Frosty Things...

A nightmare few weeks, family illness, work and a host of other things have conspired against me getting out with the camera and also blogging.

After what felt like the wettest, most miserable autumn in history, my corner of Scotland finally moved into winter over last weekend. As result we got frost, lots and lots of frost. We got frost on frost, which makes for photographic gold, especially after weeks of rain.

So off I went for a jaunt around the river. The key thing to remember when taking pictures of frost is white balance, white is actually a really complicated colour photographically, depending on the ambient light in your composition, your camera can struggle to get ‘real’ white. This is where white balance comes in. I have a lovely feature on my trusty E-510 that enables me to balance my whites by taking a shot of something I know is white, like a piece of white paper. So you take a snap of the paper whilst in the field and that automatically calibrates white based on the paper. This is fine, provided the light doesn’t change, in which case things can get a little weird and you need to re-calibrate.

Anyway, with white paper in hand, I managed to get some winter-themed shots. When everything is covered in frost, I find it gets both easier and harder to take a good photo. The tree in todays picture was one of my better attempts, the challenge (once again) is composition, whilst this shot shows the tree in all it’s chilly glory, you don’t really get an idea of just how thick the frost was. But I like it, you can see the whole bunch on my Picasa photo stream and the best of them on my flickr stream.

In other news, I’ve been approached to contribute some photo’s to a local website and I really like feel like I’m slowly starting to raise my photographic profile within the local community. Which is nice.

Finally, much kudos to JT and his brilliant “Simply Superb Swans” website. He’s just posted some great photo’s of ‘a year in the life’ of the River Nairn and it’s inhabitants. I love the documentary style of the pictures, interspersed with some really creative photos. Well worth a look…

Unsure if I’ll get another chance to blog before Christmas, so have a good one and barring further crises, I’ll be back on the blog in the New Year :)

Photo Objectives & why they (sometimes) don't matter

It’s been a slow month photographically. I had a great week off at the end of October; we spent a couple of days ina Aviemore, staying at the brilliant Hilton Coylumbridge. It’s one of my favourite hotels, feels more like a little community than a hotel, the food is brilliant and the a few days there is a great way to relax and get away from it all.

Photographically, Aviemore is a real treasure chest of opportunities. It has one of the largest arboreal forests left in Scotland, which looks stunning in autumn, the gorgeous Loch Morlich, which nestles in the forest and I haven’t got onto the pleasing pointy-ness (not a word, but should be) of the Cairngorm mounting range.

But the Gods of photography did not smile on me. Low cloud and crappy weather conspired against me and I struggled to get any decent shots. Photographing autumn colours is a real skill by the way. My mate Ted has nailed it, as have many other photographers, the challenge is composition, you have the dilemma of getting the blaze of autumn foliage in enough detail, coupled with the challenge of giving the shot some context. I struggled with this, especially given the flat, dull, damp weather conditions. In fact, my favourite shot of the time spent there is a black and white one, taken on one of my dawn strolls. I went out with the objective of shooting landscapes, sunrises and mountains, but came back with this shot and a few of the forest. I’ve talked before about setting objectives when you go out with the camera, but sometimes it pays to be flexible with that objective if the conditions/environment isn’t right. The shot below was taken in RAW at ISO 200 & F22 about 20 minutes before sunrise. This aperture slows the shutter and creates that the blurred water effect, but by shooting in Aperture (A) mode, your camera does the hard work of exposing correctly. The black and white treatment came from using photoshops black and white sliders to balance the shot. I’m really pleased with this one.

Okay so that was Aviemore, not great for photos, but a perfect, relaxing trip away. November to date has been a wash out, almost constant rain and very few crisp, frosty mornings or that lovely hard, clear afternoon light. Just rain, rain, rain. I managed to dodge the showers a few weeks ago and got out and about to shoot sunsets. Once again, the sunset wasn’t great so instead I turned my attention to other things, namely the swans on the river. You can read more about Nairns swan community and other wildlife at this great blog. Another Black and White shot, this time using Nik Colour FX pro to balance the colours.

So the moral of the tale? Set yourself goals when you head out with your camera, but be prepared to change your objective if the environment conspires against you. Not much of a message, but then I’m not much of a photographer! I guess a better message would be to keep taking pictures and enjoy it.

My highlight of the week (and my real reason for blogging today), the brilliant folks at http://www.gurnnurn.com/ have featured my photos not once, but twice this year. Huge kudos to them, not only for having a most excellent community blog, but also for having a very discerning taste in photographers!

A grand day out...

It’s been a slow month for me photographically; work and family commitments have conspired against me and meant that I haven’t had much time to get out and about with the camera.

That all changed this week, with a long weekend off work and a chance to get out to the area around Cannich, a beautiful part of the world, especially at this time of year, with the autumn colours in full swing. The trees looked amazing and we were lucky with the weather, brilliant blue skies and unseasonably warm for October, which is usually a horrible, damp month in Scotland.

We went up to Dog Falls, which is where todays two shots come from, the first is a close crop of some oak leaves that were just waiting for a gust of wind to blow them off the tree, I loved the contrast between the gold leaves and the blue skies, I’ve done nothing to this photo except crop it a bit. Photography is easy when you’ve got great subject material like this!

The second shot is of the river. The viewing galleries for the waterfall are really stupidly placed, you can’t get a good shot of the falls themselves, I took this shot from a bridge about 200 yards down from the waterfall, what makes this one special is that stunning tree on the right. As I’ve talked about in the past, knowing what to crop is still a challenge for me. I could have just kept the tree in frame, but instead opted to give the tree some context by including the river and the shore. I think it works. This one got a saturation boost to bring out the colours a little and also some added contrast, I could have gone nuts with HDR and massive amounts of post-processing, but I don’t think it would add anything. Comments appreciated as always.

You can see the full set of shots from my day out on the Picasa stream, along with some choice picks on Flickr. Next week looks set to be a good one, we’re off to Aviemore for a well-deserved break for a couple of days, the autumn colours there should be really nice.

Dpreview, Ranting, Competitions and Publication

It’s been a good week. Not a lot of time to get out and about with the camera, but a few bits of good news for me on the photographic front.

In order to try and take my photography to the next level, I’ve been entering a few online photo competitions, flickr is all well and good as a channel to share your pictures, but if you actually want your shots critiqued by your peers, then competitions is the way to go.

It’s been a while since I’ve ranted so….

Dpreview.com, a brilliant, free website for all things photographic, the content is fantastic and the lengths that the guys go to in order to test the gear is amazing, and provides me with more than enough information about the latest camera gear.

