2 from 5?

OK guys: my picking and choosing is as bad as ever so here are five very different images in subject, approach, post-processing. Which two, and of the two, would you suggest any changes in the post-processing?

Also, Ivan, I found this link about calibrating your printer for mono work: http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/digitalblack.html

New camera for me

Well, I finally did it. I have bought the Canon EOS 40D and it sits happily on my desk as we speak. I intend to sell my 350D.

I haven't used it yet really so cannot report on much but straight off, the camera itself is very different to the 350D, being much larger and heavier. So much so, that I actually miss the feel of the 350D but I am sure I will adapt.

At some point I will give a report on how I am getting on with the camera...

Damian

1st Print Competition - Ivan's result

Dear All

Well, again, a mixed bag. One bombed and one did well. When will I crack this, and get two placed in one competition?

"Shove Tuppence" did not go down well. Some nice comments regarding the reflection of the hand and that it was a nice idea, but apart from that, it did not engage or really clearly show what was happening. The hand looked in a strange position and a bit unnatural. Not good overall.

"Window and Chair" did much better. Got a "First" place grading (1 of 2 on the monos). All similar comments to those that you guys raised, and it definitely benefited from being marginally lightened up, so thanks for that input!

The overall quality of the monos was very high - I was worried about not getting anything, so it was a complete surprise (genuinely) to get a First. Because they announce it in reverse order, mine was announced last of all, so I'd given up hope by that point!

So, thus far, I have 24 points in the Projected Image Serial Compeition (round 1 of 3), and 30 points in the Print Serial Competition (round 1 of 3). Last year I got 54 points in the Projected Image competition and came third overall. This year, the standard I think is higher, with lots of talented new members, so I'll need to raise my game too, but that's a good thing.

Ivan

Canon EOS Digital Photo Guidebook

Available as a free PDF download

http://flash.popphoto.com/blog/2007/09/tip-of-the-d-20.html

Very interesting guide for pro photographers, covering colour management, post processing etc.

More Athens Monos

Ivan was right about the sky on the previous one being too flat.


Do we think these are any better?


Still as contrasty but I've played on that in the post-processing.


Maybe not this one though, eh? (that's me, for those of you who haven't worked it out...) :)

Chaps, Ivan and I attended an excellent talk on Monday from a guy called Tony Worobiec, who produced some stunning mono work. I revisited some recent images in Lightroom and came up with this one. Thoughts?

Two from Three

1. Bath Cresent


2. Shove tuppence


3. Window and Chair

Your thoughts on which are the strongest two for the up-coming 1st print competition would be greatly appreciated. I have a potential two picked, but not sure at this stage.

Ivan

Horse, gull and sea

This shot was taken in 2000 ( I think) using my Nikon F90x on black and white film (Agfa). It was scanned in at 4000 ppi.

It was taken on Sable Island at the eastern end of the island. It is one of those images that capture a very rare moment in time. There is an obvious interplay between the gull in flight, the horse and its posture and the wild crazy sea. For me, it captures the wildness of the Island.

Damian

Two for Monday

Ivan's kindly offered to print my selection for the first CCC print competition, the deadline for which falls on Monday. He also made the suggestion of which pair of images I should enter. For the church in Santorini at sunset, I absolutely agree. For the recessional columns, I'm not so sure, but it's going to be fascinating to find out!

Massive Update

Guys, thought you might like to know that I've done a massive update putting all of my photography from the last few months onto my flickr stream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gareth_marlow/) - there are about 300 new images on there - with a selection onto my photo blog at http://www.marlow.org.uk/pblog/.

I'd have put more onto the photo blog but it's such a faff having to upload them one-by-one.

I've categorised the flickr photo stream a bit but I need to do some major cataloguing - there are now 1,337 images up there in total, and none of them have titles, descriptions or tags - which I'd really like to get round to at some point.

Ivan, you've a much better eye than I do for what the CCC folk might be looking for, and I'd be interested to hear your views as to what to submit for Monday.

As Ivan knows (because he's already had a play with it), I bought a Canon 40D last week and I hope to put some first impressions on this new kit up here, soon.

