Terrific, just terrific. A weekend of sea mist, rain and dull skies.

I managed to dodge the showers long enough to spend half an hour around Nairn, looking for something blue to photograph.

I found a few blue boats and doors etc...but the flat light and dull clouds really washed everything out. I'd say I'm an intermediate Photoshop user and the rubbish I produced this weekend was way beyond saving with my limited post processing skills.

At least all the chores I've not done for a while got up to date...sigh...

Hopefully the weather will brighten and I'll get the opportunity to go fishing in the hills next weekend, always a good photo there...

Finally, I'm thinking about doing a few blogs on my photowalks around Scotland, when and where I go, maps and so forth....if you think it's a good idea then either leave a comment below or twitter me.

plog?

No picture today!

I thought I'd type some stuff. I guess the big revelation over the last few days was that people actually read my blog! So to the handful of people that are looking at this every day and those that drop in from time to time...hello!

Anyway, there's some things I'd really like you to look at if you've got time, firstly the awesome Frederick Van (Johnson) has posted this excellent interview with Photoshop guru John Nack. In the interview the thing that interests me the most are Johns comments on a multi-shot depth of field type function that might work in a similar way to HDRs. I'm not doing the concept justice, so go listen to John and have a look around Freds excellent & varied video blog. (vlog? ...0log?...vidlog?...whatever)

For a lesson in how to do a photography blog (plog?) look at 365 to 42, by Brett Trafford. For a newbie like me this sets the bar for what I want to archive with my blogging (bloggery?). His photos (especially the birds) are tack sharp and gorgeous and backed up by really insightful text. There's also Brett Trafford Photography which has more of a tutorial feel to it and is shaping up to be a belter.

Anyway the weather forecast for tomorrow is excellent and my challenge for the week is 'Blue' as per the latest TWIP photo challenge. Hopefully some blue skies or blue seas or something - the standard of these contests is incredible but as I've said before, as a newbie I really like going out with a subject of some kind in mind. Even if I have nothing remotely near the quality of the stuff in the competition I will have had fun trying.

Passing Place

Passing Place, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Let’s talk about HDR.

There’s a debate going on about HDRs and I think there is an element of snobbery around the whole thing. Firstly, the initially idea around a High Dynamic Range picture was that it would (doh) boost the dynamic range, bringing up shadows, correcting the exposure in a sky or adding tones and depth in under-exposed areas. Essentially, making a ‘normal’ picture better. With tools like Photomatix it’s possible to boost these levels beyond reality, creating some bizarre, unusual and surreal images that only bear a basic compositional similarity to the original picture.

Your HDR snobs (like Conrad Obregon in this book review on TWIP) think that ‘overcooking’ a HDR is somehow distasteful. Personally I liked to blur the line a bit, choosing to boost the contrast & saturation just slightly over what my eye sees as ‘normal’.

This lends a kind of oil-painting feel to my pictures that I really like, it gives my landscapes a sense of individuality. So in Conrad's (and plenty of others) eyes does this make me a bad photographer?

Interestingly, the more I overcook an image and the weirder it looks, the more plaudits and awards I receive on Flickr, “Cats Sunset” (see below) is my most successful picture on flickr to date, hundreds of views, several awards and loads of positive feedback. It’s also the most over-processed picture I’ve ever done. It’s actually a very dull landscape, rocky beach, tree and a little bit of sea water coupled with a moderately spectacular sky. It was fun to do as I was learning Photomatix, but I think that my ‘Storm Clouds’ shot is much more dramatic and significantly less processed than ‘cats sunset’. To date, ‘Storm Clouds’ has attracted less than half the comments and views of ‘cats sunset’.

So does that mean a ‘good’ HDR can be a ‘bad’ photo?

I don’t know, I’ve found my personal approach to doing it, I’m enjoying it, learning loads along the way and for the first time, attracting some great (positive and negative) comments for my work. I still take plenty of non HDR images; most of my portraits, macro and so forth are all just touched up in Photoshop.

HDR is simply a different take on things, like using a filter, or colouring your pictures in Photoshop or anything. It’s also new, and as with all new things it’s viewed with ignorance and used ignorantly. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder so find your personal way of doing your HDRs and enjoy it! Okay rant over,

***Edit - I originally stated that Scott Bourne wrote the article on TWIP mentioned in the above post - it's important to note that he did not. Apologies to Scott for misquoting him - Twitter is broken so I can't apologise personally.***

The Path Home

The Path Home, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Okay,

Talk about highs and lows; I had a wonderful end to the week, fishing over on the West coast with my dad. Great fishing and some brilliant landscape fodder. Photomatix has been doing overtime and the above is one of the results. You can see the full set over on my Picasa site.

