Tag Archives: field recording

Crop Rotation

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This view can be seen at the start of the StillWalks video “Winter Lakeside Walk” which features Llyn Llech Owain in South West Wales. The widescreen video necessitates the landscape crop but to avoid the need to click and zoom on an image in this WordPress theme, the crop is better rotated to the portrait format.

I find cropping images a fascinating challenge and whilst this is first done when framing the shot on the camera, the requirements of different purposes and platforms such as square for Instagram as well as those below forces me to look at the photos with a new “focus” on their impact. It is not ideal to do heavy cropping of any image but where the output is for screen rather than print, this is not such a big issue.

The images I am posting this week are all from the “Winter Lakeside Walk” production shoot and each day will offer a landscape and portrait crop of the selected image. Which do you prefer?

Watch the video at the bottom of this post.

sunrise

sunrise

Crooked Woodland

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Whether there is snow or not this year, this is be a popular place for people to walk on Boxing Day. The footpath round Lliw Lower Reservoir features in my Winter Reservoir Walk, part of the StillWalks at Lliw Reservoir collection available on request or at the reservoir cafe.

The video is featured below, so if you don’t want to go out if it is pouring rain again . . .

winter footpath

crooked fence

Misty Walk

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The StillWalks video below is not from the place I have posting about this last week but is nearby on the Gower Peninsula. The weather forecast for the production day of this video was good – in reality it turned out as you will see in the video, more in keeping with the atmosphere of the misty hills, if not as wet and windy.

If you are looking at this in an email, please click the image below to be able to watch the video on the blog.

Misty Walk screenshot

Seeing Through the Rainy Season

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If last week’s photo series was about changeable weather, this week’s is about the apparent permanence of moisture during one of the rainy seasons in Wales – there is certainly more than one!

I was recently up on the hills of the Mawr ward near Swansea to assess the conditions for a scheduled project production day . . . what a joke. I couldn’t believe the weather on my journey up there but thought “the weather is so changeable these days, you never know, it might clear“. Ha! Wishful thinking indeed.

Having said that, I had my waterproofs with me and decided it would be good to try and capture something of the atmosphere of the place in these wild conditions. So here is a short accurately descriptive sound clip to accompany the first two images of the week.

Mist and rain on Mawr

Mist and Rain on Mawr

Celebrating Dylan Thomas

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In celebration of the centenary of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, I thought I would post a second time today with a link to my StillWalks video “Cwmdonkin Walk – Autumn”. The park in Swansea was a significant feature in Dylan’s life and has seen some notable improvements in the last year to celebrate his centenary.

I have upgraded the normal sample version of the video to the full length at a higher resolution and hope that you will enjoy it as much as those people using it on a daily basis.

Click here or the image below to watch the full video (8 minutes).

Cwmdonkin Park

Trolley Cemetery and a New View of Drawing

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Decaying with time, these old trolleys create a strange cemetery in the mouth of the River Tawe, Swansea.

Those that already follow this blog will know that there is more to come throughout this week to tell the story of a recent walk in the docks/marina area of Swansea.

The walk was the second Mission Gallery Walk and Draw with Sarah Abbott that I have taken part in. On this occasion, while I did a little sketching, most of my drawing was with my DSLR camera, iPhone and small edirol sound recorder.

Having read that the winner of the Jerwood Drawing Prize this year was sound artist  Alison Carlier, I felt that my description of drawing with my camera and sound recorder while out on pre-production recce walks for StillWalks videos, is perfectly valid.

With The Big Draw continuing throughout this month, perhaps it is an appropriate time to consider and enjoy the broadening definition of drawing.

trolleys in sand

trolley in sand

Old fence section

trolley in sand

New StillWalks Video Collection

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“StillWalks at Lliw Reservoirs” – This new collection of StillWalks videos looks at Lliw Lower Reservoir through all four seasons as well as a Spring walk to the upper reservoir. It also includes a short introduction.

Below is the introduction and a sample from the collection which is available here or can be bought at the  reservoir cafe on disc.

As with all StillWalks videos, the sounds are unique to the time and place of the walk. In the case of this collection, the location is the same in each video, albeit with a slightly different route taken each time. The sounds recorded, however, vary with the conditions and the acoustics of the surrounding landscape are affected by changing weather conditions to give different effects to permanent features such as flowing water or background ambience.

Why buy a StillWalks video or video collection?