November sort of flew by without much photography activity from me.  I think the fact that it was either raining or monsooning (that’s a word, no need to look it up) for 98% of the month put a damper (that’s right, I’m telling puns now) on my creativity.  I did manage to take a single, postable photo however so the month wasn’t a total bust.

It’s pretty close to straight out of the camera with the exception of a couple of minor adjustments.  The whole thing took about a hour to set up and then about 30-40 shots to get one where I liked how the ‘snow’ was falling.  I did a couple of these for my 365 last year and I’ve now got some new Lord of the Rings lego, so expect some Middle Earth themed shots soon.

Here’s the setup shot if you’re interested.

The softbox is essentially the main light, acting as the sun in the background.  I have a wonky homemade snoot on the inverted flash at the back to give me my round hot spot for the actual sun, and the big umbrella up front is just for fill.  I used some black foil for the mountains in the background and all of the snow is just baking powder (I used baking soda in the past, but I like the snowfall look of the powder better).

Anyway, that’s it for November.

I spent the day with Matt, Bonnie and Lord Crawley of Crawley roaming around London’s Wetland Trust shooting all things great and small.  Of particular interest in this meet were the small things.  Lee has managed to get a few people hooked on macro photography with his daily updates of creepy crawlies (no relation) he finds on his lunch break.

It’s been ages since I’d done anything fun with my macro lens and over a year since my last visit to the trust, so it seemed like a perfect way to spend a Sunday.

I’ll be perfectly honest…if it wasn’t for Lee spotting most of these interesting critters and pointing them out to me, this album would likely be full of dull close-ups of flowers.  As it is, there are only a few dull close-ups of flowers.

There are quite a few more in the gallery here.

I picked up a new toy for the upcoming winter months so I can keep shooting without having to go outside.  It’s a fairly simple set up with just a couple of flashes, but it’s got a lot of potential.  So far I’ve played around and helped Danni with a batch of charms as well as taking some shots of my new toys (a Dell laptop and a Wacom Cintiq 12WX).

There’s a few here, and some more in the gallery like always.