One of the nice things about being out and about with a photography club is the availability of unwilling subjects to pose for shots!

Just a reminder that if you want to play, you need to submit your photos by Tuesday night.

All the details are here.

And remember – it’s just for fun so don’t feel it has to be the best photo ever seen. I don’t think mine is going to be up to much anyway!

I’ve read three Scott Kelby books recently. Two, I borrowed, which convinced me that I liked his style and his approach to Photoshop which led me to buy this one.

My first impression was one of disappointment. The first book I read (reviewed here) was quick and snappy – easy to pick up and grab a useful tip or snippet. This felt much harder to track, to find something from.

I’d almost discarded it when desperation (my daughter wanted me to watch Dora) made me pick it up and just read it.

When you actually start on page 1 and read from front to back (I tend to flick books from back to front for some reason), suddenly lights came on – it made sense!

Since then, it’s gone from being lost in a pile of magazines to my bible for post processing.

OK, there are sections in it I have no interest in – I’m not bothered about the best way to save an image for email for example. But for every wasted section, there are four or five which are really informative and provide good insight.

I’m currently stuck in the convert to black and white section – the tips and tricks here alone make the book worth the £18 or so I paid for it.

Here’s my latest B&W conversion (using Scott’s calculations, shadowing and sharpening guides)

And this is using Lightrooms default conversion

Remember, if you wanna play – Colour

Have taken the image I’m thinking of using.

Not sure if I’ll stick with it or take another…

Tuesday night was the second camera club outing of the year, and yet again we were blessed with blue skies and good weather.

Unless you were me.

Yet again I fell foul of the burned out skies problem.

Now, either there’s some magic to this that I haven’t worked out yet or the other photographers there found the joke very funny cause no one else was complaining!

I’m going to have to break out the books or the googles or something before next week.

One of the few shots from Tuesday that I actually liked was this grab shot of some barbed wire. I just liked how the flowers were ignoring it and growing regardless.

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.

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.)