I'd big plans this weekend. Initially it looked like a trip to Donegal was on the cards and that meant some good opportunity to shoot coastal scenery. Then when baba got sick, it looked like a weekend in the house and a chance to shoot local scenery...

Then the weather happened. Maybe I'm a fair weather photographer, but I don't do cold or rain. I especially don't do cold and rain. So I stayed home and lit the fire instead.

 

(1/13, f/5, focal length - 44mm, ISO - 400, 01/12/07 21:43)

 

The challenge here was to get the shot before the lens started to heat up. I've no idea what the tolerance on these things are and I wasn't about to find out.

The shot hasn't been cropped, but has had some 'burning' (I know, I know) performed to intensify the coals and glow under the log.

For those of you who're interested. I'm hoping to do get out on a Christmas in Belfast jaunt sometime after the 14th. Let me know if you're up for it.

 

(Oh, this was posted with Live Writer, sorry if the fonts and things are different than normal...)

"Shoot for the moon and if you miss you'll be among the stars" - Les Brown

"Poetic, the stuff of romance and mystery. A bugger to capture on picture" - Learningtosnap

During the night shooting trip a few weeks back, one of the things I tried and failed to do was to include the moon in a picture. Now, you’d think a big, reasonably static lump of “space stuff” wouldn’t be that hard to picture, but damned if I could get it.

I tried again last night.

 

I still couldn’t get it.

 

In despair I used google and found an interesting web site talking about how to shoot the moon. Seems I’d been making a few simple mistakes.

1. Autofocus doesn’t. Because the moon is bright and the sky is dark the camera will over compensate and you’ll get that shiny nonsense.
2. Actually trying to zoom in on the moon using a lens is much better than trying to pull the detail out with crops later

 Sounds simple doesn’t it?

 

Well, I went outside and tried again. The results this time were much better.

The first shot is of an un-cropped, un-tampered moon and the second is post manipulation to tweak the crop and the colour thresholds etc.

 

(1/100, f/16, manual, focal length - 200mm, ISO - 100, 25/11/07 23:50)

 

 (1/100, f/16, manual, focal length - 200mm, ISO - 100, 25/11/07 23:50)

 
There are still a few issues with this, mostly because I couldn’t get the tripod to the angle I needed for the shot and so wasn’t stable as I would have liked. The image is also a little on the soft side I think (which might be down to the lens being at its outer end). I’ll try this again in weeks to come.

 

Anyone else tried this or have suggestions?

I’m going to be away for a few days this week and, having just packed my bag, I made the executive decision not to take my camera.

I’d always planned that it would become part of my standard kit, but I’m guessing an industrial estate in Staines isn’t likely to give me a lot of time or opportunity to take good photo. I have packed my current photo read though, so expect a review of it when I get back.

In the meantime, since there are flowers in the house at the moment…

 

 (1/400, f/2.2, manual, focal length - 50mm, ISO - 800, 18/11/07 13:33)

 This was taken with the canon 1.8 lens that I’m playing with at the moment. It’s taken a while, but I think the whole aperture thing is finally sinking in and I’m finally getting away from the “must use extremes” approach that’d I’d defaulted to on this lens.

In terms of post processing, this shot is based from the raw image with the white balance (left on auto on the camera) changed to auto using Lightroom. You’d think this wouldn’t make a difference, but surprisingly it does. Geoff mentioned a few posts back in some comments that the cameras all use their own algorithms to decide on colours etc, and he’s right. Take a look at the original below.

 

I’ve also cropped the image to push the rose out towards the top right corner. There is a whole theory about this in the various magazines and books and I’ll try to explain this sometime soon in “snap speak”.

I'm quite concious that all photographs are subjective and that people will prefer the second over the first (or just hate them both). for me, I feel the first one draws you in more and maybe gives a softer feel - course I'm an IT geek, so what would I know about flowers...

One final thing... Having just grabbed the camera settings for this shot I look in horror at the ISO figure. Once again I’ve fallen foul of a night of messing - ISO 800 was not intentional!

I finally got out last night to try something I’d been planning for a while.

So, if you were “exceeding speed guidelines” on the M1 last night and saw someone standing on a bridge with a fluorescent jacket and a tripod mounted device, don’t panic – it was just me and my Canon*

What I was specifically out to try was playing with the manual and shutter speed settings of the camera. Up until now (with the exception of a disastrous day at a RCC race), I’d purely used the aperture speed setup (or automatic) on the camera. But, since seeing them on the web and in DSLR magazines I’d wanted to try my hand at those “Rivers of Light” shots.

I found this to be very much a case of trial and error. After getting the camera rigged up on the bridge, I played with a series of settings and shutter speeds ranging from 1/250 up to about 30 seconds and briefly into bulb mode (oooh look at me).

At 1/250 my picture of the black object in the black night surrounded by black stuff was…erm….very dark.
 

At 27 seconds, things were much prettier…

(27secs, f/8, manual, focal length - 24mm, ISO - 100, 13/11/07 18:40)

Interestingly, I also tried the same shot using aperture priority and it came out like this after 30 seconds (camera set) exposure.