Whilst the content generated by the owners of dpreview is excellent, the forums have gone down hill massively in the last few years (inline with the massive increase in people using DSLRs to make photos). For someone in IT, the Dpreview forums are really interesting, we often talk about digital moderation and control of information in my job and it’s typically viewed as a kind of draconian thing that makes peoples jobs more difficult.

Dpreview shows what happens if you don’t moderate forums. The Olympus forum in particular can be a very unpleasant place to live. If users identify issues with their equipment and ask their fellow forum members if they’ve encountered the same problem, they are typically derided and accused of trolling. Very few pictures are posted and a great deal of forum space is wasted by people simply moaning about other forum users. This is what happens when you don’t moderate. But, there are some incredibly talented photographers on dpreview and some wonderfully helpful people who give their time, advice, loans of equipment and knowledge to help others. The good is dramatically outweighed by the dross because there is no moderation, and that makes them almost unusable as a source of information. Some of the posters on dpreview might read this and then they’ll comment at the bottom of this blog about how much they disagree with me…you get the idea….except that you won’t because I moderate my comments!

The example I’ve used to illustrate this in the past is this one. In this case, one of the dpreview developers has posted a fascinating article on the evolution of a forum post. Showing how it grows and digresses and goes off at tangents. If you’re remotely interested in how people use the internet to communicate, it’s fascinating. If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see how the dpreview community responds to it….basically by deriding, disagreeing and moaning. That’s why I don’t spend much time in the forums.

Away from the forums, Dpreview has introduced ‘Challenges’, effectively a way for users to set up and moderate their own competitions on a subject of their choice. This can be anything from a content specific challenge like ‘pictures of road signs’ to a technique like ‘Black and White’ or ‘HDR’, even equipment specific challenges like ‘Shots taken with a D90’. The challenges are opened, pictures are submitted and then the shots are judged by the community. It’s dpreview, so the same people that can be found moaning about the forums are also moaning about the challenges, but I think they are super.

I’ve entered 2 pictures so far, in the first I came about 100th out of 200 and the second one finished 39th out of 183. The standard of photography in the challenges is fantastic, and I’ve learnt an awful lot just by looking at other competitors in the challenges. It’s great fun, and for me it feels a lot more inclusive than the forums.

So that’s cool, in other news, my employer has approached me and asked to use some of pictures in a brochure! Okay, it’s unpaid, but it’s still getting my pictures out there and is enormously flattering. In still other news, one of my prints sold at a charity auction for about £60 so that’s cool as well.

I get told all the time that people ‘love’ my pictures and they are ‘excellent’ but when people are willing to reach for their wallets for my photos or rating them highly in competitions, well that’s praise indeed.

Just enough time to mention this weeks picture. I went back to the beach this weekend with my tripod to do some more water-blurring type stuff, the above shot is the best of the bunch. Enjoy.

Promiscuous fingers

I vaguely remember wittering on about setting yourself challenges or themes when out shooting. It helps focus the mind a little and forces you to take pictures of things you normally wouldn’t.

Cat was in Inverness on Friday, getting her hair cut, a process that takes about 3 hours, so it was a good chance to take some pictures of one my favourite cities. The challenge was to take some shots of Inverness that hadn’t been taken before. As the capital of the Highlands, Inverness is a real tourist hotspot and must be one of the most photographed cities in Scotland.

Recently I’ve also been taking 100s of shots of the same thing. on my recent trip to Dunrobin Castle, I must have taken 200 shots of the falconry display and almost using my SLR like a point and shoot, just firing off shot after shot in the hope that one would work out. I think I kept about 10 shots of the display, a keeper rate of just 10%.

My trigger finger is getting dangerously promiscuous.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, especially with wildlife, but the good photos were taken more by luck than judgement, and this somehow feels like I’m ignoring all the things I’ve learned over the past few years. With this in mind, I set myself the target of only taking 50 shots of Inverness, and then refining that number down to 25, a ‘keeper’ rate of 50%.

It’s really hard! Amazing how quickly bad habits get ingrained, I started by wandering up to Inverness Castle, to see if there was anything there that would make an interesting shot. The Castle also serves as a courthouse and council building, and it’s a rather squat, utilitarian building that isn’t too photogenic up close. Despite my eyes telling me there wasn’t a shot there, I decided to waste 5 of my precious shots on things that I knew wouldn’t make the cut. Curse my finger!

I then looked away from the castle itself and at the surrounding area, a brilliant panorama of the city and the hills and trees etc. That cost me a further 10 shots, but I really thought about each one. The ever brilliant Scott Bourne and Rick Sammon tell me every 10 days on their Photofocus podcast to ‘make pictures not take pictures’ and I think it’s finally sinking in!

Then it was down around the river, over the bridge and back up the other side, passing the architecturally interesting Eden Court theatre (pictured below). There goes another 10 shots. Down a nice alley and then into a church and I spent the last of my precious shots taking pictures of church spires and graves etc.

I’m really pleased with my final selection. Instead of spending hours choosing which shots to choose and perhaps sharing half of them…I was left with just a handful of pictures that I knew were okay. You can see the shots on my Picasa stream.

Now, I’m not advocating taking this approach on every trip out with the camera, I can visit Inverness anytime and take the shots I might have missed. If you’re at a wedding or an event that will only happen once, then fill every memory card you possess, but as an exercise in self discipline it’s really useful.

What are your thoughts – are your fingers getting promiscuous?

Panos, Owls and Lochs

Sorry for the lax blog posting this week. Other stuff keeps getting in the way!

Anyway, last week was a good one. Off fishing on Wednesday to Loch Lunndaidh in the hills above Golspie, a beautiful location with views out over the Dornoch Firth, great photography and 2 fish caught. Todays first picture comes from there, it’s a 6 shot panorama that’s been stitched in Photoshop and then blasted with lots of contrast.

Originally, we’d planned to go camping on Thursday and Friday, but rain stopped play and we headed off instead to Dunrobin Castle, also near Golspie. The castle itself was a bit of a disappointment for me due to the fact that you couldn’t take photographs inside the castle. No explanation was provided as to why this was the case, and you could take pictures outside. Considering I’m paying to look at their castle, I’m at a loss to understand why I couldn’t photograph it…stupid. Added to which, you only got to see a small part of the Castles interior and whilst what you saw was pretty cool, I would have liked to have seen more…also it wasn’t that interactive, I like picking things up and it just wasn’t like that.

