This is the second shot of the rifle from the local gun club.

It only struck me when reviewing the images that I never actually took a shot with the entire gun in focus. There was no reason not to. It simply never crossed my mind. I've all manner of macro shots of the trigger, the stock, the barrel and lots of these shallow depth of field shots, but no single rifle shot.

I mentioned this to the owner of the gun and he just laughed. Apparently the single most common picture taken in those circles is of the entire rifle in focus and side on, so he's happy enough that I approached it from a different angle.

Still, the shot might have been nice...

I guess if you're going to shoot pictures of something you should take the obvious shots as well as the less obvious ones. You might regret it later...

 

(F/4, 1/2 sec, 50mm, ISO - 100, 31/03/2008)

Sorry it’s been so quiet lately. A few different things had cropped up and… well, you know how it is.

I’m always keen to try different types of photography and over the last few months have been lucky enough to try a lot of different things (portraits, street shots, landscapes, night photography, HDR, the list goes on). A lot of the opportunities have come about by talking with people about their hobbies, telling them about mine and generally trying to be a good bloke. It’s always worth asking friends with interesting hobbies if you can tag along, you might get a great photo or even a great new hobby too.

 

A few weeks back, I was lucky enough to be invited by a work friend to a local rifle club to take some pictures. It was an excellent experience and I’ll share some of those pictures here over the next few days. In the meantime, he has my thanks!

This is a cropped close up of the barrel of a rifle – I don’t have the details of the weapon to hand – they’re not really important in this context.

It’s a good example of the ‘beauty in the eye’ type thing. I like the shot for the shallow depth of field, the reflections and the little marks showing the gun has had some use. The friend who owns the gun immediately commented on the hexagonal pattern around the barrel. Where I saw a nice image, he saw abrasions proving the rifling is pretty accurate apart from maybe a small throw to one side.

(Oh, for those of you scanning my images for signs of sensor dirt – keep it up! But you’re wasting your time here (I hope!), this image would have had the dirty marks cropped out).

OK, so it’s been quiet all week after the flurry of photos from Easter. The plain and simple reason for this is that I spent several hours on Sunday trying to clean my camera.

Darrell noticed these odd spots in a photograph I’d published last week and correctly identified them as sensor dirt.



This sent me into a whole self loathing spiral.
I mean, I’m a good boy. I don’t fool around with other cameras, I don’t go into those sorts of shops, I always use protection and try to avoid exposing my sensitive bits in public…

But still, I’d picked something up.

Seems at some point when I’d been changing lenses a bit of pollutant had managed to sneak into the camera and that it was pretty well stuck as the sensor cleaning (some electro-static charge thing on my camera) wasn’t shifting it.

I asked Darrell some further questions about the issue and he pointed me here as well as providing me some good advice. It seems I could either clean it myself or pay someone to do it professionally.

Well, that sent me off to my local chain camera store to look for solutions. Whilst I’d prefer to have it done properly, the thought that it was something I could learn made me give it a go (that and I’m cheap. Hey! Nobody is sponsoring my camera madness and the amount I’ve spent recently…).

Firstly I purchased a Rocket Air Blower and tried that. The trick with using one of these is to set the sensor to manual clean then hold the camera upside down and blast air into the sensor area. This seemed to life a few little flecks which were sitting in the mount area – I’m guessing these had been kept of the lens by the electro-static sensor clean. But the artefacts on the lens lived on…

So, I resorted to a lens cleaning pen.

Now most photographers I spoke with went a bit green at this stage, you’ve been warned.

Basically you rub the lens pen around the sensor, making sure to get all the corners. Don’t rub too firmly, but at the same time make sure it’s not like getting touched by a rainbow. It’s best to make sure the camera is upside down to encourage the dirt to fall out.  Yep, that bit they say don't touch...

Well, it took a few attempts, but suffice to say I think I got the most of it. Do me a favour. If you disagree, don’t tell me!*

So, today’s lesson. To clean a camera.
1.    Hold or mount the camera upside down
2.    Set the camera to manual cleaning mode
3.    Realise the batteries are nearly flat and the camera will close the mirror before shutting down, so change the batteries and start again
4.    Try using an air blower first
5.    Try using a sensor pen, but be gentle!

