To New York and Beyond!

As I write this I am waiting for my flight to New York. We are going for 5 days (until Boxing Day) and then two days after I get back I am off to Sable Island for work. So I would imagine that I will not be on the blog until February when I return.

I have my camera with me so hopefully I will capture some decent New York images for the blog.

See you all then,...

Damian 

Something from the Market

I always have my camera with me when I am selling at the market and am always looking. So I saw this. The girl was walking around with this brilliant yellwo scarf and the green cat grass. The contrast was startling to me. Then she came over to my table and POW...I took her down.

Shot with my great and most beloved fixed 50mm, 1.4 lens...

D

A couple of Venetian images

Both of these were taken in 2004 using my old Nikon Coolpix. Crap camera - although it did do RAW - but somewhere as beautiful as this can be captured with a disposable camera and still look good.

They were both early morning, before the crowds. I like the one of the shadows under the arches, with the solo figure walking away. Also, I tried to get a new take on the tired theme of Venetian gondolas. Did I succeed?

Ivan

Just a little something...

Well, not much to offer this week. Shot this while in St John's, Nfld during the summer. Its kind of fun with the plant pots and the broken pot and the various fun colours, typical of houses here. Lots of lines up and down.

Damian

Dolomite Flower Meadow - Part 2

I posted the sister image to this quite a while ago, but I found this one - which is portrait rather than landscape format - while browsing my back catalogue. I think I prefer this one to the landscape image.

Comments?

Ivan

A Venetian "Before and After"

This one is quite radical, and from the days (about 4 years ago) when I used to make really big changes to images, including new skies, colour temperature, adding/removing elements. I don't really do that these days, but I do like the change from the original to the manipulated image in this before and after.

Below is the original. It was taken at/near sunrise, so it's nice and quiet, few boats and NO tourists. But, the feel was cold and not what I pictured in my mind.



The manipulated image has a new sky, selected with the characteristics to match (i.e. light coming from the right direction etc). The buildings and water were warmed up to match, and then the two carefully put together using layers and layer masks. Took a bit of time, but I think the effect is quite convincing. I wanted an almost painting-type of quality, as I thought it went well with the classical scene.



Thoughts welcome as ever

Ivan

More night shots...

Ventured out again a few evening ago with a Cambridge chum (not Gareth). My friend, Bob, has a new Nikon D300 - man that camera has great high ISO sensitivity and low noise. Awesome. Make the 450D look a bit shit, actually, in that regard, but I was able to get both shots below at ISO 200-400, 30" exposure, f8-9. I have also just got a remote control, so I can move to bulb (i.e. >30s) exposures with mirror lock up, so hopefully I can swap high ISO performance for longer exposures at lower ISO...

Anyway - here are my shots:

The first is looking from Garrett Hostel Bridge towards Trinity Bridge. It was a long exposure (30"), and I may have overcooked it a bit, but there's nice softness on the water, and check out the movement of the tree on the left. It was quite blowy, which has captured a nice effect, I think. What you don't get from this is quite how dark it was - it was very dark, and I only managed to focus by setting one of the focal points to a distant light, then recomposing and pressing the shutter (2 second delay, mirror lock up and then 30" exposure).



The next image is Cambridge's newest attraction. It's the so-called "Chronophage" (time-eater) clock, which forms the corner of the newly refurbished Corpus Christi college. See here or here for more details.



I took this from across the street, with the telephoto on a tripod. I wanted to get the whole thing in the shot, and avoid reflections too. I'll revisit this to get some detail shots sometime also. As it moves, a long exposure led to some very blurry shots, and the beastie couldn't be seen. So, I went for about 1/20 second exposure, to get a mostly-frozen image, and capture it as it looks, backlit in eerie blue. Interestingly (geekily), the shutter speed can be verified, since the second "hand" LEDs do one revolution per second, and there are 3 of them illuminated in the shot, 3/60 = 1/20. Also, note the time - 10:45pm, just before we headed to the nearby Eagle pub for last orders.

Ivan

Now for something a little different...

A few months ago I received permission to spend hours in our local natural history museum photographing bird eggs. Bird eggs have amazing intricate patterns, and they are of different sizes and shapes. Anyway, here are three eggs from a guillemot (seabird for those who are not ornithologically gifted). They are pointed so that they don't roll out of the cliff nest but rather spin on their axis.

