Skateboarding on Boxing Day

We went to a school yard nearby to test out this insane skate/snow board hybrid present, I wasn't too keen on breaking a limb but thought I'd take the camera and maybe snap some of the thrills and spills. My sister was directing the off camera flash, hard light coming from camera left, I was wanting to throw a harsh shadow on the brick wall to give it a bit of a grungy look. The second one was just as the sun was setting and the sky looked pretty cool.

When I use off camera flash I always go full manual with both the camera and the flash, this is great because when you get the flash set for a given aperture you can control the ambient just by changing the shutter speed, this is good for to get moody skies.

NB. I have been trying to post these for a few days but it seems the people over at google blogger have had an extended xmas break, all back in working order now. I went to the lake district again today so I'll hopefully have some of those shots up soon. Happy 2009 everyone!

You guessed it, a tree...at sunrise!

Hey folks, I wasn't in the best frame of mind for photos this morning so it became more like a what not to do on a photo outing and if you can still come away with something half way decent you are doing ok. (Remember, it's what not to do, and I did them all!)

1. Set off with no plan of what you intend to shoot.
2. Take the bare minimum in terms of equipment, filters and polarisers just take up space and you won't need them.
3. Leave yourself no time to get to where you wish to take photos.
4. Walk the least distance possible but through bogs that only 50,000 horse power tractors can get through, if possible wear brand new Italian motorcycle boots, oh and clean jeans!
5. Don't worry about checking what ISO you were using last time, it'll probably be a nice noise free 100 anyway.
6. Take a haphazard, almost child like approach to crossing muddy puddles, with equipment depreciation these days you can always just get a brand new camera should it come off the tripod as you skip over the half lit puddles.
7. Spend no time thinking about composition, you'll just over complicate things, is a straight horizon really that important?

This is the result, I'm amazed I managed to remember to take the lens cap off! I got away with being a little lax this time because I was familiar with the surroundings and the equipment. The timing of the shot is critical, shots 10 minutes either side of this one would be moved to deleted pretty much as soon as I got them on the computer. For anyone still following this was a HDR so the shutter varied from 5 secs to about 1/25. ISO was 100 (I do check this without thinking now, despite the above point 5) Keeping ISO's low is extra important when doing HDR stuff, f/16 and 16mm.

I'm adding another shot to this post as I think I prefer it to the HDR look, I'll probably change my mind back as soon as I post it!

More from the Vault

This is an old one I was playing with today, only posting as I have been pretty poor at keeping the blog up to date recently. I'll hopefully get out soon to get some landscapes done as we've had some nice clear weather recently, all be it a mite cold! I'm not too keen on the square (ish) crop, only noticed that a minute ago. I'm sorry if this is a little brief, I'm dashing out so can't give any tips on this one.

Desert Landscape

This was taken out in the desert (surprisingly enough). I didn't have a lot of time to set this one up as I was holding people up. Unfortunately there wasn't a huge amount of foreground interest, unless you count fag packets and plastic bottles, so I tried to do something with the ripples and the reeds. I originally wanted to have a black and white version but I think the colour one just edged it. This was taken at ISO400 (I had a polariser on) f8, 1/100 at 16mm.

HDR in Dubai

I used to do a fair bit of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography but now I tend to just use an ND grad to balance the sky. This is not so easy when you have lots of sky scrapers dissecting the horizon, plus setting up the filter can be a little bit annoying.

This was taken using my 16-35 lens at 19mm, I focused on the horizon and then set it to manual focus, the camera was in full manual mode at f11 ISO100. The only thing I changed was the shutter speed. I used to just bracket 2 stops either side and join the 3 raw files but now I take up to 9 exposures as I think it gives a far better result.
The speeds for this one was 1/15,1/30,1/60,1/125,1/250,1/500,1/1000 and 1/2000 so a stop difference every time (1 stop is half or double the light) or if you aren't great at judging stops, if your camera works in 1/3 stop increments, each stop is a 3 clicks on either the dial or the wheel.