Anyway, the gardens were amazing, brilliant topiary and ornamental stuff, which made for great photographic fodder, also the castle has its own falconer who does a couple of displays every day. These are fantastic, and worth the admission price for that alone. Andy Hughes is charismatic, funny and amazingly knowledgable about birds of prey. He actively hunts game with his birds and they are all incredibly trained and in amazing condition. You can get really close to them and I must have taken about 300 shots of the display and the birds afterwards.

This shot of ‘Plop’ the Barn Owl was taken with my 50-150mm lens, I was trying to get close ups of the owls face so was shooting at an aperture of about f6.0. By complete luck, I managed to keep the face sharp and blur the movement of the wings. I’m really pleased with the shot, but it was more by luck than judgement on my part!

Finally, Friday took us to Loch Achonachie at the top of Strathconon, with the weather improving, we were able to get back out fishing, and the final shot is of our little boat on the shore of the loch. It’s processed using my now fairly standard black and white workflow, I’m quite pleased with it.

The full set from this weeks shooting can be seen on the Picasa stream.

Anyway, off to do some shooting out and about in Inverness tomorrow…hopefully that will bring some nuggets.

Games, Pipes and Water Blur

The old piper, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Great weekend. Every August, Nairn hosts it’s annual Highland Games, the links are taken over by a fairground, the games themselves and the entire town along with just about everyone else descends on our sleepy town for a day of boozing and fun. It’s a grand day out and I thought it would be a good chance to get some cool photos of the celebrations. The weather was great, sunshine and nice chunky clouds that should have made for good photos.

The challenge was the crowds, it was incredibly busy and with so much going on, I found it really difficult to isolate subjects and ‘tell a story’ with my photos, there was lots of photo-fodder but I guess it’s just my lack of experience in these kinds of situations that made it tough to find something meaningful to photograph. Ah well, there’s always next year, my one reasonable shot was this one of a guy from one of the pipe bands. Just a quick bit of black and white and some contrast made a half decent photo. The rest of the shots are on the Picasa stream here…

Disappointed with my failure on the Saturday at Games Day, I decided to head down to the beach on Sunday evening to get some shots of the sunset. I actually missed the ‘actual’ sunset, arriving late but there was still a fair bit of ambient light and I was able to do a bit more experimenting with slow shutter speed stuff. I did some of this last year and had some good results, but that was at sunrise rather than sunset, meaning it was a race against time to get the right shot as I was constantly gaining light. Sunday was much better because the sun was setting, meaning I was loosing light and for some reason this feels like I’ve got more time…of course it’s all relative but anyway I was pleased with the output.

So todays second shot is what I think is the best of my ‘water blurring’ attempts. The camera was wedged on rock inches from the sea and I cranked the aperture round to f22 which forced the shutter speed to slow to about 4 seconds. Even with the light from the setting sun, I was able to blur the water successfully…although it got a bit nervy as the water came surging towards my beloved camera!

Anyway, the shot was then given my usual 5 shot HDR treatment from Lightroom 2 to Photomatix before getting a final contrast blast in photoshop. I’m really pleased with it, and think it’s better than my previous efforts!

Really excited about this week, on holiday from Wednesday onwards and hopefully off to get some camping and fishing done….can’t wait!

To crop or not to crop...

rays over loch broom, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

A great weekend, out to Ullapool on the Western coast of the Scottish Highlands, arguably one of the most beautiful places in the world. The contrast between the rural fields and dunes of my hometown of Nairn and the rugged mountainous coastline of Ullapool is amazing, even more so when you consider there’s only about 50 miles between the two. I guess that’s one of the reasons why I love Scotland so much, you have an incredible diversity of environments all within striking distance of your current location – brilliant.

We spent a very busy Saturday fishing a remote hill loch in the morning and then doing a bit of sea fishing in the afternoon. I can’t remember the name of the hill loch we fished, but if you look at my picasa stream, I’ve geotagged the pertinent pictures so that you can get the idea of where it is, there is no path, just a straight hike through difficult long grass and bracken to get to the top of viciously steep hill. Coming down was much easier!

Anyway, the scenery was beyond spectacular, looking down on Loch Broom to the east and the rocky coastline past Rhue and on to the Summer Isles in the west. It looks so good to the west that we headed off to the Rhue peninsula and did some sea fishing for a few hours. The weather was perfect for both photography and fishing, rolling clouds, shafts of sunlight and heavy showers blowing down the glen, brilliant.

I love taking landscapes, and my weekly jaunts around Nairn are really just rehearsals for opportunities like this. After 2 years of using the same camera body at least once a week, I can shoot with a fair bit of confidence. It really, really pays to practice so that when you are in a new environment/situation with the camera you can use it quickly and confidently. The scenary was so spectacular and it was very difficult to take a bad photo…or so I thought.

Something I’ve tried to shoot in the past are these shafts of sunlight you can sort of see in this weeks picture. They often show up during sunsets, when the sun goes behind a small cloud and the light splays out all around it. What I’m struggling with is getting the crop right. You can crop the entire picture so that you’ve just got the shaft of light and whatever it’s illuminating. That’s great, but you loose the landscape that the shaft of light isn’t illuminating, which can look a bit silly. I’ve gone with the alternative here, showing the shafts of light and their environment. I like it…but the shafts of light look more like “smudges” in the distance and whilst the landscape is really dramatic, I don’t quite know if the picture tells enough of a story.

The same can be said of portraits, I’m struggling with how much you crop. Just keeping the head and shoulders in the frame is great, but you loose all sense of the environment. You might see what I’m talking about with my shot of my nephew Dave, the one on Picasa is more environmental…it shows the loch we climbed to, his rucksack and tells a story about where he is. This shot however captures his face in a lot more detail, and forces you to look at him. I don’t know which is better…maybe they are both rubbish and I should just take up needlework as a new hobby!

In terms of this weeks shot, It’s a 5 exposure HDR with tweaks done in Photomatix and then Photoshop. I’m still not happy with it and might pull it apart and start again.

Next week, I’m on holiday from Wednesday and camping is on the cards….Thinking of hitting some hill lochs that I fished last year near Poolewe…we shall see but I’ll certainly have the camera.

Pride

Pride, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

A while back I was wittering on about ‘capturing the essence’. You can read the babble in detail here, but the crux of it is to sum up the whole of a thing by shooting an element of it. It’s supremely hard to do and I’ve been battling with the concept for years.

