After a bit of reorganisation, it seems the peoples photography exhibition is on again in Dublin this year. It also seems it’s already sold out!

I’m reliably informed that Dermot has booked a place for me along with him and his sister. So if you’re in Dublin over the weekend of the 29th and 30th August, look us up.

All I need to do now is work out which images I’ve taken in the last year that are worth displaying, get them printed (if necessary), mounted, arrange a hanging structure, book a hotel for the weekend, buy all the clips and ties and strings I’m likely to need…

No rush, plenty of time…

I mentioned I was in Galway this week. Well, the weather was a bust from a photography perspective – and I was in a grump anyway.

Sometimes it’s better I don’t pick up the camera.

Anyway, as I was checking out of the hotel yesterday morning, they were getting ready for a wedding party later that day. The manager was putting flowers into a vase, and while she was running through payment I decided to see if I could take a shot of one of the flowers on the hop.

I think its a Chrysanthemum, but I know as much about flora as I know  about fauna so…

Anyway. The lighting in the room sucked, so since flash and off camera cord were to hand, I tried a little unusual lighting by illuminating it from below and just left of the camera.

Considering I had all of two minutes to grab the shot before going to work, I quite like it.

Firstly, sorry for the delay in following the colour challenge up. I’ve been away most of the week in Galway on business. Twas very wet and dull.

Oh, and there was work to do.

Anyway…..Colour.

I ended up with 5 entries for the game and a 6th arriving after the judging was finished. It’s about the number I’d hoped for given this site is only really followed by friends and a few others. (What, you thought millions of people read my drivel???)

The five shots submitted were:

1. Colour – Stuart

2. Dahlia – Darrell

3. Paint Pots – Paul

4. Poppy - Gordon

5. Shoe Maker - Dermot

All in all, some nice pictures.

After voting the paint pots picture won. I was lucky enough to have taken this. I’ll post some details on taking the shot in a subsequent post.

I’d just like to thank everyone for taking part. Hopefully you found it as interesting a challenge as I did.

If people are up for it, we’ll start the game again in a few days. One of this months contributors has suggested we spice it up a little by not only submitting pictures, but by trying to match the image to the submitter…

(All pictures above are copyright their respective owners and are produced here with their permission (I hope!). )

No, this isn’t some sort of “…every Friday night, by the light of the moon…” confession.

So, what do you do when you want to try portrait photography. And macro photography. And it’s Friday and you’ve had a glass of wine. And there’s a good show on TV but it’s an add break. And your camera is sitting beside you?

Yup. you take pictures of your kids Barbie doll.

(f/16, 100mm, 1/125sec, ISO-200)

This was shot using my 400D with a Canon F2.8 100mm macro lens. Lighting was supplied by the pop up flash.

Some post processing was applied, including a little curves, some exposure highlighting of the left eye and a tweak to colours using LAB colour mode (applying an adjustment to the Lightness channel).

Anyway. It’s Friday night, the moons in the sky…

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!