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.