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  The walk up the steps seemed longer in the dark. Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, I lifted my head and stars filled my vision. I refocused on my destination, the black shape of the tower at the top of the hill. I took a deep breath before continuing the long climb up the stone steps, my eyes dropping back down to my feet. I wasn’t expecting it to be so quiet up here. Faint sounds still made their way up the hill from the town behind me, but even they seemed to be getting more distant...

I recently acquired an infra-red converted camera, something I had been looking at for the past couple of years. All digital DSLRs are fitted with an ultra-violet/infra-red filter over the sensor, cutting out unwanted light. The conversion removes this filter, and replaces it with an infra-red filter, which allows infra-red light at only a certain frequency to pass through to the sensor, while cutting out all other light. The conversion I chose is a 720nm filter, making it ideal for black and white photography with fantastic contrast, as seen in the image above. The tree is found on the banks...

Making the most of the Winter Blue Hours   Winter can be a difficult time to photograph, with the colder temperatures, later sunrises, and the general winter blues, but it is often well worth pursuing. I regularly find the sunrises and sunsets to be spectacular, with weather fronts moving through the Channel. I also love the fact the sun rises and sets further south, giving a fantastic backdrop to the lighthouse and Harbour Arm in Folkestone at dawn, and sets over the coastline stretching towards Dungeness in the evening. From about March to October, I need to travel a little...

There are three main elements that come into consideration when I decide on what exposure to use for an image, the shutter speed, the aperture, and the ISO. In this article I'll move away from physical equipment, and discuss exposure, and the elements that make up how I decide what to use in any situation. I'll focus on the shutter for now, as the full exposure subject is so vast, it needs to be broken down into the various components. So what is a shutter, and how do shutter speeds influence how an image is taken? Much as I'd like to...