"I've a little challenge for you" he said...

"for the next week (or even 10 days), go out and take a picture, just one, and that one has to be the best of all the many other photos that you could have taken. Don’t crop it, edit it or enhance it in any way. The photos can be of anything at all, as long as you take one and only one each day."

 

Dermot had finally pulled together his proofs from our trip to the North Coast and after seeing them I was feeling a bit down. It's hard to find a good excuse as to why your photos aren't great and it gets harder when you lose the obvious "sure, he had better weather" or the best selling "I could have taken that if I'd been there". I was left with the classic "His toys are better than mine" and the self effacing "I suck bigtime" (copyright 'Yerman', 2008).

 

So, in an effort to help me focus (Lord I may suck at photography, but I'm the pun master!) on what I'd learned and to give me a short term goal, Dermot set me the shot a day challenge.

 

I accepted.

 

I may have been mad, and I quickly had to follow it up with some caveats about still being allowed to snap my family and make use of the camera for the purpose of the macro project (the close up filters have arrived).

But apart from that, I'm allowed one shot.

In an effort to make it really interesting I've decided on a few other terms. I'm only going to use the camera and kit lens. I'm also going to make use of the manual function. I'll also try to explain here exactly what I wanted to achieve and an honest assessment of whether I did or didn't. Feel free to comment.

 

Day 1

I guess a lot of these shots are going to be around the house. I can't see me travelling 30 miles for a sunset when I have just one chance to get it right. I also can't see my missus and kid being too happy if I head out every night. (Though, they might like the peace and quiet).

(F/5.6, 1/100sec, 55mm, ISO-200, 23/05/08)

The idea was to pick out this cluster of flowers and throw as much of the rest of the background bush out of focus as possible.  What I wanted to achieve was just a simple shot of some flowers.

I think it would have worked better if I'd gotten closer to the flowers I wanted to help throw the DOF a little more. I also think it would have been better if I'd isolated the flowers more, maybe tried to lift them out of the image by removing or adjusting the flowers directly behind the front set. In the end, I think it's probably too noisy with not enough area for the eye to settle on if that makes sense?

 

Comments?

It was just pointed out to me that there might not be an obvious email address to actually send entries to.

All I can say is 'ooops'.

Please send them to

paul<at>learningtosnap.com

Needless to say the <at> should be an @...

I've taken to carrying my camera when we go out at weekends. The little Slingshot bag I used (yep, papa's got -another- brand new bag. More on this later) was really handy for just tossing in the car or over the back of a pram.

Anyway, last weekend we were visiting some good friends for an impromptu BBQ and I noticed some excellent weathering on one of the patio chairs, so proceeded to snap.

Unusually, the original image from the camera was very constrasty and looked awful when I uploaded it (OK, it looking awful wasn't unusual but normally they look flat and awful). But I wanted to do something with the picture and felt it might look better in black and white. It's kind of ended up as something inbetween, but I do like the faded, weathered feel of it.

(f/4.0, 1/400sec, 50mm, ISO-100, 18/05/08)

For me, what's important about this image is the lines. I wanted to show the way the weather beaten lines are bracketed by the varnished areas - the back struts of the chair providing protection. I'm not entirely convinced I ended up with that.

I chose the angle for the shot to give it more of a 3 dimensional feel. The struts when shot stright on didn't seem 'interesting'. I also chose a small f-stop to try to keep the background out of focus as well as allow the struts to fall slightly into and out of focus.

What I'm trying to do at the minute is understand what I'm taking before I take it and to make a conscious decision about what I want to achieve. "ooh, pretty" isn't really getting me good pictures, so I need to get to "ooh, pretty... Because..." and that means thinking more I guess. Geoff's comment on the boat pictures a few days ago kind of brought this home and made me realise I was too busy playing with photoshop to actually ask what I wanted to show in the picture.

This picture is one of a few where I'd actually done that before pressing the button.

I NEED one of these.

OK.

I want one of those.

A lot.

Sadly, they cost many of your earth pounds and so I'm going to have to save and buy one later. So, in the absence of sponsorship from Canon (Mr Canon, if you're reading I am still open to offers), I decided to try something a bit different. Andrew suggested a reversal ring, and after convincing me it wasn't some sort of weird proposition and it wouldn't hurt I looked them up.

Essentially you use a little adapter ring to mount your lens on your camera backwards. The reversal ring comes with the appropriate lens mount for your camera plus a thread of your choice. I'm not sure I understand the physics of it, but essentially it allows near 1:1 (macro scale) image capture depending on the lens you use.

You can pick one up on Ebay for about a tenner.

Well, since it was cheap and a bit of a giggle I picked one up and had a play. The version I bought had a 52mm thread on  it to fit my 50mm F/1.8 lens. Honestly, the only reason I picked this one was because it was to hand when I did the ordering. The ring (with appropriate thread size) will work fine on the kit lens as well I reckon.