From a great few days holiday to a tragedy. As mentioned in a previous blog post, Jye our 12 year old German shepherd had to be put down on Friday night. I can’t put into words how much we’ll miss her, it’s awful not having her around. I’ve not gone back to the beach where we spent so much time…going to wait a few weeks before I face that. Jye was the most photogenic dog in the world and I’m working on one of these Photobooks to see if I can find a way

To try and fill the ‘fluffy space’ in our lives, meet Sol, the latest addition to my family. He is 10 weeks old, very cute and came to us free of charge – who could refuse?

The Jellyfish Road

The Jellyfish Road, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Quite a productive weekend with the camera. As mentioned in a post last week, I always try to set myself a goal when I go out to take photos. Based on the last weeks (excellent) TWIP podcast, I decided to take more pictures portrait style rather than landscape style.

As someone who takes a lot of landscapes, this was surprisingly difficult and posed some interesting compositional challenges. Fortunately, the constantly changing Nairn seascape came to my rescue with 1000’s of beached Jellyfish, stretched in a long line across the beach. When the tide goes out in Nairn it really goes out, opening up about a mile of desert-like beach and these fellas were sitting about halfway down the beach.

I assume they were dead? They aren’t exactly the most mobile of creatures….not sure if they go dormant and wait for the tide again? Anyway, it made the walk along the beach quite surreal and from a photographic point of view an ideal opportunity to shoot a landscape style picture in a portrait format. The result is above and I’m really pleased with it.

As per most of my recent pictures, it’s a HDR but I was very gentle with the tone mapping, just bring the contrast up and trying to highlight the brilliant colours of the Jellyfish. I took a load of close-ups of the prettier ones, they look a bit like flat marbles, with the swirl of colour through the middle. I’m working on some kind of montage of these and will post shortly.

I’ve not managed to be on Culbin beach at low tide before, and it’s a hugely atmospheric place, the challenge is adding some foreground interest when surrounded by so much…nothing. The only thing to break up the otherwise empty landscape are these posts…possibly the remnants of an old pier or something…you can see my efforts here and here.

In other news, I continue to develop a love of my new Lightroom>Photoshop workflow, rather than Olympus Master>(several crashes)>Picasa>Photoshop….as someone who only shoots several hundred shots a week rather than a pro who might shoot several thousand, Lightroom really does the job, I think I’ll wait until Lightroom v2 comes out, which looks even better.

Lightrooms ability to process several tasks at once (like exposing the same RAW 6 times for a HDR image) yet still allowing you to continue working is a Godsend, I’m still getting my head around catalogues and whether I really need them but aside from this and a few minor niggles it’s great.

Finally, I’m getting increasingly annoyed with the bad-press that HDR’s seem to be getting…I’ll rant about that this week at some point and also I hope to have another trip out with the camera on Thursday or Friday this week, so hopefully some more eye-candy then.

"Fields" Triptych

"Fields" Triptych, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Frustrating and stressful weekend!

The stress: my dog isn't well....probably on her last legs which isn't great news. Jye is just about the only member of my family who can put up with me when I'm out and about with the camera. Ah well...she's 12 which is a good age for German shepherds...she'll be missed...excuse me....manly sniff...

The frustration: maybe it was the worry about Jye, but I just couldn't take a good picture on my Saturday trip out with the camera. Every shot I took looked boring, done before and the blazing sunshine (whilst great) meant a lot of blown shots and the Oly white balance/exposure compensation doing overtime.

I was also exploring new territory, around the Howforth bridge. It's a really agricultural area to south of Nairn and following on from my successes with fields last week, I wanted to get some more 'pastoral' type scenes.

Okay so you've got great weather, rolling green hills, interesting subject matter? And the result? Not very much really.

So anyway...I decided to resort to some photoshop practice and using a template from the May issue of 'Digital Photo' - I created the attached. I'm quite pleased with it...it makes 3 rather dull pictures look a bit more interesting and I learned a fair bit about using the 'transform', 'distort' and 'skew' commands in PS.

Finally, "Cats Sunset" becomes my first picture to win awards on flickr and has had over 130 views! Not bad for a noob with 7 months experience.

Oh and even more finally, I was approached by Ed O' Keefe, asking if he could critique - "Greenweed" on his site. He's given a really balanced view of the pic and even gone as far as tweaking the pic himself to show how he would have done it! Not sure if I entirely agree, but it's really flattering to get critiqued on his external site.

Interesting that he's also challenged the horizon position...note that all the pics on todays blog entry are rule of thirds compliant :)

Cats Sunset

Cats Sunset, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Workflow woes

I ranted the other day about trying to manage my pictures from a RAW to finished JPEG.

