I haven't gone away you know...

I managed to get an hour at the weekend with my camera. It's the first time I've came home and uploaded photos and not liked any of them.

Either that means I'm getting worse at taking pictures, or I'm getting much more picky about what I do and don't like.

Hopefully it's the second one.

I'll probably post some of the rejects at some point since I always said I wouldn't hide the tripe but try to work out what went wrong.

Sometimes pictures just work in mono.

I think this one does anyway.

(f/4.5, 1/400sec, 24mm, ISO-100, 12/4/08)

I like to try things. Even when what I read makes sense. Even when the photographic evidence proves the point. I still like to try things.

Sometimes it can take me a month or two to get round to it. Sometimes it happens sooner. But inevitably, I'll try a thing just to prove it is so.

So, finding myself alone in a house filled with food, beer, hundreds of my favourite movies and the web...

I ignored all those and got out my new light stand and umbrella to see if using a reflector with an off camera strobe really did make a difference to the light...

OK, not owning a reflector was a bit of a bind, but I happened upon a fantastic piece of A2 glossy white card, and necessity being the mother of invention, suddenly I had a compromise.

I set an apple on a chopping board. Then I positioned a flash high to the left pointing at the apple through a translucent white umbrella. For the reflector shot, I then positioned my white card to the right of the apple - the size of the card meant it ran from the surface of the table to above the umbrella in height. (For reference the chopping board was on a black surface). since I was shooting freehand, the position of the apple is slightly different in the two frames, but the setup was the same.

Without a Reflector...

With a Reflector...

OK, neither of these is going to win photograph of the year, but it proved out the theory I'd read about.

Whilst there is still shadow in the reflector shot, it's a lot less sheer and looks more natural in keeping the apple and board detail.  I reckon moving the reflector closer again would have reduced the shadow further.

So, lesson for tonight. Reflectors do work in reducing the harshness of a shadow.

I've a confession to make. When I'm using the tripod I always take three images, bracketing my chosen picture by +1/-1 Ev using the auto exposure bracketing in the camera.

There's a couple of reasons for this.

1. It allows me to play in HDR land with pictures. (I've stopped posting a lot of those as they can feel over processed and 'samey')

2. It allows me to see what a modification to the settings might have got me - I'm still learning here, so this is useful.

If memory is cheap for you, I'd suggest you do the same. It really isn't as much of a waste of card space as you think.

On other matters, with the number of club competitions I've been entering, I've taken to buying mounts pre-cut and in bulk. This has left me in even more of a 3*2mode than before - If all my mounts are already cut to 12*8 apertures (maximum entry is 16*12 including mount), then I tend to only see a 3*2 ratio picture as a potential entry.

So much so, that a digital entry I submitted this week was in that aspect ration as well. Even though in a slightly different ratio it might have been much nicer.

Well, tonight I'm breaking my 3*2 habit.

And posting an HDR picture.

So there.

I guess I'm going to have to cut my own boards.

(f/18, 30secs, 14mm, ISO-100, 02/08/2008)

Sometimes pictures develop long after you've stopped fiddling with them. I hear DJ's talking about a record being a "grower, not a show-er" occasionally. I guess the same can be true for a photograph.

Anyway, this photograph was taken in early August. At the time I thought it was OK, maybe a decent example of slow shutter speeds making water a bit like smoke. But it kind of left me cold.

When it came time to send pictures away to print, this was number 30 of 30, just making it in because 30 seemed like a nice round number for printing and I was kind of curious about what it would look like.

In the Peoples Photography exhibition, it just slipped onto the list because I had space for one more portrait image.

And people liked it. Probably more than me.

Then this week, I found myself having to select an image for a digital presentation competition (images presented via projector rather than as prints or slides) and once again this kind of slipped past me and into the selected pile.

Then it slipped past the judges and into their submissions pile.

I look at it now, and where it originally left me cold, it now leaves me calm. Maybe that's why it's growing on me. Maybe that's what other people feel when they see it. I've certainly no idea.

I was playing with my flashgun tonight and decided to try and recreate a picture I'd seen in this Strobist post.

Because I was away from technology at the time, I had to try it from memory.

When compared to David's toy car, the highlights on mine are still very sharp and there are some burnt out patches on both pictures (I like them on the second car), but it's a fun thing to try.

Now the essence of David's post was related to light sources and what makes soft light or hard light, and to be honest I'm still trying to get my head round some of this so I'm not going to try and stick my understanding of it online just yet.

Still, it's a fun way to photograph toy cars.