"Messing about on the river"

OK, so there was no Day 5.

I was going to call today Day 5, after all I was away yesterday on business and I didn't have a huge amount of time for photography. But, I did manage to get a little time late last night and the result of my one shot challenge was abysmal. Let's not understate it, it was pretty woeful, even for me. It was blurred, out of focus and badly composed.

I was feeling pushed or time, so tried a shot of an ornament in the house. The object is quite nice, but I just didn't do the right things and I hurried it.

I guess if I was to learn anything about yesterdays shot, it would be that sometimes you have to accept it's not going to be worth the bother - if the shot isn't there, you're not going to get it.

 

Anyway, on with Day 6.

 

the weather's turned here and as a result the blue skies are grey and that miserable drippy rain is - well - miserable and drippy.

I tried to work around that a little and took a stroll down to a railway bridge close to home and shot this.

(F/14, 1/13sec, 18mm, ISO-200, 28/05/2008)

I tried to follow on from Dermot's comments the other day about lines heading into the distance, as well as give the horizon a bit more life than just the grey sky that was available. I also tried to get lower, both for perspective and to keep the tree I was hiding under out of the picture.

I feel the sky lets it down, and I'll go back here when it's a better day to see if it can be improved. A little more exposure might also help the dark areas under the tree in the right foreground.

Comments?

"Woo! Woo!"

In an effort to ensure I got a day 4 at all, I took my camera to work today. It's a habit I've been trying to develop as much as possible as there are always photo possibilities when you don't have it.

To be honest, I'd almost given up on a shot for today by home time. Work seemed to have this expectation of me working, so the camera stayed in it's case and I stayed firmly up to my eyes. But then, on the way home I remembered a shot I'd wanted to take for a while and thought it might just be OK.

(f16, 1/125sec, 18mm, ISO-200, 26/05/08)

 

If I'd to do this again outside the realms of this challenge, I'd use a polariser and maybe come earlier in the morning - by my reckoning the sun rises at the end of the tracks or thereabouts.

I like the effect of the platform receeding into the distance, though it's marred a little by the leaning buildings and it could also have been more central. I also tried to get low to take this - sometimes I forget I'm quite tall and that can throw perspective out.

Comments?

 

Oh, and fair warning. Day 5 may not be tomorrow- I have business in Dublin and I'm unlikely to be back with time for camera fun.

When I posted about the reversal ring a few weeks back, Dermot mentioned that there were other options to do this sort of thing on a budget including close-up filters.

I found that you can actually buy a set on Ebay for under £10. That makes them cheaper than the reversing ring option.

Well, I couldn't resist could I?

I'll post a proper review of them soon, but we took this on Friday afternoon while messing about and it's been kind of freaking me out ever since I uploaded it at the weekend.




Now, someone else tell me they can see a six in his eye! I mean, why would he have a six in his eye? Why would anyone have a six in their eye? It's just wrong.

It's also very very close.

Thanks to Gordons eye for not exploding while we hit it with the lens!

"It's a what now?"

It's actually the inside of one of those fabric play tent maze things my daughter has.

I'd spent pretty much all morning looking for today's shot. I'd considered going out somewhere, I'd considered some form of constructed insanity and then, while trying to chase her out of one of the tunnels I decided I liked the light in there.

Well, you may as well have fun.

 

 

(F/10, 1/60sec, 18mm, ISO-200, 25/05/08)

It's a complete departure from Day 1 and 2, given that there is no central subject. What I wanted more was the effect of colour and the feeling of depth, something that would draw the viewer in. Of the three shots in the insane challenge of Dermot's, this is my favourite to date. I'm not sure I achieved my aim here, but it felt pretty close.

Biggest issue for me is that rogue tie, hanging at the end of the blue tunnel section. The one further on is less annoying.

In terms of yesterdays mistakes - today I double checked all the settings on the camera. Maybe this could have done with a little more exposure, but as I've said before - I like dark.

"There be Dragons..."

Day 2 of this challenge and already I'm finding I'm spending hours thinking about the right shot before setting it up or doing anything about it. I guess that was the idea behind it.

Of course, today I think I fluffed it.