So this weekend was the annual Nairn Farmers Show. It’s a fascinating event where the agricultural community from across the North of Scotland descends on Nairn, or rather Auldearn, an even smaller town a few miles up the road. The main objective of the show is to enable farmers to highlight their best livestock, but it’s also an opportunity for local business to showcase their foodstuffs, crafts and so forth. In addition to the livestock show there are fiercely competitive baking, handicraft and produce growing competitions. I was amazed at the standard of the stuff on display, they have a photography competition and the quality was excellent...I might enter a photo next year.

But the critical element of the show is the livestock. Winning means a lot more than just the rosette, the value of the winning livestock skyrockets, which means there is a lot at stake for the major players. The farmers remain relaxed about proceedings but it’s obvious that they are under a hell of a lot of pressure and the rosettes must be all the more valuable in the current economic climate.

As a photographer, these shows are a brilliant opportunity. Lot’s of colour, characters and things to capture, often in difficult light and due to the packed timetable, you get limited opportunities to photograph each subject. I had several objectives in mind whilst I was snapping away, most importantly to improve my shooting of people in their environment, you can’t really call it ‘street phtography’ when there is no street…rural shooting? Ach, I don’t know. Also as the scale of the event is pretty big, it’s impossible to capture everything in a single shot, so we go back to ‘capturing the essence’.

This drags me back to the shot above, this guy was the owner (or at least working with) this massive Shire horse. The horse was immaculately turned out in an amazingly ornate piece of tack that ran the length of its body, I don’t know if it won anything, but I really hope so. What I’ve tried to sum up in his expression is Pride…you can be judge of weather I’ve achieved it all not.

The photo was a bit of a labour of love in the digital dark room. LOADS of contrast from a combination of a contrast layer in Photoshop, then I flattened the image and blasted it again with contrast from ‘Nik Silver Effects Pro’ (brilliant plug in), then I colour toned as per my guide here. I then did a bit of dodging to better bring out the guys face. Then an unsharp mask just to get the face as sharp as possible. I think the effort was worth it, it’s probably one of my only half decent photos of people.

Farmers shows run the length of the country; it’s a great day out and an excellent opportunity to shoot something a bit different. I’d urge you to head along to your nearest one. There are loads more pictures on the Picasa stream.

Sometimes...

wood 2, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Sometimes things work out. Sometimes…

The weather this weekend was rubbish with constant rain on Sunday, making photography somewhat difficult, but the gods smiled on Nairn and the sun finally bothered to put in an appearance at about 6pm. By 8 I was out with the camera for some ‘magic hour’ sunset shots. I’m really pleased with the output from this, I went to the ‘main’ bit of Nairn beach which doesn’t have the rocky drama of further up the beach or the wildness of Culbin sands. It’s just a wide expanse of beach, the sunset and the departing rain clouds made for an amazing scene that I tried to do justice with the camera.

Lighting was really tricky, I was down to about -1 EV which meant that all my shots were unexposed. In order to recover them I went down the HDR route. Not that I mind too much, but I’ve kinda done over-cooked HDRs to death and I’m trying to get a more ‘lifelike’ look to my shots. So I was doing some gentle tone mapping rather than aggressively processing them Photomatix. I’m quite pleased with the results and would love your feedback. I gave into temptation with this one and did something a bit more abstract. The lure of the sliders on Photomatix just gets too strong sometimes!

A couple of other things in photo-world, I’ve discovered that Facebook might be merrily using YOUR photos if you are a member. You know those ads in the sidebar of your Facebook site? Well apparently Facebook have a clause in their terms and conditions that enable them to use YOUR photos in those advertisements. You can opt out (and I would strongly recommend you do) by going into your settings/privacy/and clicking Facebook ads.

I’m doing another photo book this year for Christmas; I used photobox last year and was quite pleased with it. Last years book was a bit of a last minute affair so this time round I’m starting now with a plan to have the book done by October/November. This year I’m going to be using Blurb, based on lots of peoples recommendations. I believe they have the capacity for people to view the completed book online. I’ll post links as soon as it is done.

Finally, I’m going to be using local photographic printing company Iolaire for some printing (duh), I’ll let you know how I get on. I like the idea of someone actually looking at my photos and helping me find the best way of getting them onto paper, they have a really comprehensive set of services on thier website and might be worth a shout if you're looking for an alternative to major printing services. Yeah, they're slightly more expensive but you get what you pay for.

Have a good week

Black and white colour toning

I’ve been getting a few questions by Twitter about how I do black and white. So I thought I’d do a quick tutorial. I must first list some disclaimers.

1. I am an idiot – I don’t know very much about anything.

2. Just about everybody is better than me. That’s better at Photoshop, better at taking photos, has better gear and is probably a plain better quality human being.

3. I use Photoshop. There are other photo editing picture editing software packages out there…but I don’t know how they work.

But you asked, so I’m answering.

Okay, so you’ve got a cool shot that you want to make look even cooler by turning it into a luscious piece of black and white goodness. Here’s my Fannich Weir shot….it looks a bit boring in colour so time for some black and white drama.

There’s several ways of doing this in Photoshop. You could create an adjustment layer and choose the ‘black and white’ option. This brings up a load of different sliders and you can either be lazy and choose the ‘auto’ option or you can tweak the sliders until you find a pleasing combination. I use this route occasionally but find it a bit fiddly.

Or, you can use the ‘channel mixer’ adjustment layer, tick monochrome and play around with the Red, Green and Blue sliders. This is a really good way of getting an ‘infra-red’ type black and white shot, but I’m going to show you another way….

A “true” (and I can’t emphasise the quotes enough) mono image is done either by creating a saturation layer. – Click the little adjustment layer button at the bottom of your layers palette and yank the slider all the way to the left. And voila, you now have a mono picture….okay it’s completely lacking in contrast, definition and probably just looks washed out. You could just leave it there…or…

Now that you have a mono image, let’s make it bit more dramatic by putting a little colour back in…I really like this, but please remember disclaimer 1 and 2. To give it a subtle colour boost, open another adjustment layer but this time choose curves. Curves scare people, they used to scare me…really they are just funky contrast controllers and will kick the “Levels tool” square in the ass in this respect. Before you start playing with the graph…change the drop down so that you are just adjusting the green channel colour curve. Now...click the line of your graph about 2 thirds along the line and pull it up a bit. Now do the same about a third from the bottom of the line but pull in the opposite direction so that you get a subtle ‘S’ in your line. Marvel at the color tint and then click okay. Your shot should now have a green tint to it…wow…

Open another curves layer, and if possible leave your computer somewhere where your friends can see it whilst you go and get a coffee. They will think you’re a really clever individual who knows software editing inside out because it now looks very complicated. Once you’ve had your ego suitably buffed by friends/family you can change the curves layer to either the blue or the red channel and repeat the ‘s’ curve approach.