Or

1.    Pay someone who knows what they're doing

I found the best way to test if the lens was clean was to take photographs of the white tiles in the bathroom. By looking closely I was able to track the marks and see when they were removed. Best bet is to set the camera to focus at infinity and make sure the picture is over exposed. A good uniform colour is what you need.

I’m almost frightened to post in case it’s not fixed. I'll post over the weekend and we can have a debate.

*Actually do tell me. Please.

Last picture of the pier in Dungloe for the time being. It's yet another thing on my list of "to try again" shots. Next time, hopefully with the classic sunset (and just a little bit warmer please).

I've been using a product called Dynamic Photo HDR for all these shots. Whilst possibly not as complete as Photomatix, it's pretty simple to use, gives good results and isn't out of the question at $39. Both products have demo versions available, so give them a go.

Having played a fair bit with HDR over the past week, it's another of those techniques that generates tripe and treacle. I'm not overly happy with some of the pictures I've ended up with, but the taste is there and I'll be back for more.

This is another composite image, created from an HDR tone map.  It's also had some level alterations made to the pier itself to make it a little brighter.

 

Oh and Darrell, you're right. There is crud on my lens. It was in this picture as well, before I cloned it out. I'll look into cleaning the camera and kit over the weekend. Good spot!

I just received the first copy of my new subscription to Digital Photo.

The few times I’ve picked this magazine up I’ve been very impressed by the quality of the articles and the accompanying CD is brilliant for tips and tricks.Having already subscribed to Digital SLR Photography (which I’m really happy with), I was in two minds about paying out another £60 for a different magazine.Then Geoff turned up with some interesting information.

Did you know that you can subscribe to Digital Photo using Tesco Clubcard Vouchers? No, neither did I.

Well, it seems you can. What’s more, an annual subscription costs £16.22. Yes, sixteen pounds, not sixty. OK, you don’t get the Lowepro bag, but if you’re actually into photography you probably have a bag alreaddy.

Only issue I have with it thus far is that it took a while for the first issue to arrive.

So, if you’re looking to expand your reading, and you have clubcard vouchers going spare, this might be the deal for you.

Oh, and on a related note. What’s the cover story on this months magazine? Landscapes and HDR. If only I’d had that handy over Easter. Still, every little helps… (do you see what I did there?)

I just recieved an interesting post from Stuart. He took the image of the posts in the water and changed the crop in it to remove the quay/pier thing, but at the same time he adjusted the aspect ratio.

Here, let me show you....





and the new cut




As he points out, he's moved the horizon to the lower third of the picture, rather than the middle. This gives more emphasis to the sky. The width of the picture also gives it a more 'landscape' feel - you know wide open spaces etc. His post has reminded me that I need to be a bit more planned in composition. I have a tendancy to always put the horizon about halfway, but that's not always the best is it?

From what I've been picking up, there are probably a few rules I should try to apply more often in landscape shots.

1. Always have something to give interest, draw your eye in and give a sense of scale.

2. Make use of the rule of thirds in the composition, placing things a third of the way horizontally and vertically in the picture will give it a sense of proportion and balance

3. Give your eye something to follow - a line of rocks, a path  - leading you into the picture

4. Consider what you're presenting in the image. If it's the sky, it probably needs the majority of the picture


I'm sure there are other rules or tricks. I know someone mentioned trying to include a bit of red...


In terms of cropping, I've always used roughly the aspect ratio of the camera for shots I've posted. Stuart has different opinions (as can be seen here in some examples). I'll have to try this out a little more myself.

Another of the shots from Donegal over Easter. This time, taken at a fly fishing pier close to Burtonport. The weather spent the entire weekend trying to annoy me.

Yes, it was a personal vendetta.

 

(1/25, F/20, 10mm, ISO-100, 22/03/2008)

 

This image has had some tonal mapping, similar to the previous couple of posts. Mostly just to give the water and the sky a bit more life. Interestingly, it's not composed from multiple images like the HDR posts, instead just using one exposure as the basis.