First of Dubai

I'm just posting the first few coming off the card from a recent trip to Dubai, if there is anywhere to practice architectural photography this is it, converging verticals everywhere! I'll hopefully be posting some more of our trip in a few days. These were taken near the marina before the sunrise, a long exposure of about 20 seconds served to really flatten the water and get the mirrored effect.
Obviously I needed the tripod but nothing much else to it, the exif data on these ones was ISO100, 16mm f/8 for 20seconds. I was a bit slack processing them, using noise ninja when not needed etc. So I might redo them at a later date.

Behold The Dawn!

I just found this photo I had been playing with a few weeks ago and forgot about it, there isn't much to be said about it really, I'm not a great fan of using myself as foreground interest but when there is nothing else about you just have to make do.

On an unrelated note, apparently photomatix have released a lightroom plugin for all you HDR enthusiasts, I haven't tried it yet but it sounds like a good idea. Anyway I have to sort some wedding photos from the weekend, have a good week everyone.

Woodland Shoot

I was out in the woods with my niece and nephew and as the weather was nice I thought I'd take the camera. There are quite a few problems using available light in woodland, as there is a lot less light than normal outdoor daytime conditions you have to use ISO levels similar to indoors. The light levels can also vary dramatically, confusing the hell out of your cameras light meter so in some cases you might be better finding a good exposure for your subject and dialing it in on full manual.

This can be seen in the first photo, the bright sun light coming from outside would have cause the subject and woodland interior to be under exposed and although there are some blown highlights I'd take it over a near silhouette. Another issue I find in woodland photos is a murky green colour cast from the leaves that is not the best for skin tones. Shooting in RAW you can adjust the white balance during the editing stage, I warmed these up to around 6000K as it also enhances the autumnal colours, just try not to go overboard.

Self Portraits

I had to send a mugshot type photo of myself to a magazine today and as I haven't posted on here since god knows when I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. I really dislike being on the other side of the camera and I particularly dislike it when I have to use a mirror, I could have set up a tripod and all that but thought it would be a fairly quick affair. So then out came the speed lights and pocket wizards and I got set in front of the mirror.

I have no idea why I decided to take pictures in the bathroom and it was particularly embarrassing when my sister dropped in to see me but I managed to get through it. It was a two light setup with hard light coming from behind me to provide the rim lighting (no I hadn't brushed my hair) and a light in front to 45 degrees to my left. The light in front had an umbrella on in one shot and a home made grid on the other providing two different types of lighting. A decent amount of light bounced from the rear light on the mirror lighting up the room behind me so I just sorted it out with the local adjustment tool in LR2 (now much better after 2.1 patch). I put it in mono as I find it more flattering. The exif was ISO100, 70mm, 1/200 at 5.6.

Sky Library

I went out this morning to get what I thought would be a great sunrise and ended up sitting in the car for an hour as it started raining pretty hard and the sunrise didn't look too promising, the joys of landscape photography! I decided to come home and although the sunrise wasn't that great and there certainly wasn't much foreground interest to properly compose a photo I decided to add to the sky library. These are great to have on your system if you ever need to replace a dull looking sky from an otherwise ok shot. They can be taken whenever you see interesting sky. I have a few sun rises, sun sets, midday blue skies and some moody cloud shots. I don't do a great deal of composite sky shots but is handy just to have the option.

Bolton Abbey Shoot

I was doing a shoot at Bolton abbey with some friends but they were busy at a service so I just got some shots of my girlfriend/assistant.

Conditions were very overcast which I don't generally like as the light is very flat and it's difficult to create any depth but on the otherhand it is very soft with no sharp shadows or 'panda eyes' you can get in harsh afternoon light. I got 5 shots I was happy with and thought I would put a couple up, they were taken around ISO200, 1/500, f/4 at about 70mm, processed first in lightroom then in photoshop, 4 out of the 5 were black and white.

Cows Week

A couple more from the back catalog, I have not done a lot of processing with these really but as you will have noticed I'm back in Black and White mode, I really wanted to use one of the cows bright orange colouring but it just wasn't happening. I was a bit annoyed as when I was snapping these my mate was getting shots of the bull, which I thought was probably a little more photogenic but I had not noticed him until we were leaving, breaking one of my main rules - Avoid the 'walk up' shot and have a look round. Anyway just thought I'd put these up to keep my post rate up.