You can do the ‘s’ curve approach on all three channels, but I tend to stop at two…and KEEP IT SUTBLE! You’re going for a slightly colour toned black and white image, not some weird quasi-coloured hybrid…well maybe you are, but this isn’t the objective of what you’re reading.

Right…you’ve done your desaturation, then brought in a subtle (or otherwise) amount of colour back into the picture. Well done…now open another adjustment later and choose ‘contrast’. Because the shot is black and white you can be far more aggressive with contrast than you normally would be so give it a good punchy injection of contrast.

You’re nearly done. Go into layer, flatten image which will squash all of your layers into something that you will shortly be exporting as a JPEG. But before you do, go into filters and choose unsharp mask and give it a good sharpen before you save and upload to flickr for the praise from your peers you so richly deserve.

The other question I’m getting asked is about making skies exciting…I’ll answer that if you like this one.

Capturing the Essence

flowery path, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Sorry for the lack of posts. In my defence, I’m hoping to post a couple of ‘guides’ (I use the term incredibly loosely) on how I do colour toning on my black and white shots, also another one on different ways to make your skies pop.

A couple of people have asked how I do it and whilst I’m not anything close to an expert, I can certainly answer the questions from a purely personal point of view. I’ll hopefully have the ‘guides’ up by the end of this week.

Anyway, I really enjoyed my trip to Bristol, a beautiful city…flawed perhaps by a crappy airport experience but you can’t have everything.

Finally I’ve had two requests for large prints this week, which is great, I’m always flattered when people want to put my work on the walls of their houses. Thank you.

I’ve probably mentioned that I try and look at 100 pictures a week…which should mean I look at 5200 a year, and try to emulate what I see in the good ones in the vain hope that one day I’ll take a good photo. One of the things I really like in some peoples photos is how they capture the ‘essence’ of a place or a subject in an innovative way.

I probably haven’t’ explained that very well, so let me show you some examples from photogs much better than me. In Teds picture of the Mandril, you don’t need to see the rest of the picture to know that there’s a big monkey not in the shot. Ted is a master at this, he uses unusual subjects or shapes and combines them with contrast and lovely black and white treatments to create very special, almost minimal photographs that tell stories about wildlife, urban American architecture and people. He also knows how to shoot fireworks!

Todds amazing shot “Moving Forward” tells so much and yet shows so little, crumbling wall, basketball hoop, blue sky...but look deeper. There’s the lines of what was possibly the roof of a demolished building, this line runs along the diagonal of the shot and almost works like a graph or chart, plotting the decline of the neighbourhood. But there’s hope in the shot too, the new, gleaming basketball hoop and the sunny sky give us a sense of optimism that’s at odds with the gloomy forecast that is hinted at in the decaying wall. I like the fact that the wall is painted, someone took pride in the wall and took the time to paint bricks, people are (or were) proud to live here. Could it be that the 'graph' isn't plotting the neighbourhoods decline but it's revival? I don't know and it's dichotomy that makes the photo so profound. This shot works on the aesthetic level in terms of composition and colour but there is layer upon layer of depth too. Todd has a set called ‘rural poetry’ which is one of the finest sets on Flickr. If you want to see what ‘capturing the essence’ is all about then look at Todds work.

Do you get it? Doing an awful lot with very little. That was my photographic task for this weekend. Guess what? It’s really, really difficult but the only way to get better is to try. I headed out with the camera on Sunday and took a walk through the fields to south of my home town of Nairn. The weather wasn’t great and I was struggling for inspiration, the sky was really flat and gray and recent heavy rain left everything looking a bit washed out.

The shot at the top of this weeks blog post is probably the ‘best of a bad bunch’, I was trying to capture the essence of the footpath, surrounded by wild flowers on a dreary afternoon. I think my choice of aperture (f3.5) could have been better, as the stuff that’s out of focus is maybe too out of focus. I did very little with this in terms of post processing, just cropped and tweaked the levels. What’s more valuable is what I’m learned about photography by trying. Every day’s a school day!

Around the UK in 7 days...

selfridge 2, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

What a week! Flew out of Inverness on the Monday to Birmingham, overnight in Birmingham and then a major board presentation, my hardest to date because I had to present about myself and my career plans. I hate talking about myself at the best of times, I far rather showing my ability through my work rather than waffling on it about it in front of an audience. But anyway, it went well and hopefully I’ll get some decent feedback.

Anyway, it did give me the opportunity to get out and about in Birmingham on the Monday night. The city has some amazing architecture, not least of which is the amazing Selfridges building pictured above. Birmingham city centre is the perfect place to de-stress, it’s easy to travel around and has some great photographic material. I took this just before a massive thunder storm blew through, it’s a HDR exposed 5 times from a single RAW file in Lightroom 2. I’ve become a huge fan of the ‘clarity’ slider in Lightroom, it’s basically a ‘make my shot cool’ switch that dramatically boosts contrast and adds a lot of depth to shadows. HDRs really pop with this.

Then it was on to London, a horrible journey in 30 degree heat on a train with no air-con made worse by the fact that it took 4 hours to signal problems…I was very grateful for my air conditioned room on arrival in Kensington!

After a much needed shower, I headed off to Westminster and battled the crowds to get some shots of Parliament, Big Ben, the London Eye and my personal favourite, this shot of a sculpture on one of the buildings in Piccadilly, I loved the realism of the dancers, and the 9pm sunlight really made them sparkle. My admiration for good street photographers increased 100% from my time in London. So many people, so much heat and so much to point the camera at, in the crowds you have the added paranoia of getting your gear stolen, which adds a lot of dimensions to an already complex aperture/exposure challenge! I love the blue of the sky, the shot is cropped but apart from that it’s just straight out of the camera, thanks Olympus!

Wednesday was spent in the London office, and then it was time to jump on a plane and head back to Inverness. I managed to get the Birmingham shoot processed and onto flickr by Thursday, and then on Friday it was off camping with my wife at Loch Fannich, a huge loch near Loch Luichart. Beautiful surrounds, lovely weather and the occasional fish made it a very pleasant end to a busy week!