Images from Brighton; June '07

Hi there,

I though I would post a few images from my trip to Brighton last June. I went for a walk down the seafront and shot images that I thought were appealing. It was just me, my eye and the camera....Damian

Annual Exhibition

Big East Anglian Skies

Santorini Blue

These are the two images I'm submitting for the annual exhibition - assuming they come back from the printer quickly enough and I can get them mounted in time! The first we've seen before - it was an entry into the pictorial category of the annual digital championship last year and it did reasonably well - grabbed me a commended, I think.

The second is new - part of my haul from my honeymoon in Greece. The challenge with Santorini is that it's so beautiful, it's hard not to take the standard postcard shots so I hope this is a little different. The only post-processing that either of these has had is some sharpening, and a touch of rotation to get the cross vertical in the second image.

It's going to sink or swim on the quality of the prints - so I've got my fingers crossed.

Peak Heather and Barn - colour version and a more panoramic crop

The colour version of my CCC competition entry, with a different crop.

How does it compare to the competition version? Preferences?

Ivan

Alternative Crop

You'll all have seen this image below before....



I wanted to try a new crop on it, to see if it could be improved or to just create a different effect. My crop is below...



I wanted to focus on layers; the river, the punt, the distant bridge, and bring out the shades and textures therein. Did I succeed? What do you think versus the original? Has seeing the original changed your view of the crop i.e. would you have liked the crop if you'd not seen the original for example?

Please, let me know what you think, or suggest (and post) your preffered crop.

Ivan

The Art of Seeing

Images from last year's book of the same name. Some wonderful images here to inspire...

http://www.alcovebooks.net/AOS.sample.html

Ivan

First Projected Image Competition - my entries

Image 1: "How Things Have Changed..."


Image 2: "Peak Heather and Barn"

With Image 1, I moved the old gent slightly away from the RHS, by creating a bit more wall - combination of cloning and painting shadows. This takes him away from the edge, which made for a slightly uncomfortable composition. I've also tightened up the composition, so he is more of a focus, and cropped out a dark LHS wall which added a distracting dark band to the LH edge. I've tidied up some of the cloning work to remove the circular table, and brightened up the old man's face a bit too, again to provide more focus.

With Image 2, it's a bit of an experiment to try something different with landscape. I've never really done any type of toning or sepia work, so it's a new thing, but I wanted to be trying something new, so that was the decision-making process. As for the image, I cropped it square and converted to black and white, then added a photo filter on top in CS. After some dodging and burning on a separate layer, I flattened, sharpened, and sized.

Let me know what you think? Competition is on Monday coming.

Cheers
Ivan

1st competition of the year

I really ran out of time this evening to decide which pictures I'm going to submit so I grabbed the first two which came into my head. I'm really interested to see how they get on. They're very, very different images and I'm cross with myself for not having thought more about which ones to submit. Hey ho!

Tea at the Science Museum

The Kiss

Bay of Fundy

I have just returned from a 5 day trip to the Bay of Fundy assisting with the teaching of a marine mammal class. While out on the boat I took the opportunity to shoot what I could. During the middle of the trip the weather turned foggy so that the last two days were a wash-out. But I got a few nice shots. Here are some...


This is my favourite shot. It is a Greater Shearwater that was following the boat. So I tracked her with my camera. The light coloured foamy water adds to this shot.

I also really like this one too. A white-sided dolphin porpoising alongside the boat. The water was very calm with some nice reflections.

















Damian

Power to the Fens II: The Ivan crop.

I removed the horizontal cable, removed a few bushes and cropped to nearly square. big improvement - thanks Ivan!

All the best

Adam

Peak Cottage

A quick post from me to get some feedback on.

Taken a couple of years ago in the Peak District. I liked the quality and direction of the light, and wanted to do a panoramic crop, using the line of the stone wall and road to lead to the cottage, bathed in late evening sun.

Comments welcomed.

Ivan

Power to the Fens

I have been struck by all the power lines disappeaing into the distance in the fens - being so flat it realy accentuates the effect. Having said that, I'm not sure this snap cover that but it was near the car! (can't walk to far at the moment and kind of grabbed me). Any thoughts how it could be improved? (1/12 f11 82mm; ajusted WB and exposure level in Rawshooetr and converted to BW in phtoshop).