After Dermot's comments yesterday about backgrounds I spent a little more time considering what I wanted and made some adjustments. I also decided to get out my dragon so to speak.

 

(F/10, 1/160sec, 55mm, ISO-200, 24/05/08)

I'm not happy with this picture. I kind of knew as I pushed the button I wouldn't be and only afterwards realised my mistakes.

What I wanted was the head of the dragon with the sky in background. That was all.

But I got a few bits wrong that I can see.

1. the cropping is out. The little trace of the wing on the right and the dead space on the left. I think it would have been better in portrait.

2. ISO-200? Yeah, I forgot to change it back after yesterday.

3. The white balance was on flash. Somehow when I moved it from shade to daylight I got distracted and put it onto flash. I think this is what's left the odd fringing at the edges of the dragon, though that could be the excessive ambient lighting too (Damn you sun!)

4. The sky is blown out, possibly too over exposed

I like the depth of field in this, I wanted almost the entire head in focus, with the eye being sharpest. I also like the position, it gives a decent 3D perspective of the figure.

I guess if I was allowed two shots a day I might be able to correct a lot of this, but it's not anything I would typically have noticed until I was back at my pc (OK, ISO and flash white balance, maybe).

 

Right, I'm off out to see Satriani. Have a good one.

"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...

I'm not sure exactly what they're for - I'd suspect Shrimp, but since that season isn't until August, they may be for Green Crab or some other local shellfish. Either way, I liked the semi-uniformity of the two stacks.

 

I thought I'd also post the unedited picture (below). I think this might be a case of a photoshop too far, but I'm trying to find the vibrancy and richness other people manage, both through the lens and in the post edit stage. It's worth looking at photographs by Oswegan, Dynamic Perceptions, etc for good examples of rich, powerful images which don't feel over processed (if they've been post processed at all - I honestly have no way of telling!)

 

While retracing my steps on the beach that night, I came across this.

(F/8, 3.2sec, 22mm, ISO-100, 03/05/08)

 

Now, only one of those sets belonged to me. So, who exactly followed me out?

(Yes Dermot, I know it's very dark - I like dark!)

The settings quoted above are a little misleading. I did a reasonable amount of photoshoping on this, specifically I used sharpen masks and some curve changes to push intensify the colours. Interestingly, I was playing with the application mode for the layers - I'd tended to leave it on normal in the past.This picture makes use of the multiply mode, merging two duplicate layers and (I guess) multiplying the colours together for a result. The "soft light" option also seemed interesting, but I decided I preferred this more sinister version. A heavy crop to change the image from landscape to portrait finished it off and got rid of the empty spaces down each flank.

I'd kind of stopped post processing outside of Lightroom and forays into HDRville over the last few weeks, but I picked up some fantastic tutorials on photoshop today and they've got me all inspired again. I'll post some details about them later.

I came across a couple of different online image editors recently, specifically Photoshop Express and Flauntr.

Both work via a web interface and seek to provide a selection of simple tools for image manipulation and management. Now, before I go any further – replacements for GIMP/Elements/CS3 they aren’t, but they maybe fill a niche in the whole web portfolio sphere by allowing some tweaks here and there. 

Essentially both sites offer free registration and a certain amount of free web space (2GB for Photoshop, but no obvious limit mentioned for Flauntr) to host pictures for editing. Both allow image uploading from hard drive as well as imports from a range of photo hosting sites (including flickr in Flauntr’s case and photobucket in Photoshops). Finally both offer the ability to save your pictures back to your hard drive. It's worth noting at this point Photoshop Express is restricted the the United States only, but there was nothing stopping me creating an account and pretending to live there (I'm a bad boy...)

So far they’re both pretty similar.
 

Photoshop Express




Flauntr

 

They’re both reasonably well equipped with a standard set of tools (crop, rotation, resize) as well as with some more advanced stuff like sharpening and highlights etc.

What sets them apart?

 

Well, based on a lunchtimes play, I’d say that Photoshop Express is the easier product to use. The majority of features are on the left hand side of the page and usually have handy previews above the image you’re editing to show you what’s possible with the tool selected.