(30secs, f/8, manual, focal length - 24mm, ISO - 100, 13/11/07 18:43)

It’s noticeably darker (to me anyway). This confused me briefly until I realised that all the light in the shot is provided by the traffic and as a result completely dependent on the number of cars, the brightness of their lights and the speed of their travel. 

If you live near a bridge or busy road, this is a good experiment to try yourself. Though, I warn you – you will look like a loon running backwards and forwards trying to see how much traffic is coming and when to press the button!

 

*Though the least you could have done was waved hello.

So, its been a little quiet over the last few days/weeks.

There is a reason for this. I don't want this place to turn into one of those "waffle" stops that are so common in bloggerville. I decided when I started this journey that "if I'd nothing to say, I'd just say nothing".

So.

I'm just saying you know.


Oh, and on an unrelated note and the real reason for this post. I'm planning to get out over the weekend with the camera and take some photos using shutter priority to try to get "artistic" blurring effects.

Rather than just turn up next week with some shots, I thought I'd offer up the idea to everyone else. See who wants to give it a go too?

On a related note, I've started thinking about another 'trip/event' thing. Anyone interested?

I've finally managed to get the gallery part of the main site up and running.

It's making use of iWebAlbum which is a good, free, web album generator. Thanks to Shereen for pointing it out!

Go, take a look.


Go. Go now.

Run, don't stop.


Go!!!!


Oh, the link?

Oh alright then, here!

This is the last of the pictures of Belfast I took from the night shooting trip.

I've mentioned before that my camera can take both jpeg and raw pictures at the same time. To date I've been relying on the jpegs for posts here. There's never been a coherent reason for  this, just one of those things.

But, after the discussions about colour warmth I decided to take a look at the raw files generated and see if you really could do the whole white balance thing after the fact.

OK, so here's what I've found so far...

Most dSLR's have the ability to change the white balance of the shot as it's being taken. this is to allow you to compensate for the lighting conditions of the scene. For example, an indoor scenes can have a different cast from different artificial lighting setups. Equally, outside can have different lighting shades depending on the time of day/year.

...So they tell me...

Fortunately most cameras have the ability to handle white balance automatically. So I've ignored it.

However, if you use your raw files, your camera editing software and packages like Lightroom allow you to make some post processing changes. On eof these is the White Balance.

Here's some examples of this:

Automatic White Balance




Shade




Tungsten



Fluorescent



All these shots used the following settings:
(15secs, f/9, aperture priority, focal length - 28mm, ISO - 100, 24/10/07 18:51)


You can get some really nice effects playing with this.

If it was me, I'd leave the camera on Auto and leave any editing to the post processing stage.

I've been reading The Digital Photography Handbook by Doug Harman recently.



Working from the very basics, (What's a digital camera then Bob?), through so some of the more advanced shooting techniques including motion blur etc, it gives a good basic overview of the world of Digital Cameras. Once the basics are covered, there are a series of good sections covering post processing, these include simple things like getting your pictures from your camera right up into cloning and special effects.

All in all I found it a good little read. Maybe a little patronising at times, but given it's aimed at the likes of me who knows nothing maybe I shouldn't complain about the few times it told me stuff I already knew...

The pictures in the book are all in keeping with the theme and for the most part you left feeling as if you will be able to achieve them as well (unlike some of the other books I've seen).

My only complaint is that the tutorials all appear to be for Photoshop Elements, which is a pain if you're just getting into the hobby and don't want to splash out for it on top of the camera, lenses, batteries, bags, memory cards... For such a cheap and friendly little book, they would have done well to use something like GIMP as the basis for tutorials.

Still, when all is said and done. It's a good little read for beginners and at under a fiver it's good value too...

Just got an interesting comment from Gordon submitted against a post from a few weeks back when this site went live:

"Ok - Let's see if Paul is up to the challenge...

I'd like to get a new desktop image - I'm currently using Ascent but something more personable would be good. So here is the challenge to the man with the new site.

For my Christmas present I'd like a new image to replace Ascent as my desktop.
Key requirement: soothing on the eye and not garish apart from that it's up to you.
It can be manipulated / polarised or whatever I don't care about that.

I'm hard to please so it'll be interesting to see what you come up with.
A variety to choose from would be good.
Consider it your first commissioned piece."

This does seem like to good an opportunity to miss, and I like a challenge.

So, what do people think?

"Soothing to the eye and not too garish" is the key. That would make me think of landscapes or water or something quite abstract. I guess the danger with a landscape is making it seasonal (who wants to look at frost in June?). Water and sunsets or sunrises might work quite well I guess.

Another option would be to follow up Gordon's interests and see if there is anything he does which would make good picture?

Anyone any thoughts?

I think most everyone has thrown some pictures into the gallery at this point. I'm hoping Sean will share the film shots at some point in the future.

Some lovely photographs.

One interesting observation is the difference on colour warmth between Louises bridge picture and mine. Both were taken at roughly the same place and roughly the same time but the difference in colours are clearly visibile.

So, todays question. Why?

OK, we have different cameras (a Canon versus a Nikon) and I posted based on a jpeg whilst Louise used a raw, but surely the colours should still be close?



(I hope you don't mind me linking directly to your picture Louise!)