Interesting Metrics...and initial goals for the 2007/8 CCC Season

Remember I finished third overall in the 2006/7 projected image competition? Well, I scored 52 points for that third place. I knew Barrie Hatton (Club President) came second and Ann Miles (Programme Secretary and semi-pro photographer) came first, so I totted up their scores (sad, ain't I?) from the results on the CCC webpage...Ann had 104 points and Barrie 82, I was a distant third with 52.

Shows that in order to challenge this season, I do need to have both images scoring at each competition, as both Ann and Barrie regularly did. I ALWAYS had one image that bombed, with no score, and one that did quite well. Still, numerically I am half as good as Ann Miles, so being half of shit-hot is good enough for me (for now)!

This year, it's my goal to achieve at least a 3rd overall again, but with a higher score (realistic goal) or to come 2nd overall (less realistic). I also want to enter some of the print and portfolio competitions too. I'd like to also do well again in the Annual Digital Championship, but will be hard-pushed to improve on winning (and coming second too) in the Creative category. I think I'd like to enter in the Pictorial (i.e. Landscapes) and do well in that - entering the Creative section was a calculated strategy to use my relatively good photoshop skills to good effect in a category I knew would be less intensely fought. This turned out to be a good move, for my ego if nothing else!

I'll have a think about my CCC goals for 2007/8 and put them on the blog; last year, being my first season, I had no idea what to expect, and hoped to place in ONE competition. I did a whole lot better than that, which makes 2007/8 a bit tougher. A bit like Lewis Hamilton in his F1 rookie year...(sort of).

Cheers
Ivan

Quick snaps

Just a couple of recent snaps on my 5D.The first was at Linton Zoo (400mm) and the windfarm was deep in the fens ( I could hear 'dueling banjos' in my head so I wasn't hanging about-24 mm). Not the best pics you'll ever see - I'm still relatively new to digital so I'm experimenting. all converted from raw in Rawshooter, uped the saturation and cropped inPhotoshop. all comments welcome - all the best, A.

Some thoughts on Lightroom

Guys, I've been playing around with Lightroom for the last week or so. Thought you might be interested in my first impressions.

My mate Rich - a semi-pro photographer - is now using it primarily for portfolio management - tagging. The demonstration he gave me as to how he's using it to manage his workflow was excellent, and at some point I can see me going through my 40,000 image library to do the same thing.

But what's really impressed me is the speed of use for post-processing and subsequent final image management. It's very easy to assign levels/curves to an image, tweak until you get something you like and then apply those changes to a whole photo shoot. Furthermore, the mono conversion is absolutely awesome - much more flexible than using the channel mixer. For instance, if you want to do that classic Ansel Adams blue skies-> black thing, in photoshop you'd apply a channel mixer adjustment layer with the channels at (say) r+150, b-50, g+0. Which is fine, but you can get some odd results with faces or brickwork. In Lightroom there are a number of sliders for more specific colours so you can wack the blue right down to make the skies black but tweak all of the other sliders to preserve the tonal range of the rest of the image.

Split/duotoning is similarly powerful. I haven't tried many third-party presents but there are a lot of them out there, too.

But where it saved me literally hours was for post-processing the wedding photos for a shoot I did for a mate a few weeks ago. I set up for or five different presets with wildly different results - straight colour, straight mono, sepia, contrasty mono and weird draganised colour. I just applied each preset to the whole directory one by one, and hit "export" after each. It started exporting in the background and let me get on with setting up the next one, and the next... then I just left my PC alone for 45 mins and it just churned away in the background, saving each of the post-processed versions in a different directory. When it was done, I just burnt the lot to a DVD and gave them to this guy.

The integration with Photoshop is also very nice. You can just right-click on an image that you've part-processed in Lightroom, and it'll export a copy as either a TIFF or a PSD to open in Photoshop. You'd want to do this if you had more specific cloning work to do - there's a spot removal tool which works well but you can't do big clone tool/healing brush work. Also, the curves and conversion is applied to the whole image - there's no layer masking so you'd want to go to PS for that.

The other interesting thing is that it means you don't have to save multiple copies of files at different resolutions. You just keep the master, managed in Lightroom, and generate web-sized versions, full-sized jpegs etc. as you need them. The export feature lets you set these up as templates which makes it all very fast. You can also ask it to use a customised template for how the file is named - date stamping, serial numbering etc., and also to carry over a serial number from the original file - so the RAWs from my camera come off with filenames like CRW_8259.CRW which you can tell Lightroom to automatically convert into something like wedding-20070707-8259.jpg

In short, I'm very impressed.