Smooth Infrareds

I got an infrared filter a few fays ago and have yet to use it, it's just so much easier getting a similar effect in the digital darkroom. This is a shot I have processed largely using silver efex pro. I like the IR effect, especially on the sky but I'm not a great fan of the glow you tend to get from traditional IR photos. The benefit of doing it digitally is you can experiment and see the results straight away. With this shot I wanted to retain some detail in the grass and the leaves that the IR glow would lose.

Last of the Mud Flats

These were from the maybe pile from last week that I decided to tinker with and was quite happy with the results. The light was going quite quickly in these shots so there has been a decent amount of recovery both in lightroom and in photoshop. Lightrooms gradient tool and local adjustment brush are awesome, I highly recommend it if you shoot a lot of RAW's.

These were taken at similar settings, 16mm, f/16, ISO100 and around 2 seconds exposure. Again I warmed the tones up by adjusting the WB in lightroom, I wasn't after a high contrast HDR look but I did bring back some detail with the local adjustment brush on the rocks and the gradient on the sky.

Highland Cattle

I got this one a few days ago at the end of a bit of a photo walk, We came across a field of highland cattle who must be fairly used to visitors. I managed to get closer and closer until after about 10 minutes this one came over to check out what was going on. This was taken about 0.5 a second before he licked the front of the lens. I wanted to get really wide so I was at 16mm at f/5.6 and 1/250 to ensure there was no motion, I still had a circular polariser and an ND grad on the lens, as I'd been shooting landscapes so I had to pump up the ISO to 400, the colour version has quite vivid blues from the sky and oranges from the cattle but I like the mono version as it accentuates the low sun side lighting we were getting, especially on his nose!

Seascape at Sunset

Another one from our trip to the lakes, this was overlooking the Morecambe Bay area during the last few minutes of sunlight, the tide was very far out leaving large bodies of water between the sand (or mud) banks, as there are no waves the water is very still and ideal for reflections, I was a little annoyed at the ripple saw after we got back but there you go. The original was quite a cool tone so I warmed up the white balance in Lightroom, one of the enormous benefits of shooting in RAW. This was shot with my 3 stop ND grad at ISO100, 17mm, f/16 at 1/2 second.

Boat at Low Tide

I've just come back from a few days in the Lake District and have started processing some shots. This one was one of my favorites. I used a very low angle to really include pebbles and hyper focal distancing to ensure all but the very closest stones were in focus. I have a colour version which I really like but I've decided to post this mono version. I'll hopefully put a few more up this weekend. As I didn't have my tripod I had to make sure any exposure had to be over say 1/100 as I was lying on the pebbles I wasn't confident to go any slower and keep the camera steady. I had a 3 stop ND filter attached to keep the sky from going places it shouldn't! This was taken at 16mm at ISO200, 1/160 at f/9.

Architecture in Leeds

I was on a shoot in Leeds last week that called for some architectural shots so I headed for the townhall with a view of doing something with the columns. I wanted to concentrate on the transition of light to shadow on the circular pillars and the shadows they were casting, as I had a feeling I would be doing a mono conversion. I was using my 70-200 lens as I wanted to isolate certain details, I knew if I had my wide angle on I was bound to get some bystander as it was quite busy and I didn't want to spend hours cloning out afternoon shoppers. I took quite a few shots like this but I stuck with this one as I liked the leading line element to the black door, I was lucky with the shadow of the lamp above it too. This was taken at 70mm, f/4 @ 1/400 ISO100.

1 Strobe, Choose your background

Hi folks, I've been playing with my pocket wizards again just experimenting with exposures with one flash off camera and some light coming in from the window. This was quite a quick setup in the living room with no clear backgrounds, I have done a shot to demonstrate what was in the background (a couch!). I didn't have any willing subjects so I had to use my wii guitar.

I think ambient exposure was about 1/100 at 2.8 ISO400. From this I can now choose if the background can be blown out white or Black, obviously for a white background there also needs to be something lighting your subject or you would get a silhouette, in this case the light came from the window.

So to blow out the background I had my flash pointed at the ceiling at 1/4 power, my camera set to 2.8 ISO400, 1/200sec, the window light exposed the guitar and the flash blew out the background.

