“You make me very angry...very angry..” – Marvin the Martian.

Life. That is. How dare it get in the way of me playing with cameras.

“Oh, I'm going to blow it up, it obstructs my view of Venus.“ – Marvin the Martian

There’s about 1 week left in the Daily Rituals challenge.

If you haven’t taken the photograph yet, its time to get those thinking caps on!

There’s a macro themed competition this year, so I’ve been trying to get the hang of macro photography. I guess the stereotype for the competition will be an inset shot and so I started out with those because I love stereotypes and it’s a decent way to practice focusing.

I ended up converting this to B&W as part of my messing about with the image and actually quite liked it.

I’d love it to be sharper though.

Been a while since I posted something just because it’s Friday…

If you hate HDR, look away now…

(I kind of expect this to turn up on one of those 50 images that prove HDR is evil sites….)

I’m playing with a new add on for Photoshop (Well, new to me anyway).

I’ll put a write up about my thoughts with it later in the week, but I wanted to throw up an image now so I could look at it in the cold light of day and see what I think.

Sometimes with these things I can get a little target blind, seeing only what I want to see, not the actual picture as a whole. It’s good to reflect a little.

Anyway, this picture was originally taken in December 2007. It’s always been on my pile of “I wish it was better…”, it seemed like a good sample image for the new utility.

I mentioned the pain I got through having to set up gear and then take it down every time I try to do something studio-esque. I think part of my frustration is that quite often the effort is wasted and I come away with nothing to show for it.

I spent a little time taking photos of Liquorice Allsorts on a white background this evening and it’s typical of the problems I seem to face. Either I end up over-exposing or the white background feels grey and not uniform in some way. Now occasionally, I can recover to a degree or I get a nice shot despite my best efforts, but often it’s just a wasted hour.

I’ve read lots of tutorials on how to set up this sort of shot and I’ve spent money buying gear to try and do it, but it’s just not sinking in to my thick skull.  It’s always hit and miss.

Well, in an effort to get better at this style of photography, I’m going to try and do at least one session a week like this. Needless to say I’ll share my results and try to explain what I was doing with lights and such.

Liquorice Allsorts

For this shot, I had two flash guns behind umbrellas. One strobe was on each side of the setup, the gun on the left being more powerful than the one on the right. Both strobes were shooting down onto the sweets, with the strobe on the right coming from slightly behind.

The above image is the cleaned up post processed version with sharpening and curves adjustments to help fix the white background. The original isn’t so pretty.

My current thinking is there are a couple of things I need to consider further.

1. White Balance – It’s probable that the white balance was wrong since it was on auto and the lighting was provided by flash (chained from cheap ebay wireless triggers)

2. Two flash guns does not a lot of light make. Maybe I need to add more light, or at least more defused sources. Maybe next time I’ll add some reflectors.

3. Lens choice. This was shot with a 100mm macro lens. Down side here is that I need it up around 1/125sec to get a shot without shake (damn my tremors). Maybe a 50mm lens would be a better choice?

If you’ve other thoughts, drop me a note.

One of the problems with being an amateur and having to fit photographer around that life thing is that I never seem to have the time for lighting shots. By the time I dig out light stands, lights, umbrellas and all the do-hickeys I want to play with, what time I had for shooting is gone.

Take today. After discovering I had 45 minutes for me. I spend 40 minutes getting the kitchen set up for some shots, took a couple then spent 10 minutes rebuilding it.

Man, looking around my play room I’m beginning to wonder if it really is time to sell all my board and role playing games…

(Yes, I am that nerd).

Anyway. Reason I had the camera out is because I have the poker chips from the shots a few weeks back and wanted to try and get a few nice pictures of them. I figured they’d make a nice colour study thing.

Maybe slightly overblown?

Honestly. How he was able to sit beside me for two days listening to my rambling madness and still keep a smile on his face is beyond me…