G

Sunset on Marmot Island, Gulf of Alaska

Here is another photograph that was taken while I was doing fieldwork in the Gulf of Alaska in the winter of 1996. The image was scanned at 4000 ppi. The original image was very dark so I used the shadows and highlights tool to balance the tones a little better, although it is still not perfect.

I find this image very calming and like the contrast between the rather monochrome foreground and the setting sun in the background.

Damian

Feet

Messing around in the garden this evening.

I will continue to read here, guys, but I'm not going to be contributing much until September. Less than three weeks to our wedding - but at least the honeymoon is booked. Rhodes, Santorini and Athens - I'm hoping to strike photo paydirt while we're away!

Halifax Pride Parade

On Saturday Halifax had its annual Pride Parade so Sue and I went along in the rain to have a look. I took my camera and shot images that jumped at me. So, to keep the blog alive I thought I would post some of what I took. I was using my 100-300mm which is great for working with people. Damian


Sue walking in the rain. The contrast between the bright colours of her clothes and the black umbrella and her partially hidden face, appealed to me...
This is a copper on a horse. The bright colours of the Pride flag and the dark horse provided a good contrast which caught my eye. I also like the boot of the rider poking out beyond the flag...
Here there was a match between the white/red of the fire truck and the white/red of the dress which struck me. But there was also this mis-match too between the straight lines of the truck and the circles of the dress. Then the contrast with the black top. And finally the subtle Pride colours.
While everyone was watching the Parade I was also looking at the people. I really like this shot. There are some nice reflected colours on the wet road.
The flying flags and this guy in very Pride clothing was too good to miss.

What is it that we want

What is it that we want?

Do the contributors to this blog have any thoughts on what they would like this blog to provide. Or are they quite content with ocassionally posting a blog and reviewing those posted. I sense a feeling of the blog being 'lost' or almost bored with the repetitive reveiwing of one image after another. I very much enjoy in on to see what has been posted and to post daring images for your critical comments. But I do feel that perhaps there is something more that we could develop here. No idea what but then I haven't given it much thought. Perhaps we need more blogging on photo tips and techniques or something...

I think it would be a good idea if we could spend a few minutes thinking about what we would like the blog to give us, if anything at all...

Damian

Two herons

I took this photo when I was working in Florida in 1995. It was taken with my Canon EOS 100. The reflection was perfect and there was very little colour since it was quite late in the day.

In photoshop I adjusted Levels and Curves and Shadows and then converted it into black and white. I then sharpened the image and cropped some from the bottom and a little from the top. I then added a border around the image.

Damian

Wicken Fen

Something I did a while ago; blended image, one exposed for sunset, one for foreground. Tried to achieve a natural feel, although it was a good deal darker than this. I like the square format, and the foreground detail of the part-cut grasses, leading in the eye to the windmill.

Ivan

Pattern

Taken from the top of the Campanile tower in St Mark's Square, Venice, before all the hordes arrived. I love the simplicity of the pattern, with people adding scale and interest in places. It was in shade, so hence the high ISO and noise. Also, pre-350D days, so noise much worse than would be now. I added in an extra row of tables, at the bottom, to complete the pattern. Looks more powerful that way, I think.

Still, an interesting image.

Thoughts/comments?

Ivan

I love the smell of napalm in the morning

Was whisked away on a surprise stag day on Wednesday - chauffeured jag to Cambridge airport, chopper to a restaurant in Hertfordshire, nice food and got absolutely pissed, then the jag back to Cambridge.

In the close confines of a helicopter cockpit, the Sigma 10-20mm comes into its own...

Cliff with snow and trees - Marmot Is., Alaska

This image was taken in the winter of 1995 on an island in the western Gulf of Alaska called Marmot Island. It was during the early days of my photography. It is quite obvious what caught my attention.

At the time I had a Canon EOS 100 and I always shot with slide Fuji ISO50-200; ocassionally ISO400. No idea what the camera settings were for this shot. I scanned this slide in at 4000 dpi and cleaned it up using the spot tool in Photoshop. I made slight adjustments to Levels and Curves and added a little sharpening. Comments welcome. Damian