I like the eerie quality to it, though I'm not sure about the corner of the quay in the bottom left of the picture.

Oh, I've also decided to increase image sizes a little on the blog. Typically I used 300*200 for thumbnails and 800*533 for the proper upscale. I've changed it to something like 400*267 and 900*600 respectively. The odd numbers for height are down to the aspect ratio of the raw picture.

 

Waiting...

... for his ship to come in?

Actually, just waiting to see if the clouds will clear and give me some sort of sunset or if the storms will get that little bit prettier before the rain starts to fall again.

This is another of those tone mapped images using the HDR tool that I found. To be honest, it's pretty much what I would have tried to do manually anyway as the original pictures were either to dark or had the sky blown out.

And yes. This is the first time a 'person' appears in a photo on this blog. It's also the first time 'I' appear on the blog (told you there was a self portrait coming Dermot).

The power of the shutter timer is a glorious thing.

Yes, I is giant. I also wear very baggy jeans for some reason...

Like I said yesterday, I went out over Easter with the attitude that I would try some new things and experiment with some stuff I'd heard of over the past few months.

One of the things I did was to set my camera to do some auto exposure bracketing (AEB)*. For those that don't know, or got bored before that part of the manual (and who can blame you), AEB on your camera sets it up to take three photographs. The first is at the exposure you select, the second is under exposed and the third is over exposed. The amount of over and under exposure is up to you.

It's a useful facility for shooting landscapes and other static scenes and allows you to do things in post processing like tweak some levels or replace an over exposed sky (kind of the same way you might use an ND filter I guess). Whilst not a great example, the picture I took of the Rock of Cashel used the effect - basically the sky was cloned from an under-exposed version of the shot.

Anyhow, I took a range of pictures of a life buoy on Dungloe pier as I really liked the colour against the stormy sky.

The image I got was OK.

(1/15, F/4.5, 22mm, ISO - 100, 23/03/2008)

In itself, I guess the image isn't bad. It's probably better than stuff I took 6 months ago, and I'm happy enough with it. But as usual, I got to playing around and remembered a technique a bluegrass loving bloke I work with told me about called HDR.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a process which allows more tones in an image than would be usual. Essentially shadows are reduced and highlights less blown out... or something like that... Essentially it takes a range of exposures of the same image and mixes them up to produce an interesting composite. Here, let wikipedia explain....

Well, I pushed my three exposures of the life buoy through an HDR engine and got what I think is an interesting result. I'm actually kind of taken with it, so expect more HDR type images soon!

 

 

*For those of you with Canon 400D's and who can't be bothered reading the manual, the AEB setting is on the second menu tab. It's worth noting it resets every time you power off the camera, change a lens, etc etc etc... Also, it behaves differently when using remote or timed release of the shutter. It is worth playing with though...

 

Oh, and the astute will notice that the HDR image is number 1 and the original number 2. Nothing sneaky, just the sequence number that was added when I exported the pictures for upload..... Honest!

OK, it's a little late, but I've been away.

I spent the Easter break in Donegal with my wife and baba at her folks place. All in all, much relaxing and eating. God bless people who buy 2 year olds Easter Eggs, knowing full well it's daddy's responsibility to make sure they don't eat too much chocolate and that it doesn't go to waste...

More importantly, this trip was a great chance for me to plan some camera activities into my days. Whilst not all of them came off and most of the ones that did didn't work out, it was a valuable learning experience and I picked up or proved out some ideas. I'll post stuff over the next few days as I work through the 300 (yes, 300. That's 100 a day) photographs I took.

For now, Happy Easter.

 

(1/500, F2.2, 50mm, ISO-400, 22/3/2008)

 

(1/25, F1.8, 50mm, ISO-400, 22/3/2008)

 

(1/50, F2.8, 50mm, ISO-400, 22/3/2008)

 

The middle picture is a little soft, but I really liked the colour of the rose. I'm growing to like taking pictures of flowers, (flowers...growing... I crack me up, I really do). After spending an hour trying to photograph my daughter and her proving that the baby is quicker than the eye (or the camera), the lack of movement in the flower is a godsend.