Lecture Theatre but I got a similar looking photo with no movement in the clouds (even though the exposure was 150 seconds!).  It appears that it is a lot harder than it looks to get cloud movement in a long exposure (most likely due to the detail in the sky being blown out).  More practice is obviously required!  But I did manage in Lightroom to make a half-decent image out of my photo of the church.


My next idea was to head to Ladybower Reservoir and take some long exposure shots of the water. I spent 3 hours there yesterday freezing my nuts off but couldn’t get a shot I liked until dusk where I made this panorama:



Although I like this image it is a little dark so I revisited my Henderson’s photos and discovered that I had luckily taken 2 normal bracketed shots of the building without the welding glass attached – one to expose for the sky and one for the building.  I blended these together to make the images below, one in colour and the other in much more striking black and white:




And it is this last one that I have chosen as my photo of the week and will be entered into the View52 Group on flickr.

PS Regular viewers of my photos (and also of the View52 and October groups) will recognise Henderson’s building of course.  I first shot it back in 2008:



And my friends Richard and Dave have both shot it too, for the October and View52 groups respectively: