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.

I’ve been suspicious about the images I’ve put up here for a little while. I’ve noticed that from time to time that when I view them as prints or on other machines they sometimes look different.

It’s never bothered me that much up until now. It’s always been “close” and I haven’t regarded anything I’ve taken as being important enough to fret over.

However, it does detract from an image. And it drove me mad when I reviewed this image on a different machine

When looking at my monitor I didn’t see the black cast from the body and the panelling effect in the background. All I saw was black. It made  the birds head look like it was isolated and it was the effect I wanted.

When looking at it in work on a different system, it looked entirely different. Half finished.

It drove me to get a hold of a Spyder monitor calibration tool.

It’s early days. The change to my monitor has been quite severe – most notably the colour temperature. I’m going to  rework a few images and get them printed to see if they are closer to what I expect. But in the meantime, take a look at this and tell me if it’s better/worse and if the background looks more “black”

A few weeks ago I posted an idea for a game.

Well, a few people have contacted me to say they’d be interested, so lets give it a go.

First theme – Colour

Rules are pretty simple. you have until the 23rd of June to come up with 1 image on the above theme which you’ll submit via “submissions<at>learningtosnap.com”. I’ll make the images submitted available to the entrants on the 24th and you have until the 29th to vote for your favourite (only entrants can vote). Winner gets kudos and the right to pick the next theme.

why should you play? Let’s be honest, most people who read this blog are like me and learning to take photos. Having a theme to shoot to is a challenge – it can be hard to find something to fit a theme and it can be fun. go on! Give it a go!

Here’s hoping you’ll play!

(Oh, and if you want to photoshop – feel free.)

More beaches. More sunset. More…

I’m suspicious my monitor is set too dark based on some of these images I’ve been looking at on other pc’s. Plans are afoot to check this, so bear with me.

Yesterdays picture caused a bit of discussion over breakfast with some friends.

It all centred around when is a photograph no longer a photograph. Now, this is something I’ve spoken about here and I’m still pretty undecided myself. My current thinking is, it’s a photograph for as long as the photographer wants to call it one. There may be a better definition of it out there.

The question arose if the HDR was better than the original, or if its artificial adjustments made it something different but that it lost the appeal of the original.

I thought it might be interesting to share the three original images and let people make their own mind up. These are as imported from the camera.

I might come back to this at some point myself and see if I can produce something I like more using only one of these images.

I’ve been sitting on this picture for a while now. I knew I wanted to try and process it through HDR – even when taking it I took three exposures to give me the capacity.

I find shooting into a sunset like this incredibly difficult. The last rays of the sun either cause the shot to under-expose or leave the sky a horrid washed out white mess. Taking this as three exposures allowed me to find the best of each world, and whilst I normally wouldn’t go this extreme with HDR, I do like the finished result quite a bit.

The last three pictures I’ve posted have been processed in HDR and I think this is my favourite. It does give images a nice feel, although I’ll be the first to admit they do drift away from “what the eye saw”.

It’s typical that now the competition season is over in the club, I start producing pictures I’d like to use. Still, there’s always next year.

I feel I should confess my problem.

No. Not that I can’t take photographs – you know this already.

I feel I should confess my love for cheese.

Not the yellow, made from milk, type cheese, but the big hair retro “Disco Stu” cheese.

Which is why, even though this should have been consigned to the recycle bin as a drunken mistake, I decided to let you all see it.

I can’t help but feel it should be stitched or stencilled onto a T-Shirt or the back of a motorcycle jacket and sent back in time to the 1980’s.

I really need to try harder to manage my depth of field issues.

This is just a little shallow for me. Though I love the effect pushing it through an HDR process has had on it.

Original image was parsed through Dynamic-Photo HDR then had some small curves adjustments and a little sharpening applied to it.

The original image was shot at f/5.6 1/250 at 250mm. The wide aperture at such a zoom has left it a little too shallow. On review, it’s an issue I have with a few birds of prey pictures I took over the weekend.