The shot below was taking at about 7am on Saturday morning, I went for a black and white treatment on this one to try and bring out the relative ‘hardness’ of the mountains contrasted with the fluffy clouds. I’m pleased with how it turned out, apart from converting it to B&W I didn’t really do much in terms of post processing.

Finally, props to my wonderful sister who did the calligraphy that now adorns all of pictures following my copyright drama last week. She’s available for commissions as required!

This week looks set to another busy one…off to Cleveland (UK) not Cleveland, Ohio unfortunately! Hopefully a quiet weekend, I’ve processed about 300 photos over the last few days and I could do with a rest!

Lot’s of pics on the flickr feed and on Picasa as well – enjoy

Copyright Crisis

No photo today, I won't be uploading anything new until I get a copyright stamp put on all my future work.

It was going to happen sooner or later. I naively thought that I didn't mind people using my photo's, I just enjoyed taking them and sharing them...and I do.

BUT...imagine my surprise when one of my photos made its way onto a privately owned website...and I got no recognition for the picture at all. Suddenly my feelings changed...I can't really describe it, kind of hurt and kind of sad...but mostly really pissed off that people don't have the common decency to give credit where it's due.

I never plan to make any money off my photos, and I'll gladly share anything with anyone, provided they give me the credit for taking the damn thing!

Anyway...all the back catalogue on flickr and Picasa will remain in it's current state...all my future photos will need to carry a copyright label...sigh..a sad day. If you want an unlabeled file, just let me know.

Regardless of all that rubbish, this week has been a frantic one, with a trip to Birmingham on Monday, then down to London on Tuesday, and then home to Inverness on Wednesday. I took my camera and had great fun trying to shoot street photography/buildings rather than beaches and mountains! One of my photographic new years resolutions was to shoot more street/urban photography and whilst I enjoyed it, the constantly changing landscape, coupled with crowds, fear of your gear being stolen and the insane heatawave we're currently experiancing made it very difficult for a street photography virgin like me.

I was also preparing and subsequently presenting a major board presentation, I was struggling with nervousness and wanted to get some self portraits in the vein of the “Me myself and I” shot I took last year. Like I say, as soon as I can copyright them in a way that I like I will get more content online.

If the weather holds, we’re going camping this weekend in the hills…so hopefully I can shoot Birmingham, London and the Scottish Highlands in one week! Woot!

Rob Roy in the rain

to the distant peak, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Firstly a great weekend in Perthshire, acting as the photographer for 20 work colleagues (including my wife) who were taking part in the Rob Roy Challenge, a gruelling 55 mile hike and bike ride across some spectacular countryside.

This was a great photographic challenge for me. Portraiture, coupled with sports photography and made even more difficult by the very changeable weather conditions, torrential rain in the morning followed by an afternoon of heavy cloud, becoming sunny in the evening – typical Scottish summer weather!

For the first time, I felt really comfortable composing, taking and working with the camera and other people. The feedback I had from the photos was pretty strong and I think I did a reasonable job of capturing people’s experiences. You can see my efforts and judge for yourself on the Picasa site here.

Todays blog shot comes from Dukes Pass, a stunning place just above the village of Callander, made all the more atmospheric by the misty and rainy conditions. This made photography nearly-impossible, the rain kept spooking the autofocus and the above shot was the best I could get, eventually resorting to manual focus. I think it’s a bit soft but the HDR treatment makes it a little more palatable.

I’ll finish on a follow up from my blog post last week on the EP-1. Once again, Olympus completely balls up the release of a new camera, miscommunication and confusion are utterly rife, nobody knows who the EP-1 is meant to appeal to and I think the four thirds system is safe….for now!

I wrote almost a year ago about Olympus’s decision to launch the Micro Four Thirds (MFT) line of cameras. Like many current normal Four Thirds users, I was worried that the Four Thirds line would be discontinued in favour of the smaller system.

It seemed that my feelings were unfounded as Olympus went on to refresh their 4-series with the Oly E-450, the E-30 and the well received E-620. Following the lukewarm reception of Panasonics GH-1 camera, the first to use the Micro Four Thirds technology, I was starting to relax MFT didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

But this week, Olympus have announced the EP-1, the first Oly MFT camera, along with what appears to be at least 2 MFT lenses, a pancake and a 14-42mm walkabout zoom. It looks very, very good and is clearly inspired by the Pen series of half-frame analogue cameras.

Effectively it’s an E-30 in a much smaller form with all sorts of bells and whistles (First Oly D-SLR to have video and the brand new Truepic V processor) that essentially make the EP-1 far superior to anything in the standard four thirds line up. As result, I’m feeling a strange combination of excitement and fear, excitement that people will take the EP-1 seriously and Olympus’s presence in the camera market will be seriously enhanced by the camera, but also fear that Olympus have clearly invested in this camera at a higher or at least an equivalent level to the standard 4 thirds line. It means that the features from MFT will ‘trickle down’ to the Four Thirds users…for some reason I don’t like that at all.

I’m also confused at the cameras position in the market, is it an enhanced compact for a newbie who wants to take the step to an SLR? Surely the price would be prohibitive? (around £700 with a kit lens.) Or is meant to act as a pros backup system? I’ve heard of a number of pros who carry a Cannon G9/10 everywhere with them, a lightweight compact that can take RAW for situations when a massive full frame camera might not be the most effective way of getting the shot. But surely a pro wouldn’t take the natty EP-1 seriously? I wish I knew.

Either way, as my knowledge of photography slowly grows, and my shots get gradually better, I want my next SLR to be around the D300, E3 level of functionality, as an enthusiastic amateur, I want a bigger camera with more power, more processing grunt and more features. I don’t need (or could possibly justify the cost of) a full frame monster but at the same time, I don’t personally want to go any lighter than my current E510. I want to spend £1000 on lenses, not on a new camera body, but…

I’m wondering once again if I should heavily invest in the Four Thirds System. I love my trusty E-510, it’s taken me on a spectacular journey and has made me look at the world differently, but the lure of Nikon is so attractive. The D300 is now in the sub-£1000 price point on ebay, which makes it ludicrously attractive and the sheer range of lenses available makes me wonder and wonder.

The thing to remember is that even with this announcement is that my E-510 still works! I can go out anytime and take wonderful shots. There’s no rush for me to spend anything and I can take as long as I want to make my mind up. Any input into my dilemma always appreciated.

buttercup bokeh

buttercup bokeh, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

It’s been a quiet week in photography land, not much news.