Express also offers some nice features, like the colour pop tool above which reduces the image to black/white and your chosen colour and what appears to be the clone/repair tool from it’s big brothers under the guise of a touchup button.

Photoshop Express - Pop colour Tool

Flauntr approaches the usability question from a slightly different angle, making use of a set of tabs to offer different functionality in sensibly clustered blocks. The downside of this is that unless you know what you’re looking for you have to spend a lot of time exploring to see what’s possible. I’d suspect once you know what you’re doing it will all be so much faster, but I could see this putting a new player off.

Flauntr also provides a pretty little tool called PicasR which allows you to blend your photograph with the colour tones from some old masters paintings resulting in some lovely effects. Here's a few samples based on this picture.
 

Flauntr - Carnlough with Beachside Colours
using



Flauntr - Carnlough With Sunsetsea Colours
using
 

What sets Flauntr apart though, and what makes me think it’ll be used by the web generation it’s aimed at is the addition of a couple of simple tabs for social networking and mobile sites. Using these it’s painless to take your photograph and sculpt it into something to use as your logo/screen saver on LiveJournal/Bebo/WhereEverTheKidsPlayNow

So, what do I think?

Well, I reckon if you’re into the infernal complexities of CS3 then this isn’t for you. However, if you enjoy playing with images or if you want to be able to make small tweaks to existing pictures quickly without needing to get too complicated then these are definitely appealing. If I had to pick one, right now it would be Flauntr – in a world where it takes years to get to grips with CS3, allowing 10 more minutes to learn Flauntr over Express is not much of an ask.

 

(Since the web is immortal, it’s worth noting that Photoshop Express was in Beta on build version 448357 and Flauntr was in Alpha with no obvious build number).

Potpourri!

I was messing on Friday night and took this while checking lenses for dust/dirt/little green men.

It quite struck me with it's uniformity. I wish I could say it was planned.




And for the record. Andrew suggested I call this post "Photopourri". I told him I thought that stunk...

Long exposures can give some interesting and completely unexpected results.

On Saturday night I was on one of the beaches in Cloughglass and to be honest should probably have packed up and gone home instead of trying to take one more picture (final image count for the weekend was 290 pictures by the way).

By the time I took the following, it was well into dark and the nice red twilight was pretty much gone. In an effort to get some light into the camera, a 5 second shutter speed was required. The side effect of this was that the waves and the boat have a nice ethereal blur about them.

At least, I think so.

 

(f/14, 5secs, 22mm, ISO-100, 03/05/2008)

 

To my mind it gets even nicer when you see the resultant HDR - Yes I had auto exposure bracketing on and couldn't help myself.

Oh, it's been cropped a little as the horizon wasn't in a great spot in the original.

I like the intensity of the colours more here. Yeah it's probably lost some of its natural hues, but the sky and the colours just seem more.... well more.

I tried a third version of this. Just because I was messing and could.

This time I used the overexposed image in the exposure bracket and let the HDR software work from there. Just using a single image.

I'm not keen on the burned out white in the sky and if I didn't have 300 images to play with I might spend a little time trying to clean it up. but I really do like the sand and the boat motion so thought I would share.

I spent the bank holiday weekend in Donegal basking in some unexpected, but very welcome, blue skies and soaring temperatures.

I was also lucky enough to get out a couple of times with my camera. the photos are currently uploading, and I'll get onto that subject in a moment, but for now... Some Seaweed.

 

(f8, 1/100sec, 181mm, ISO-100, 04/05/2008)

Yeah, it's not great (are they ever?), but I liked the liquid effect on it.

 

Anyway, onto more important matters. I remember a time when I made mention of taking 100 photos over a weekend. Well, this weekend I arrived home with not one, but 3 and a half full memory cards. That's 7Gig of photo insanity. This leaves me with a couple of important things to consider.

1. Do I buy more/bigger cards? I'd really rather not run out.

2. Am I being too proliferate* with camera? Taking too many pictures, or too many pictures of the same thing?

3. do I need to start deleting on the camera before uploading?

Any thoughts?

 

 

*I do not think this means what I think it means, but I think you know what I mean...