Now to make the background black I had to eliminate all ambient light so I set my camera to 1/200 (I couldn't go any quicker as this is the 5D's x-sync speed) ISO100 and f16. The drop in ISO and aperture would also reduce the effect of the flash. The flash was now lighting the guitar, it was still at 1/4 power but I set the zoom (on the flash) to 85mm to reduce the spread and had it coming in from about 45 degrees to the right, this was important as I didn't want any spill onto the background, not to mention the horrible sharp shadow it would have produced. Instead of increasing or decreasing the power of the flash I just changed the distance between flash and subject and thats about it. I did a very minor tweak in lightroom to ensure the blacks were black and the whites were white but nothing else.

Sports Portraits

I did some more outdoor lighting yesterday with my nephew playing football (a big man city fan). This was a 3 light setup with two speedlights behind and to the side of the subject, providing rimlighting, and another just off to camera right. This was quite tough as there was only a small area of space that was lit by all three lights, I could have probably made it easier by removing the one to the camera right behind the subject and increasing the spread of the remaining lights but then I wouldn't have got the rim lighting I was after. The light levels were also dropping quite quickly but I wanted a small amount of ambiant light to get the motion blur. This was taken in full manual 1/125, f11, ISO400 34mm.

Off Camera Portraits

I've recently bought a couple more pocket wizards that allow me to use more lights off camera, this was from a few quick shots we got in the garden. It was a two light setup with an umbrella to camera right and a bare light behind the subject to camera left providing a little separation light from the background. I'm going to use another light behind the subjects to the camera right. This was taken on full manual, both lights and camera, the exif was f/11, 1/200 sec. ISO400 at about 150mm. Sorry for the quick post but will do a more detailed version when I get a better shot.

More Bales

There was some really nice light this evening so I dashed out to my nearest field that I knew had some hay bales in it. Nothing extraordinary really but it was nice to be out doing a landscape, I'm doing quite a lot of strobist type shots at present and hope to post some soon. As always with my landscapes I did a mono conversion and decided it was slightly better but there wasn't much in it. I used my trusty 3 stop ND grad filter but thought it was a bit strong so I brought the sky back about a stop using the local adjustment gradient in Lightroom. The exif was my safe 16mm, f/16, ISO 100, 1/6 sec, I forgot to take my infrared filter with me, must remember for next time.

Pre Wedding Portraits

I had a pre wedding meeting yesterday with a couple we are covering in a few weeks and I thought I might use some off camera flash, I've been reading a lot of strobist, if you haven't been it's worth a look for techniques and inspiration. Anyway as the sun had pretty much dipped over the horizon I wanted to do something with the sunset, but not have the couple as silhouettes, so in full manual I metered for the sky and got f5.6 at 1/160 sec (ISO100) I had a flash to the left through an umbrella and it was just a case of changing the flash power (I ended up at about 1/4 power with an old SB28, I know, a Nikon!) I could have darkened the sky by simply adjusting the shutter speed. I tweaked the shot in lightroom, I originally added a textured layer in photoshop but decided it made the photo look like it was on a backdrop so I binned it. I was going to do a mono conversion but decided it wasn't necessary

New Macro Lens

I recently bought the Sigma 150mm Macro (after reluctantly selling my 50mm version) so I decided to have a few test shots with it. I used a 580EX off camera to let me use a narrower aperture (to increase DOF). I didn't spend too long on these really, I just wanted to get some pictures as it was raining quite hard outside. These were taken at ISO200, f8, 150mm, 1/125 sec, on full manual mode as I was using a flash, the shutter speed was enough to cut out any ambient light.

Chester Zoo

I went to Chester Zoo at the weekend, I wasn't expecting to get too much but I was quite surprised with some of the ones I came away with. I had to pump up the ISO on some of the shots and was thankful of the image stabilizer on my 70-200 lens. I've processed them all in mono because I quite liked the effect and did a little doging and burning in photoshop, the gallery with the 12 I processed can be seen here.