Had a nice weekend, my parents came through for dinner and generally just chilled out. The sun came out for most of Sunday and I decided to capitalise on this rare occurrence by getting down to the river with my camera.

The bright light made things a bit tricky in terms of exposure, but I managed to get the above shot of buttercups by the riverside which I’m pleased about. I just need a third flower with starting with the letter “b” and I’ll have 3…which means I can do a triptych of “b” bokeh shots – this has suddenly become important!

Getting close up shots was one of my photographic new years resolutions, I’m think I’m starting to get the hang of it. Focus is the hardest part, especially when shooting outside and you have wind, insects and assorted other distractions to contend with. The above shot was taken at f3.5 with exposure compensation set at -0.7. I then did a bit of tweaking in Lightroom, I recently found the ‘vibrancy’ slider which is like a super saturation boost and I gave this a nudge to make the yellows pop a bit more along with dialling up the contrast.

I was thinking about cloning out the grass stems that are leaning on the buttercup, but felt they added to the shot so they’ve stayed in. The focus on the flower itself isn’t perfect, but it’s enough to describe the subject, hopefully people will be drawn to the yellow bokeh of the other flowers. At least, that was my intention.

Next weekend we’re off to Perthshire for the Rob Roy challenge, a charity run and cycle that my wife and a team from the office are competing in. I’m going along to take photos so hopefully it’s a good chance to get some more portrait/group/people shooting.

HDR again (on my own...la..la)

the rain comes, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Another good weekend,

Off to Loch Scardroy in the Highlands on Saturday, the weather was incredibly changeable, heavy showers, wind and occasional bursts of sunlight. This made for great, moody shots of the loch – what a change from last weekend which was amazing.

The shot above was a HDR, exposed from a single RAW with 5 jpegs running from -2EV to +2EV blended in the brilliant Photomatix. The workflow from Lightroom 2 into Photomatix is really easy and the versatility you get once into Photomatix is fantastic. After a year of looking at HDRs, I’m leaning more towards a ‘realistic’ type of tone-mapping rather than the crazy ‘surrealistic’ HDRs. Whilst I get less plaudits on flickr for a more realistic shot, that’s just where I am right now…

Interestingly, it was a black and white shot, entitled ‘post’ that went down most successfully with the flickr population, getting more buzz than the shot above. That’s the first time I’ve posted one HDR and one B&W shot, shared them with similar groups and the less processed shot has been seen as ‘better’ than the fancy HDR image. Admittedly, I only get this level of granularity from the flickr pro membership which I’ve only had a week…ach I digress.

In other news, I’ve been looking at the Pentax K7, it looks a lovely camera and the main feature I was interested in was the integrated HDR functionality. It looks cool, but I’ve opted out and am sticking with Olympus. My main issue with the K7’s HDR function is that it appears to output the HDR as a jpeg file…which is a turn off for me because I’d like to see a blended RAW or several RAW files to edit. Despite this, if I didn’t have an SLR, I’d probably go for this camera, it looks innovative and has a very complete feature-set…certainly setting the bar in the mid range SLRs at the moment.

This weekend doesn’t bode well for photography, family dinners and not much planned…still I’ll hopefully get down to the beach or around the river to shoot something....photo's I mean...

Going Postal

posts, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

What a great weekend,

A terrible Friday…my first really bad day at work for about a year resulted in me feeling stressed, dejected and generally useless.

But, the sun was (and is) shining, bringing insanely hot weather to the Scottish highlands, I’ve been in Nairn for a good few years and have never known it to be this hot. As a result we went to the beach for most of the weekend and spent a lazy, sunny couple of days, chilling out and enjoying the amazing weather. Photography with your shirt off is the best way to de-stress!

I got a good few shots, the best of which you can see on my flickr stream. I took the advice from Photofocus of always working at -0.3 on the exposure compensation which worked like a charm, and helped preserve most of the highlights in the shot above. I’ve also got hold of Nik Colour Effects Pro plug in for Photoshop, which is an awesome tool and I’ve had great fun playing with some of the effects. When you combine a HDR with the 'polaroid' output from Nik, some curves, blur and saturation, you get the shot above...which I'm quite pleased with.

I also took the plunge and went pro on Flickr….best $25 I’ve ever spent – I was nearing the 200 shot limit of my free subscription and I’m loving the stats…nearly 5,000 views on my Flicrk photostream…wow.

London (again) this week and then hopefully some fishing at the weekend. Definate camera fodder.

Oh…and if you get time, check out the Pentax K7 preview on dpreview…integrated HDR and movies? Looks interesting and sets the bar high for the Olympus’s E-3 successor which is allegedly in development.

Blooming heck

It’s been a good week.

Frustrating in parts, another trip to London and the weather was fantastic, but I didn’t have my camera…completely contracting my own advice about always carrying one!

The bank holiday weekend was a bit of a washout – literally! But I went out and set myself the challenge of only using my 50-150mm lens...I’ve become really reliant on my walkabout 14-42mm lens and fancied changing my perspective. The summer flowers are finally out around the river so I got some reasonable shots of the various blooms.

One of my New Year photographic resolutions was to take more close-up photographs, and I’m amazed at how much stuff we take for granted, especially flowers. As a typically insensitive male, I tend to miss these little photographic nuggets, always looking for the landscape rather than detail. The overcast, rainy conditions actually seemed to make it easier!

You can view all the photos on the Picasa site.

In other news, I’ve had some brilliant feedback on a couple of my Fuerteventura pictures, with the possibility of some of the shots getting published! Which is great, my first paid work…the best compliment I’ve had to date.

Loosing my composure with exposure

rocky beach, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

What a great couple of weeks!

Firstly, a very stressful board presentation went really well down in Warwick, then it was off to Glasgow and from there flying out to Fuerteventura for my first real break since Christmas.

We stayed here, the resort was great, the weather was wonderful and the photography opportunities amazing.

Deciding to do something different, I got up at 6am and wandered down to the beach at Jandia to watch the sunrise. It was an incredible experience; I had the whole beach pretty much to myself. But shooting the rising sun is incredibly difficult to get right, I’ve shot plenty of sunsets and in that situation you can use ISO to manage the loss of light, however when the sun RISES, you have to very quickly compensate for increasing light. I really struggled with this, ending up with loads of over-exposed pictures. I welcome any hints or tips on how to better manage exposure in these kinds of situations.

Anyway, it was a wonderful week, aside from the profound experience of watching the sunrise over a deserted beach, the heat, the chipmunks and just spending some quality time with my wife was great. You can see a selection of shots from the week on Picasa.

