I’m led to believe this is the tallest building in Ireland. I suspect we’re still a little behind New York.

Last weekend we went to the Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh.

It being the 4th July, the crowds were mad. I took a few shots, but the weather and the crowds didn’t really help.

Last night was the first CPA outing for 2010. A trip to St. Malachys church in Belfast was organised

We got about 2 and a half hours in the church by ourselves to take photographs of the wonderful architecture and imagery. It’s a fantastic place and worth a visit whether you’re religious or not.

Unfortunately, extreme bad timing meant there was some repair work ongoing and part of the alter had scaffolding on it. This got me thinking about the detail though, so most of the night was spent with a macro lens.

Anyway, this is one of a few wider shots I took. Thanks to Frank for sitting still!

Learned a useful lesson last night. Don’t just check your camera and batteries before you leave the house. Check ALL the gear you’re bringing. I was setting up a shot and lost maybe 20 minutes and a several handfuls of hair before discovering one of my remote triggers was receiving signal from the camera but not actually triggering the flash.

I’m playing with a new add on for Photoshop (Well, new to me anyway).

I’ll put a write up about my thoughts with it later in the week, but I wanted to throw up an image now so I could look at it in the cold light of day and see what I think.

Sometimes with these things I can get a little target blind, seeing only what I want to see, not the actual picture as a whole. It’s good to reflect a little.

Anyway, this picture was originally taken in December 2007. It’s always been on my pile of “I wish it was better…”, it seemed like a good sample image for the new utility.

I’ve mentioned before that I love architecture in black and white. I think the lines are much more pronounced and the resulting image crisper in mono. Certainly, any I’ve taken always seem nicer when converted that way.

(f/8, 10mm, 1/6 sec)

This is one of those shots that’s maybe too wide. The distortion due to the 10mm range of the lens really emphasises the curves present in the building* but I quite liked it, or at least everything but the colours.

It ended up taking quite a long route in its journey to black and white, firstly converted to HDR and then pushed through photoshop using the Calculations tool. A little more curves and the unsharp mask later and…

In case you’re wondering, the original looked like this:

And no, I don’t like the colour.

*Victoria Square in Belfast is quite a new complex and quickly becoming one of my favourite places to visit. It gives space freely and the resultant openness means you never feel claustrophobic.

If you’re interested in the same structure from a different angle, Nothingtobesaid shot this a year or two ago.

I’m slowly getting sucked into the world of Twitter.

What’s that got to do with photography you ask?

Well, honestly, it has nothing to do with photography. And kind of everything as well.

Anyway, ignoring the how’s and why’s of Twitter, in my last post I mentioned the image from Mount Stewart  that was on the “how do I fix that” pile. Well, I was fiddling with it on Sunday and having an absolute nightmare with the sky being burned out.

(Short aside – shooting at twilight is great, unless it’s a blue sky day, then I find it really easy to burn out the sky when trying to capture the detail of the scene)

Anyway ,(sorry, lots of asides tonight), I was messing with the image and happened to twit/tweet/twiwhatever about the problem and a nice guy by the name of Sean replied offering his help.

I sent him the image(s) and he took a look at them and came up with a good recovery of the picture. He explains it in detail here.

I quite like his recovery – He seems to have kept more detail int he image, whilst recovering the sky.

Here’s my best attempt -

It’s not initially obvious in this version, but there is a lot of fringing or halo type effects going on where my masking isn’t up to scratch. Also, because I used an underexposed shot for this, there is a lot of noise when the image was recovered.

But apart from my mediocre masking, here’s the process I applied to get here.

Since I new the image would always end up as black and white (I seem to have a thing for architectural black and white shots) the first thing I did was convert the most underexposed version of the shot that I had. I created a duplicate layer of this and then increased the brightness on it before masking the sky through from the original.

The image was then flattened and shadows and highlights applied (Scott Kelby has done a major job convincing me this is a great thing in CS3 and, dammit, he’s right). Then a touch of localised dodging to bring the window back in got me as far as I could take it.

I guess the over-riding lesson is – get it right on the night and you’ll not have to spend your Sunday trying to fix stupid mistakes. Of course, if I’d got it right first time, I wouldn’t have got chatting with Sean.

Oh, and if you twit/tweet/twoot/twype, then this is me!

There were two windows in the little tower.

I wasn’t as happy with the shot of the second window as I was with the first.

I think the major issue I had with this shot is the burned out spot on the window itself. Lesson learned – diffusers are your friend.

This is number 2 of three images of the tower I have. The third is currently on my “how do I fix that” pile. (More on this later in the week…. probably).

There’s been a fair bit of post processing here.

I created three duplicate smart objects in CS3. One exposed for the window, one for the wall and hedge and one for the sky.

These were then blended through before being flattened and converted to black and white using a gradient filter. The filters opacity was reduced to give that washed out feel and a mask was used to retain the window.

Then it was (maybe over) sharpened.

I quite liked the result.

Apart from the burned out bit. :(

Now that the late evenings have arrived, the camera club has organised a series of expeditions rather than locking us in a room in the heat.

It’s a good opportunity to get out and see how other people approach problems. And no matter how new you are to photography, you might just come up with a nice idea for a shot.

Tuesday night past saw a gang of us descend on Mount Stewart. Some fancy talking had arranged for us to have access to the gardens after their usual closing time so we were alone in the grounds for a few hours. Even better, we had some fantastic weather to shoot in.

During our ramble a bunch of us came across this tower like structure beside a path.

Because it was getting late, it was impossible to pick up the detail of the stained glass, but a little lateral thinking got this:

By planning ahead (or by forgetting to lift them out of my bag), I’d brought a selection of ebay triggers and light sensors for flashguns. One of the guys was able to go into the room and hold the triggers at the window, allowing us to fire them remotely from outside.

I was pretty amazed at the effect (and the dexterity of the guy holding two flash guns, an extension cord and a trigger and getting a decent even light from inside the (very dark) room).

I felt the stone work in the finished image was a little dark and since I really like stone work of this type in black and white, decided to see how the shot looked with some selective colourisation. There’ll be those that prefer the one above, but I kinda like this.

My work is taking me to the west of Ireland from time to time. As a result, I’m seeing parts of the country that I’ve never really seen before. All I can say is when it comes to pretty views and interesting old castles/forts/churches they have more than their fair share.

I don’t know why, but these always look better in black and white to me.

Since Canada, I’ve tended to keep my camera close when I’m riving and know I can stop for a few moments here and there. Hence the Tassagh Viaduct shot a few weeks back and now this one. One thing I did at Tassagh and forgot to do here was take a quick shot of a nearby sign to give me an idea where it was.

So, if you want to visit this place, you need to take the road from Galway to Westport/Castlebar and keep an eye out your right window. Sorry I can’t be more specific!

Sometimes I think pieces of architecture suit black and white more than colour. I think so with this picture anyway, the original was flat and lifeless and any attempt to improve it left it feeling over contrasted (on this site, too much contrast? Never!).

However, I picked up a neat trick for B&W conversion a while back and it just made all the difference. And it’s really simple – just convert the image into “Lab Colour mode” in photoshop and then delete the channels you don’t want. You’re left with a crisp image.

A little (OK, a lot) of sharpening later and…

Not happy with this, but I’ve been sitting on it for a week or so and keep tweaking it. Rather than waste another week on it, I thought I’d post and ask for advice.

Maybe it’s just one of those “turd” shots. I still find it hard to be objective about my photographs and so spend hours lovingly crafting a waste of time – I know, if it’s fun it doesn’t really matter.