Crazy Stunts

We went to the Llangollen Balloon festival at the weekend, didn't see a great deal of balloons as the weather was pretty poor but the stunt bikes were pretty amazing, the lads did a victory lap at the end and they all looked about 12! Anyway this is a little different from the stuff I normally shoot so it was a nice change. I was shooting on Shutter priority as I needed to freeze the action more than anything, so that was set to 1/800, ISO 200 using a 70-200 focal range, the appertures were usually about f9, AF mode was set to Al Servo.

More Landscapes

Thought I'd post a couple of landscapes I got earlier today, I've been waiting for the clouds to be just right, they came in a little towards the end but I was quite pleased with these. I did a little dodging and burning both in LR2, with the local adjustment brush and then a little more in CS3. I liked how both images semed to have a different feel to them even though they were only teken about 30 minutes apart. No foreground interest or leading lines in the second one but I thought the sky was great.

Last Macro

I'm putting this one up because it'll probably be the last shot I take with my sigma 50mm macro lense as I'm selling it, I'll probably be tempted to buy another at some point but the proceeds will go towards it's bigger (heavier) brother. Anyway this was just a quick shot of an echinacea plant (I think) Taken at f2.8 50mm, ISO800 1/30, I was surprised there was no camera shake, especially as I was in an odd shooting position. I processed it with niksoftwares silver efex pro. If anyone is thinking about getting this lense my advice would be to go for it, you won't be disappointed, although the longer variants (105/150/180mm) are probably better for insects.

Farmers!

I ran past a field today full of hay bails bathed in glorious morning sunlight, excellent I thought, I'll bring back the camera in the evening and get some shots. I returned this evening to find the farmer had collected anything resembling foreground interest and the sun had been replaced by overcast skies, most frustrating. Anyway I decided to do a bit of HDR because I hadn't done any for a while. Anyway this is my only one worth posting, it was the only leading line I could find!

Back in Black

This is one I got last night during a break in editing wedding stuff, haven't done any landscapes for a bit so it was nice to get out. I was trying a new (ish) black and white plugin for photoshop called silver efex (by niksoftware) it seemed pretty good, it's one of these that claim to replicate film black and whites etc. I was going to take out the tower but thought I'd just leave it in as it was only a snap shot really. Shot with a 3 stop ND filter at f16, 16mm, 1/10 ISO100.

Lightroom 2

Hi Everyone, just putting this post up as I've been playing with the new version of adobe's lightroom, first impressions are that it's pretty impressive. There are plenty of review sites and tutorials about all the new features, I like to have a bit of a play round instead of reading the manual. There are loads of additions to the develop panel, one that caught my eye is the graduated filter. It used to be that if you wanted to say darken the sky slightly you had to open your RAW files in CS3 then add a gradient layer and change your blend mode but now you can do it all in LR. This picture is an example of a coloured grad I added to an old photo I never got round to processing. There are plenty of other features to streamline your workflow, that sounds so much like managerial bull***t, but it's true. There are some performance issues being talked about, I have noticed on my fairly old computer it does slow down but never locks up or crashes, people fortunate to have quadcore, watercooled computers say it all works fine so it looks like I may have to get a few upgrades!

Photoshop Actions

I've recently been using a lot of actions in photoshop and came across this site called PanosFX. He has loads of free photoshop actions to try, I used an action called 'the big picture' on a photo I took of a poppy field a while back. It takes a few moments to run the action as it needs to cut out bits and create drop shadows and that sort of thing but once it's done it gives quite a nice effect. There are other actions to try but I thought I'd post this as it is one of my favs.

Contrast

Contrast is the dissimilarity or difference between things, acording to wiki.

I'm adding this because I submitted it to a contest on my favorite photo forum, talkphotography.co.uk. It has contests every month and I sometimes have a punt, this months subject was contrast, quite a tough one really, a lot of black and white images as you might suspect, heres my take on it.
A simple flash setup with lighting coming from a single 580EXII to the left the black polo was changed in CS3, not as easily as I first suspected. First I applied a layer mask (cutting out the polo using the pen tool) and just added an inverted adjustment layer, the problem with it is it turns the black shadows white which isn't what I wanted. I went back to the layer mask and used a levels adjustment to just bring down the levels of white and grey to black.