isle of Man 2018
- Monty_Creates
- Jul 18, 2018
- 6 min read
Escaping the family holiday to capture the island in it's (rarely) sun drenched beauty.
I'll be the first to admit I've been putting off doing this blog post because I didn't know how to handle the scale of it.
I was on the Isle of Man to visit the family I have there for 10 days; being the picturesque piece of geology that it is, I had plenty of opportunities to take (literally thousands) of images but processing all of those photos left me with little to no time to work on the blog as I went. More than that, I'm still learning how to make these blog posts so that they're engaging and I'm happy with the quality. All that to say I came home from my trip with a mountain of photos I'm really happy with and a mental block on how to put them into a blog.
In all honesty making a chronological retell of my trip would be far too long to read and too tedious for me to make. Instead here are a handful of my favourite pictures and the story behind them.
This first picture was one of the first photos that I took on the island. After spending a day seeing family in Ramsey (North-East of the island) we drove back over the mountain road to where we we stayed for the duration of the trip, with my Mum's cousin in Douglas (South-East of the island), its a trip we'd make pretty much every day. Whilst we were driving on the tops of the hills we were greeted by a this amazing golden light. We decided to stop at the mountain box (fans of the Manx TT motorcycle race might recognise this spot) and I snapped away.
I think I had recently seen another photographer talking about shooting into the sun and over exposing to get this warm creamy light in back lit portrait shoots so I tried the same by framing these sheep with the foliage on the ground and over exposing to blow out the sky with golden light.
This picture is one of my favourites and I think to this day, most liked Instagram post. I started to take a time lapse of the sun setting with my camera but then decided that I didn't like the framing and to be honest I didn't have anything to do with the time lapse. Instead I crept closer to the waves and experimented with framing differently, focusing on the water, focusing on things like a lump of seaweed, till I managed to take this shot of the tiny waves hitting the pebbles by resting my camera directly on the sand an firing away in burst mode.
I think the reason why I like this picture so much is because of how it's a relatively simple photo but there's details everywhere. There's the soft transitions in the colour in the setting sky, the glassy surface of the sea is reflecting the sky but broken up by the rippling waves and the same with the wet stones, its all soft and calming. Then the calm is contrasted by the crashing wave sending drops of water into the air. A side point is that the sky was more orange, I edited the photo to make the sky more of a soft pink to mach the mood of the image.
Another shot taken from the mountain road coming back from Ramsey. Probably the most dramatic sunset of the trip because of all the cloud on this day but it was still clear enough to see all the way to Scotland on the horizon! I was using a long telephoto lens to photograph this sunset and I found it amusing how dramatic the light changed as I panned across the horizon. This shot looks to the left of where I was standing so you can clearly see that only the sky is lit by the sun still, looking into the sunset gave a rich golden view reflecting off the sea and sky as the sun hovered just above the horizon and finally to the right, you could see Ramsey was lit with a soft pink light. Like I said, quite spectacular.
I call it the Manx Savannah because the two slightly bare at the bottom trees in the bottom left and the colours in the sky remind me of the Lion King. Similar to the Ballaugh sunset I really like how the composition is simple yet highly detailed, the two trees are what really caught my eye so I framed them with the clouds above to end up with what you see, the outline of Scotland was a bonus when I got the files back on my computer.
There were too many great photos from this trip to go into detail about but if you want to know more about any of the photos in the gallery below leave a comment, send me a message or have a look on my Instagram (@monty_creates). I'm still working on the store for my website but if one of my photos catch your eye, send me an email to see what I can arrange.
I didn't have many opportunities to go off on photo missions this year so most of these shots were incidental to being somewhere with or coming to/from visiting family but even so I'm very pleased with a lot of the pictures I took. Maybe next year I'll plan ahead more and go on proper missions.
This next bit is about camera tech so stop now if that's not your interest.
Now of course gear doesn't matter, you can take a good photo with pretty much anything these days but it is still sometimes interesting to see what people use. So here's all the photographic gear I took with me to the island, it may look like a lot but it all packed into a small bag (excluding the tripod).
Quick list of everything working from the left and down:
>Olympus trip 35 film camera - with only one roll of film
>Olympus OMD E-M5 Mark II - my main camera
>Lenses for the E-M5 - Tamron 10-24mm, Olympus 12-50mm, Olympus 40-150mm and Lumix 20mm F1.7 pancake lens
> Extended grip for the E-M5 - Didn't need it most of the time but I brought it for extra comfort when shooting the 80th birthday party
>Lens blower thing to clean the sand/dust off my gear
>GoPro Hero 4 - for taking photos in the sea and getting some POV mountain bike video (chest mount not pictured)
>Floating grip for the GoPro
>Extra memory cards in a protective case
>Small tripod
>Big tripod on the far left
> Not shown is my Samsung Galaxy S8 phone, a handful of spare batteries and their chargers, as well as my laptop to edit the photos
A big surprise from the trip came from a chat on the beach about my photography to a relative. Being very enthusiastic about my career he went home and dug out his DSLR that he hadn't used in years and handed it to me the next day wanting nothing in return. Of course I was blown away at his generosity so I put it to use that same day at my Mum's Aunt's 80th birthday party that we were both attending and I was photographing.
The Canon 50D is about 10 years old now and I can tell what a couple of years of improvements in technology has done for my Olympus but people shouldn't be put off old cameras because it still takes great photos. Alright it hasn't got the best dynamic range, it's "only" a 15.1MP sensor and it doesn't even have a movie mode (more on that later); however, a lot of the photos in the gallery above are taken using this camera and I've been more than happy with the results, happy enough for me to now be using it as a second camera on shoots.
Reasons why this is still a good camera:
>It's built like a brick - yes it is a bit heavy but it is one solid bit of kit that'll shrug off whatever the weather throws at it (or whatever you throw it at)
>Fast, accurate auto focus - only on 9 points and when not in live view but this is why it will make a good photo camera when my Olympus is being used for video
>It looks professional - looks can be a big thing for first impressions and admittedly my tiny Olympus doesn't scream professional even if the results do
>It feels good - sounds odd but there's something about holding a big chunky camera that just feels right, although it's not enough to convert me back to DSLRs as a primary camera though.
>You can actually shoot video - I know I said it doesn't but the smart people over at Magic Lantern (magiclantern.fm) have made a hack that you can install to shoot RAW video using this camera and a fast CF card. You won't have auto focus or audio but manually focusing and using an external audio recorder can get you some stunning results and I'll be experimenting with this more in the future.
I really like how small and light MFT (Micro Four Thirds) cameras (like my Olympus) are and I intend to stick with investing in that system for the future so I don't think I'll be converting back to DSLRs but who knows, maybe I'll be convinced to keep the two systems for different purposes.
Let me know if you want to see a comparison of MFT /Mirrorless to DSLR cameras and get my thoughts on both, I could even weigh in on film SLRs too.
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