Anyway, I shot the eggs using a tripod and some lighting with the eggs on either a white or black mat. I used photoshop to remove the background and create a pure white (255,255,255) or pure black (0,0,0) background. I have lots of images to work through but thought I would share one with you. Damian

On The Road - Mile 2,226

This picture is a crop of a larger shot of the Mexico's Gulf. I burned the blacks to remove the sea. I also wanted to have a minimalism feeling. The lines of the clouds are supposed to give a feeling of movement, the shot being a part of the "On The Road" series.



Here is the original shot :

Aya Sophia Lights

Taken at the Aya Sophia (Hagia Sophia) in Istanbul.

Playing with my new 50mm prime lens. As you'd expect it was very limited light in the interior of the building.

I was drawn to the curlicue lights, the bulbs and that not all were working. Again, I liked the very tight depth of field from the prime lens.

I don't mind the slight lens flare...

What do you think?

f/1.6 1/80sec ISO200

Roots On Venice Beach

Taken 11am on a very bright sunny morning on Venice Beach, LA.

A four piece blues band were busking and I could get in quite close. Liked this shot with the focus as the drummer's hat and the Roots logo. The more obvious shot was the classic look of the vocalist, however I liked dropping him out through the depth of field...

I think it works well in mono.

f/5.6 1/640 ISO200

Comments?

Early winter

Sorry it's been a while since I've posted. Here are a couple. Nothing too spectacular, just a couple of quickies from our big snow storm last weekend.

First: I think I was hoping for more with the icicles. I think the crop helped as there was a lot of other stuff in the frame, but I don't think this is a jump-out-at-you shot. Discuss: how would you have improved it?

Second: One of those snapshot-of-the-pets that appeals mostly to the petowner. I did a little editing with this one, such as removing the fence in the background. I also saturated the horse a bit extra using some layer ideas I got while reading about HDR. I wanted to make the horse look a little more vibrant compared to the surroundings, while not overdoing it, and cropped out the foreground that was basically a bunch of snow. Thoughts? Maybe I should post the original too.

Plus I'll add some quick comments to recent posts here. (i) Love your sandwich bay crop, Damian! (ii) The HDR images: very impressive! I like #2 the best for similar reasons, though #1 is pretty spectacular too. I don't care much for the rocks on the right, though. (iii) Ivan: the Cambridge at night pictures are gorgeous! Shame about the branch in the second one. I do like the first one as well, though, and think that the strange hues and dark foreground give the image a neat eerie feel. Well done!

Another viewpoint on Sandwich Bay

If I saw what Ivan saw on Sandwich Bay this is what I would have done. Just a different viewpoint.

Damian

Light in the Valley

Another shot from the Shropshire archives. This one taken on that recent October trip this year. This was shot from a good distance away, using the telephoto image-stabilised lens all the way out to 600mm.

Lovely light picking out the relief of the land, and the detail of the wet road in the middle slight dip is visible as a nice feature. Great land contours and overall quite pleased with this one.

Ivan

Sandwich Bay - yet another mono

I took lots of pictures of the wet sand patterns when we were there a few weeks ago. I was thinking that, with some post-capture work, they'd come out quite nice, and I think they have.

Enough Sandwich Bay monos..for now.

Ivan

Another from Sandwich Bay

A colour one this time. Concentrating on the wet sand shapes and clouds.

I processed two RAW files to tiffs, then blended them in PS, with some dodging and burning to bring out the contrast in the wet sand patterns. Lightened the strip of sand to enhance the effect. It's more punchy than I saw it, but I like the image.

HDR?

I see lots of HDR images on Flickr. Some of them are great; subtle blending of carefully chosen images to gain a wider exposure range than the camera can normally handle - done well, they should look pretty much like how the eye sees dynamic range (ca. 12 stops) rather than the usual 4-6 stops of digital sensors.

Some of them are total shit. I mean, really freaky looking, and used in circumstances where the contrast range wouldn't be that wide, so they end up looking like high saturation, low contrast crap. Pointless.