Here's some results.

 

None of these shots have been tweaked in any particular way in order to show you straight out of the camera what I achieved in about 5 minutes. There has been no cropping at all!

For the cost of a pizza (I'm a big lad, I like my pizzas man-size), it's a nice toy and there are only two real downsides that I've seen with it.

1. You have to live in manual world. you lose the connection to your lens when its reversed so the aperture just defaults to whatever the lens rests at and can't be adjusted that I could see. You'll need to set shutter speed manually, though at least the exposure meter on my 400D kept working which helped a lot.

2. You have to focus manually. Now this doesn't sound that bad, but look at those shots above again. Depth of field is razor thin, and I mean razor. You're probably playing with millimetres in focus and given the lens is mounted backwards it can be tough to do any adjustment. I found it was simplest to just move camera (and head) backwards and forwards.

 

OK, lets be honest. this is never going to replace a dedicated macro lens (and Mr Canon, if you are reading I'd love a loan of the 100mm one mentioned above). But, if you want something different to try it's not a bad way to spend ten quid and an afternoon. I've put it in my kit bag. You just never know...

I purchased my camera and started this blog in earnest in July last year. A year seems to have flown past and hopefully I've shown a lot of what I've learned about photography. I know I've hosted a lot of images and had a surprising number of visitors to this blog.

In order to celebrate a year of blogdom and camera fun I thought it might be nice to have a challenge.

The aim of the game is to take the following image and make it 'better' using any post processing tools you have at your disposal. Be it Photoshop or Picasa, GIMP or Paint Shop Pro, even the online tools I discussed here are allowed. When you've finished, email me the image and I'll host all the finished work in a gallery for review. I'll even arrange an independent judge to pick the best one.

To make it interesting, and as a thank-you to all the people who've visited over the last year, I'll donate a £10 Amazon voucher to the winner. I know it's not going to change your life, but hey...

Closing date for entries will be the 30th June and I'll post the gallery and winner as soon after that as feasible.

So! What are you waiting for?

 

...oh, yeah, the image...

 

The full size jpeg can be found here.

The full size raw (.dng) file can be found here.

(You might want to use right-click then save link as...)

 

 

The small print.

I'm not sure if we need much in the way of formalised rules here, but just in case...

1. No more than 2 entries per person. The competition is open to everyone

2. All entries should have a valid email address associated with them

3. Submitted pictures should be composed of the above image (no substituting my digger picture for some random blonde, Jon)

4. The judges decision is final

5. The £10 Amazon voucher can be made available in different currencies as required

EDIT (21/05/08)

The link for the .dng file should now work.

When is enough enough?

I never know when to finish with the post processing of an image and when to just call it a day step back from Photoshop or GIMP or any of the other tools I've used recently.

Here's a good example.

(F/4, 1/200sec, 70mm, ISO-400, 03/05/2008)

 

This shot has been pushed through the Photoshop mill a reasonable amount. Curves, a slight cooling filter and a few other tweaks have been applied to make give it a bit more life. The original isn't worth posting, it's very dull and lifeless (to be honest I wouldn't even have looked twice at this if it wasn't for my weird emotional connection to this boat).

Now, I quite liked this shot and figured it was as close to OK as I could make it...

 

Then I loaded it into Dynamic Photo-HDR (the tool I use for all my HDR shots) and ended up with this.

 

So, here's the thing. Was it a step too far?

 

I like the water, I like the colours. I know it breaks my own opinion on HDR needing to look 'real' to look 'good', but apart from that I'm damned if I can decide which I prefer.

 

Maybe they both suck.

Last year sometime I mentioned Chromasia as a good place to see amazing photographs.

Well, around the time I bought my camera, the folks at Chromasia started offering some photoshop tutorials for sale. I've been debating buying for a while and last week cracked.

They're very comprehensive and easy to follow. The results speak for themselves when you look at their before and after pictures. Hopefully, some of the things I've been learning have started to appear in some of the recent pictures I've posted as well (certainly the foot steps picture was haveily influenced by some of the tutorials).

You can buy individual tutorials for about a fiver, annual subscriptions and lifetime subscriptions are £25 and £75 at the moment. To my mind they're well worth a small investment.

There's also a sample one available which looks at Tonal Range and Curves

You can find the tutorials below or by using the handy link I've added on the right menu.

Photoshop tutorials by chromasia

Another HDR shot from a week or so ago.

Nothing major to say about this, except that trying to keep orange life rings from glowing when making an HDR image is a pain in the...

Sorry, normal service will resume when it's not so hot or when I stop being basted in my own juices.

In the meantime, I went to the zoo.

 

(F/5.6, 1/200sec, 200mm, ISO-100, 10/05/2008)

Just a crop to make it portrait not landscape and a tweak to curves - it's too nice a day to be sitting in here doing anything else...