Week 10 - A Castle in HDR

The HDR plugin I use for Aperture - Photomatix Pro - has been updated to 64-bit, so I thought I would give it a try with a series of photos I made this morning of our local castle - Dundonald castle in Ayrshire, Scotland.

Bye the way, having a local Castle is no biggy here in Scotland - they are everywhere :-)

Right, here are the originals, taken from -2 to +2 exposures:







And here is the finished article:


I used almost all of the sliders in the Photomatix Pro plug-in, but it is not necessary to do that, if you don't want to - good results can be had just by using the presets.

While this Castle is not the most photogenic, it does have some advantages - it is quite high, and it overlooks the village of Dundonald which, if you get it at the right angle and the right light, can look quite charming - but that's for another day :-)

So, does the 64 bit plug-in improve things for doing HDR from with-in Aperture? Well, Photomatix are going to hate me, but I didn't notice any vast improvement over the 32-bit plug-in. But what this plug-in does, it does well, and well enough to fit pretty much seamlessly into my Aperture workflow for HDR sessions. The resulting .tiff files are large, but Aperture just gulps them in and continues on with only a small pause in processing to indicate a larger than usual file.

The upgrade to 64-bit is free, the installation can be manual or via a supplied installer. All-in-all, this upgrade went smoothly, the plug-in worked flawlessly and the result was a smooth production of an HDR photo. Next time, I'll choose something a bit more photogenic!

Week 9

As anyone following this "Project 52" will know I am about 8 weeks behind.

While I could just take any old snap and post it up here, I do not think that would be right - I would rather go after a shot and not get it than post something that was just a "fill".

Todays pic is one of what I hope will become a set - "New Growth" is how I think of it and it is all mixed up with changes taking place in my life just now and springtime and natural progression.
Don't worry, I am not going to go all David DuChemin on you guys, but things are changing for me and I am spending more time contemplating everything than I have in many years.

Enough of the navel-gazing - here is this weeks simple image, entitled "Potential"



Taken while I was walking in a small nature reserve about 3 miles from my house, I was concentrating so hard on getting the shot I missed a couple of potential images that could have been the subject of a post by themselves.
Rest assured I will try for them again....

Post processing was done in Aperture and was mainly a levels adjustment (RGB), some exposure compensation, a push to the contrast, some minor saturation increase and some burning of the flash highlights to tone them down.

Here is the original so you can see for yourself.


To my mind, this is "washed out" by the fill flash and needs the boosts given to it in pp.

If you disagree, or would like to say anything - leave a comment - all are appreciated.

Till next time.... oh, by the way, this and a couple of others I took today are in the "Project 52" gallery - perhaps you would like to check them out?

PS: I am trying out some techniques put forward in this book

Week 8

And once again, I am falling behind (or should I say still behind!)

These photos are actually the only photographs I have taken since the daffodil nearly a fortnight ago.

How sad :-(

I could plead time constraints, work commitments etc, but you don't want to hear that - you just want the photos!

Today, I couldn't make up my mind which one(s) I liked best so I am including several.

Here's the first:


This is actually one of the last I shot today. I wanted to portray a glass in a seedy, low-lit cocktail bar, with garish pink and blue neon lights and what I think of as a "50's" atmosphere.
Check out the full size one here, and check out some of the others I shot getting to the glass - they are all in the Project 52 gallery.


These two were shot early on, and the blue one is shot with one flash, the other had both flashes on.


I liked the double one in blue because of the "ring of blue" in the water at the side of the picture, and the other one because of the red areas on the right. They both surprised me with the way they turned out.

The setup for these is minimal in terms of space, but I used radio triggers for the flashes and acrylic sheets for the colours - well, just see for yourself:

You can see the simple setup here: see-through box files, some coloured acrylic sheets and a black backcloth. The flash setup was fairly easy, except that they are different guide numbers and need to be set on different power levels to achieve an even balance.

Here's a different angle.



I hope you like these. I found it fun to do, and simple, and I learned some more about setting up my flashes etc.

Week 7

Apologies, I'm a little late with this one.

I obtained a lens from e-bay and I wanted to try it out with flash on a subject that was in a "still life" type of shot.

Here's the result:


The lens is a 50mm f1.7 manual focus type - but it is 25+years old. It is built like a tank, the glass is clean and unscratched, no fungus - and best of all it just fits on my camera with no drama at all. The price? £27.
Colour me well pleased!