This may be because of my newbie status, but I really like Googles “Picasa” Software for browsing my pictures, deleting some and making basic adjustments such as straightening horizons, cropping and I also find Picasa’s ‘Gradient’ tool really simple for making skies more dramatic. I then use Photoshop for the more complex dodging/burning/levels/etc. Also with Picasa, you can upload pictures to your personal online webalbum with one click (rather than 31,000 clicks in Flickr)

However, on advice from fellow-photographers, TWIP and assorted other sources I recently began shooting almost exclusively in RAW, this mostly because I’ve fallen in love with HDR’s but also because of the flexibility in post processing that RAW allows.

The downside of Picasa as my ‘workflow’ manager is that whilst it understands what an Olympus RAW is, Picasa cannot make intrusive (save-able) changes to it, and forces you to save a JPEG copy.

I don’t like Adobe’s ‘Bridge’ software (too clumsy, too difficult to see pictures, doesn’t display Olympus RAW files) and I loathe, no I despise…no I detest Olympus Master – the abundantly awful bundled software that I got with the camera.

So….enter Adobe Lightroom. I’ve downloaded a free trial and it seems to be what I’m looking for. I played with it for a few hours last night and the above picture was one of the results. Some great little things:

* It’s quick – even the 10mp RAW files load fast.
* It looks good, the menus are fairly intuitive.
* It’s clever…you can ‘stack’ tasks, so instead of waiting for a RAW conversion, the conversion ticks away in the background and I get to work on the something else. I had 11 tasks working away last night! Olympus master implodes after one.

Some really annoying little things:

* Adobe are paranoid about ‘intrusive’ changes. Which is a good thing…unfortunately they seem to have taken this a tad too far in Lightroom, there doesn’t’ appear to be a ‘save’ button….you can ‘export’ pictures, create virtual copies, update catalogues, tweak libraries but you can’t actually save anything. This makes me nervous that the changes I’ve done to an image haven’t actually been applied.


* The whole catalogue & library thing is probably the most counter-intuitive thing about Lightroom. I just don’t understand it and to be honest I don’t think I need to. I’m very fussy about disk management, delete hundreds of unwanted pictures and I have a filing system that works. The catalogue seems to mean ‘folder’ and the library seems to translate as ‘a database full of your photo folders’. I could be spectacularly wrong about that…

I’ve yet to try tweaking jpegs in it. Essentially Lightroom is Picassa with RAW integration, but I like more and more each time I use it – I’ll keep you updated.

Anyway enjoy the pic - over 90 views of 'Greenweed' on flickr...must be doing something right!

grassandwire

grassandwire, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

I was chatting with uber-underwater photographer John, about the rule of thirds and how, on a lot of my landscapes my horizon sits in the middle of the shot, and should either be a third or two thirds from the bottom of the frame…so you get more sky or more land, depending on what is more dramatic. It’s one of these rules that is can be used to great effect or completely ignored.

I decided that on my weekend trip out and about, I’d focus on two things – firstly looking for landscapes that would help feed my ongoing HDR fetish and secondly, taking pictures that either complied with the RO3rds or challenged it!

So, here’s ‘grass&wire’…I’ve taken a fair few barbed wire shots…probably something Freudian about that…anyway, I noticed that the wire fence could be used to form a meticulous “rule of thirds” grid if I shot it straight on, so I decided to get as low as possible and shoot diagonally at the fence, grabbing a bit of barbed wire and some silhouetted grass stems in the process. I doubt the pic would win any awards, but as a beginner I’m really pleased that I’m slowly starting to form an understanding of what my photographic style will be and interpret these tried and tested concepts into my own language.

Something I’m finding increasingly useful when I’m out with the camera is setting myself tasks. Such as “challenge the rule of thirds” or “depth of field” or a theme like “strength” or “rocks” or whatever…competitions are a great way of getting ideas for challenges, I’ve only ever entered a couple of the competitions but I’ve used dozens of their themes. Living in Scotland with so much landscape, it’s often difficult to give a big beach shot perspective or inject drama into open moorland.

If you look at one of my favorite Scottish flickr photographers, Craig Robertson, you can see how he often uses seemingly insignificant things in very grand locations to capture the mood or feel of the place he’s shooting. His jaw-dropping shot of Nairn beach is one I try and emulate on a fortnightly basis! This shot of Loch Ashie sums up my point entirely. I studied this shot for some time…trying to comprehend Craigs ability that despite being so dwarfed by the majestic surroundings (that have been snapped a million times) he was able to focus on a few boring stalks and then work miracles. Well worth a look.