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

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…

It seems like it was only last week we were getting violent storms, snow flurries and frost. Then suddenly there was enough sun to send me to my garden for the day. More amazingly, there was enough sun to actually burn the back of my neck while I put up a fence! (Yep, that’s right. Not only do I attempt to take photographs, I also attempt DIY). Maybe I’ll combine things and take a photo of my fence one day…

In amongst my DIY madness, I encountered a couple of interesting flowers at my Dads house. As usual, I’m not as happy with these photos as I’d like. Annoyingly I think it’s going to be a theme with flowers and the summer.

(F/5.6, 1/320sec, 200mm, ISO-100, 27/04/08)

I’m getting increasingly frustrated with my attempts at Macro photography. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, the lens I’m using, a Tamron 55-200 Macro that I got as part of the camera kit. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice little lens for £70 or so. I just don’t think it’s as sharp or macro-esque as a dedicated lens.

Secondly, that 484rc2 ball head I bought recently. (The one I talked about here). There seems to be a little drift in it as you lock the head in place. You spend time getting the centre of your image dead centre in the view finder, you twist the lock bolt and it all slides ever so slightly out. Again, I know from various reviews and how-to’s that I’ve read that say a ball head is not great for Macro photography.. But I’m hardly trying to photograph the head of a fly here!

Anyone any advice?

Just along the coast from The Giants Causeway is the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. Originally built by fishermen to allow them to check their Salmon nets, these days it’s a good walk and 5 minutes of terror.

To be fair, it’s probably less likely to collapse than any of the millennium foot bridges that do that horrible bouncy thing when people walk on them. That said, when you’re in the middle of it, you tend to forget the giant steel pins and metal cables holding it in place.

And as it bounces, I dare you not to hum the Indiana Jones theme music.

(F5.6. 1/200, 55mm ISO-100, 12/04/08)

(Yes – another of those shutter speed shots….)

By the time I got taking this picture I’d once again fallen foul of dirt in the camera. This time, it was on the mirror rather than the lens. A good blast with the Rocket Air Blower sorted it out when I got home. I’ve been trying to work out a better way to change lenses. One which doesn’t involve carrying a sterile tent. So far, best I can come up with is:

• Change lenses somewhere sheltered (no wind or rain or sea spray)
• Change them efficiently (not quickly – you risk dropping them, but don’t stand chatting as you do it)
• Have the right lens caps to hand for the job (remember Canon cameras take both EF and EF-S lenses, one size might not fit all)
• Try to hold the body pointing down (dirt tends not to fall up)
• Accept that it’s part of life and will happen sooner or later.

Failing that, you could always carry two or more bodies. I mean, if Canon are reading and want me to try that option all they have to do is ask….. Hello?….Hello, anybody there?

Ah well, worth a try.