Note that in the exif information shown in the actual Project 52 gallery the f-stop is given as zero - this is because the lens is old that it doesn't pass any information back to the camera. With this lens on the Pentax K200D it asks you at start up what to set the focal length to - 50mm obviously - and from then on, it "knows" how to handle the lens.

Here's the setup shot:


The single flash can just be seen in the top left corner, and the two reflectors were an attempt to soften the shadows at the bottom of the flower. A radio trigger was used to fire the flash, which was set to manual, 1/4 power, and zoomed right out. Post processing consisted of an "enhance preset" in Aperture and a little leaning on the recovery slider to tone down some highlights.

For the purists ( or the judges at my club ) I know the left rear petals are actually not sharp, and I know it is because I did not have the camera in a parallel plane to the flower, so let me just say it for you:
"This is a nice picture of a daffodil, and it would have scored better, except that it is not sharp all the way through the frame. This scores 11 out of 20".

My reply is: "I like it", shrugs shoulders, walks away.

Week 6

The Falls

Scotland (or at least my bit of it! ) was blessed with a cold sunny day today, so I decided to catch up with my Project 52 schedule and go make an image.

This is what I came up with:


I was wandering around a country park and the scene above caught my eye. You come upon the burn unexpectedly as the bridge over it is just an ordinary looking footbridge and the water is hidden by the trees on the right of the frame.
All in, a nice pleasant scene. As it was a still day, I was going to set up my tripod and take a few more shots to try to turn the water milky, but a party of tourists started straggling along so I moved on as my tripod would have severely restricted traffic on the bridge.

So nothing special this week, just a pleasant scene. I applied a few adjustments in Aperture to increase the contrast a little, and give the rocks some colour, but that was all.

As luck would have it, this was my first shot of the day, and it was the one I liked best out of the 30-40 I shot today. Hope you enjoy it.

Week 5

Something for the Web

I have finally got around to posting a Book Review on Project 12, and as part of my "Web Site Beautification" drive, I decided to prepare a custom header for the Project 12 web page.

Here is the finished header - or you could just view the Project 12 page !


There was no special setup involved here - black backcloth, books propped vertically, and flash in P-TTL ( Pentax version of smart through the lens flash adjustments) bounced of the (white) ceiling.
I did try using a black shiny surface for a reflection, but I wasn't happy with the results, so I dropped it.

(And yes, Light Science & Magic is in there twice - because it deserves to be read twice!)

The process was a little bit mechanical - take picture, check for faults, repeat until done.

Then I used a Mac specific graphics program called Pixelmator, where I just made a new graphic the exact size of the required header, opened all the pictures in Pixelmator, selected the bits I wanted from each picture and then placed them in my new graphic. A background bucket fill to black, along with a few brush strokes to clean up some bits of the various selections and there you have it.

Probably took longer to type this than to do.

I have an idea for some "Golden Hour" pictures for next week so I hope the weather co-operates.

Week 4

Creative Process

What is it? How does one become "creative"? Why is it so easy for some people and not for others? Why do some people learn to be creative, while others just "don't get it"?
I don't know.
I can say about myself, that I am not inherently "creative". I don't have blinding flashes of ideas that spring fully formed into my head. For me, the process is one of "see something, think about it, try it, see where it takes me" rather than original thought.
On my good days, I'm OK with that. Bad days are another story.....

So, to this weeks photo - an attempt to represent the start of the creative process.

Here is the finished photograph:


Infinite Possibilities

I was going for a high-key picture of the almost limitless possibilities of the creative process at the very start.
In my mind, an artist staring at a blank canvas represents all the choices they have, but the minute the first line is drawn, the process starts to narrow the choices...

Anyway, enough of the navel-gazing.

Here is the setup shot:

Setup Shot

Yes, that is a Pringles can there - you can read all about it here - and I am using my wireless triggers for flash activation. I find they are more reliable than the built-in "wireless" mode on the camera.
The flashes were set on manual, and the light was incrementally adjusted until I got what I wanted. No magic bullet, just trial and error.

I liked the end result, despite the loss of definition of the canvas on the left hand side. That blown area ( to me ) speaks of the creative process arriving in a flash of light.

The final photo is now in the Project 52 gallery