I have posted three images, none of them (repeat NONE OF THEM) mine, but all described as HDR on Flickr. I think these are all at the Good end of the spectrum, but I have my fave, and for a reason. Which is your fave, and why, in the context of what you think about HDR images.




I sometimes blend two tiffs (derived from separate workings of the same RAW file) together, to achieve a more natural exposure, but I've never tried - or felt the need - for HDR. CS doesn't do HDR, but I know later versions do.

Have you guys tried this, and, if so, what do you think? Do you have any HDR images to post? If not, what blending techniques do you use?

Discuss.

Ivan

Flickr stats revisited

A while ago, I posted to the blog my thoughts about how I could use Flickr to help me choose/confirm choices for up-coming competitions. Of course, this means I need to get those images on Flickr a good deal before the competitions. Failing that, I can always look back with hindsight, and see if the placings (or not) in competitions match up to the "interest" in an image, as calculated by Flickr.

Below is a screenshot of the most recent stats for my photostream on Flickr. The "star" means favourite by another user, and the bubble means "comment".



Interesting that Window and Chair and Sunset Beach Walkers are up there (in 1st and 3rd place); these did v well for me last year. Bath Crescent is second, but did nothing last year (although did get selected for the Annual Exhibition this year), so not full agreement with the Flickr stats. White Peacock bombed in a recent projected image competition, although is 4th on Flickr. Reculver got a Highly Commended, and it's 5th on Flickr, so not bad there. Shadowman, 6th on Flickr, won me Creative Image of the Year in 2007. Peek-a-boo (Flickr 21) got me a 3rd place, but it's not been on Flickr as long.

So, mixed bag. I think I need to standardise things. I need to submit all images to the same Pools (for exposure to wider Flickr) and then track the interest for a set period of time. I assume views = interest, comments = more interest and favs = more still, which is kind of how Flickr works it out. Also, I think I need to standardise the tags on images. This is almost impossible, since different images need different tags, unless I pick very generic ones (like camera model) or don't use tags at all for all images.

Interesting from yesterday's Cambridge night posts, the order is Kings 1, River Cam 2, Clare Bridge 3, which is what Dams thought too.

Still, useful to see some rough agreement between results and Flickr, but it's not statistically controlled, so impossible to draw any conclusions as currently running.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Ivan

Clare Bridge

Another image from last night.

Clare College Bridge (1640)


Info from Wikipedia:

The oldest of Cambridge's current bridges, this bridge in classical style was built in 1639–40 by Thomas Grumbold (d.1659). It survives as the oldest due to all its contemporaries being destroyed by the parliamentarian forces in the Civil War, to make the town of Cambridge more defensible. Many different stories are told to explain the missing section of the globe second from the left on the south side of the bridge. One rumour is that the builder of the bridge received (what he considered to be) insufficient payment, and in his anger, removed a segment of the globe.

I cropped it quite tightly on top, as there were lots of distractions above - is it too tight? What do you think...?

Ivan

Cambridge by night

Last night, a chum and I headed off to take some long exposure night shots around Cambridge. It was really to help him learn his new DSLR (Nikon D300, the one with the great high ISO performance), since he's quite new to photography, and never had a DSLR before. I was hampered by the fact that I have lost the tripod shoe to attach my camera to the tripod, so had to balance the camera on whatever structures were available. Not ideal, but I coped.

The first image was taken near the Mill pond, by balancing the camera on the camera bag, so quite low down. Long exposure (30", f9, 400 ISO). Got some nice colours and soft movement on the river and sky. It was very dark indeed, so focussing was an issue. I can't rely on manual focus due to wearing glasses, so I locked on to one of the distant lights as a focus point. I also used the live view, but this was bad in such low light to focus.



The next image was again 30", f9, 1SO 400. This was balanced on fence post. The original RAW was very close to this image, but slightly darkened the sky (one RAW processing) and slightly adjusted the foreground and buildings (a second processing of the RAW), and blended the resultant tiffs in PS. I then cloned out some distracting grasses that were right in front of the camera and blurry, adjusted levels, cropped a little and then the image was complete. Quite like this one. It's a shame about the bright branches upper right, but couldn't be avoided due to where I had to place the camera. I considered cloning them out, but couldn't face the hours that would take...



Comments welcomed.

Ivan