My Walk this Week – Back at The Waterside with a Newborn Alpaca

My walk this week started with a couple of surprises! There was more than tadpoles to see and on my arrival at The Waterside Firstly I was unexpectedly met by a couple of horses, but more of them later in the week.

The real excitement came when just before setting out on a walk round the lake with my camera and sound kit, Steve ran over to tell everyone that a new arrival in the form of an alpaca was on its way.

tadpoles

Tadpoles

It was difficult to know how long the delivery was going to take but it wasn’t going to be immediate so rather than hang around in a small crowd of spectators, I set off round the lake. I was back in time to see the new alpaca just after its birth. You can see it staggering around its mother in the video clip and photos below. Introducing newborn Caleb!

 

Turn of the Lock

Having come full circle and arrived back at the blue footbridge and lock on my walk this week around part of the maritime quarter of Swansea, I focused my attention on the bridge and lock rather than the churning water of the river falling over the weir (see Monday’s post).

footbridge mesh

Patterns, sound and movement can be seen below in a mixture of photos and video taken on both my Canon and iPhone cameras.

If viewing this in an email, please click the post title to see other photos in this post, thank you.

Winter Walk Soundscape – Reviewing the Week

Crossing the dam at Lower Lliw Reservoir ends my walk this week. I have made a selection of the photos posted through the week which you could view while listening to a short soundscape of the walk. The full production video for this walk is about twice the length at nine minutes and is a part of the StillWalks at Lliw collection.

The StillWalks at Lliw collection is available here to buy as a download or on disc.

Lliw Lower Reservoir

Lliw Reservoir Soundscape

If viewing this in an email, to see the sound player you will need to visit the blog – please click the post title to view the full post.

Tree and Lake

Two alternative crops of one of the images from the StillWalks video “Winter Lakeside Walk” (see below).

tree and lake

tree and lake

Crop Rotation

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