The next few weeks look set to be quiet, but it’s finally getting warm enough in Scotland to go fishing, so hopefully some more photographic opportunities then.

The ugly button revisted

The ugly button revisited.

This weekend we celebrated my sisters 25th wedding anniversary, a great time was had by all and it was my first opportunity to shoot people in low-light in a kind of ‘formal party’ setting for a while. In other posts, I mentioned that I seem to have an “ugly button” on my camera that makes people look awful when I take shots, so I’ve been working hard to improve my portraits.

You can see the results on my Picasa page, I think I’m getting better at shooting people. I read this excellent article recently about ‘making’ a photo rather than ‘taking’ a photo, actually thinking about light, composition and so forth before pressing a button. When taking landscapes I have no problem in considering composition etc, I feel I have more time when shooting landscapes, but when shooting people I worry that they are going to get bored whilst I fiddle with buttons/settings before taking the shot.

Actually, people WANT a nice picture and if you move them, make them stand next to a window or whatever, they’re remarkably placid about it. I’ve certainly got more ‘keepers’ from the anniversary shoot than I did for the Wedding last year or any other events that I took my camera to. People are also asking me for prints!

The other thing I’ve learned is my cameras limitations; I CANNOT shoot low light effectively with the Olympus E510 and the onboard flash. You get noisy pictures and the limitations of my lenses coupled with the poor light sensitivity means it’s just not going to happen easily. So you have to choose well lit subjects or use the noise to create atmospheric black and white shots. This is what I did on the shot above, using manual focus to get the aperture down, shotting in ISO 100 to force the noise and then doing colour corrections in Photoshop afterwards.

Interestingly, my Dad has just bought a Canon 1000D. I was pleasantly surprised by the camera. It’s much lighter than my E510 and performs much better in low light situations. The kit lens is ghastly, it feels cheap and I realise how much I take Image Stabilisation for granted, however Canons range of lenses is enormous and Dad is already lusting after a 50mm F1.4 and a nicer walkabout zoom. The menu system is horribly complex and I couldn’t get the detail I wanted on the LCD, but this could just be that I’m used to the Olympus menu tree. However at £399 for body and lens, you can’t go wrong as an entry level DSLR.

Despite the low light headaches, I love my E510, it’s just great fun and easy to use. I can’t see me upgrading to a better body for some years, but the 30mm Sigma f1.4, the lovely Oly 12-60mm and the Oly 70-300mm are becoming ‘must’ purchases to take my photography to the next level.

I’m off to Warwick for a course this week, then on to Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), then back home before shooting off to London for a few days. There’s got to be some photo opportunities there!

Why my Dad likes clouds

(Yet) Another Big Sky, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

It’s taken nearly 2 decades, but I’ve finally realised what my Dad sees in clouds.

Dad spent most of his career in the RAF/Ministry of Defence, before retiring about 10 years ago. For most of his career he’s been involved to varying degrees with meteorology, the study of weather.

A combination of photography and my new job have made me stop and appreciate clouds whenever I get the chance. For most of my life, I’m too busy to truly appreciate the amazing variety, complexity and sheer magnitude of the sky, especially here in Scotland.

My new role has had me travelling for a few days every week, which makes blogging, photography and social networking incredibly difficult to do – especially when you’re hotel doesn’t have Wi-Fi and you’re working 12 hour days. So my regular weekend photowalks have become more than simply a photography exercise, they’ve become my chance to stop, relax and spend some time away from the rush of my increasingly busy life.

And so we come to clouds. In some of my earlier posts, I’ve mentioned how I really struggle with getting the composition right when shooting seascapes. You have an incredible vista, sea, sky, sand, but nothing to lead the eye in, no focal point. I’ve tried getting low/high/playing with depth of field, but the one thing I’d never really considered was using the incredible cloud formations as the MAIN part of the scene.

Hopefully I’ve rectified this in some of my recent photos, you can be the judge of that, look at my Flickr or Picasa for some samples.

I’m by no means an expert…but here’s some tips that I’ve picked up when shooting clouds:

*I NEVER get exposure right first time. I tend to shoot 3 or more shots of the same thing with different white balance settings until I get something that looks about right. You can also manage exposure through using the ‘A’ or ‘Aperture’ mode; this enables you to control the aperture whilst the camera computes the shutter speed, sometimes this technique helps you by speeding up shutter speed to avoid over-exposing shots.

*Whilst you can correct lots of things in post-processing, if you’ve blown the highlights or chronically under-exposed a shot, it’s difficult to impossible to claw that detail back.

*Shoot landscape and portrait. Shooting portrait obviously gives you more height and therefore more sky and less land which can force the view to look at your sky.

*Shoot black and white and boost the contrast - It’s weird, but by removing colour, you add a level of integrity that doesn’t exist in the colour version.

*Shoot ‘infra-red’ – Or if you don’t have the gear to do that, de-saturate a shot, then boost the blue and decrease the green in your colour mixer until you get a pleasing mix.

*HDR – Looks great, but it’s very easy to make your skies too blue and unnaturally over-saturated when working in this medium. If you want a surrealistic shot then simply turn all the settings to 100 and hit the ‘process’ button, but if you’re simply then wanting to create a “shot that pops” then use the more subtle ‘tone mapping’ option on the brilliant Photomatix software or just manage your saturation in Photoshop.

The three best ways I’ve found to improve my abilities as a photographer are:

1) READ: Learn from the best, use resources like TWiP and the ever-brilliant Scott Bournes new Photofocus site. Additionally, if you’re not on Twitter then get on it, read this and start following these incredible photographers. A lot of forward-thinking professional photographers are now using Twitter as their ‘Route 1’ for interacting with customers and colleagues alike. This enables enthusiasts like me to learn from the best in handy, bite-size chunks.

2) LOOK: Look at other peoples photographs. I set myself the goal of looking at 100 photos a week, Flickrs ‘explored’ category is good way to start browsing shots and you’ll soon have a set of your favourite photographers. Ask yourself why you like these images and why you don’t like others. Try and replicate your favourite shots and If you don’t like an image, ask yourself what you would have done differently? Then try your concept in the field.

3) TAKE: Take pictures. Take more pictures. Then take more pictures. MAKE yourself take pictures every week, take your camera to visit your family & friends, walk your dog, to work. At least half of the pictures I really love are of normal people doing normal things but captured in an innovative way by the photographer. I look at the shots I took a year ago and am amazed at how much I’ve learned. Then I look at a shot like this and realise I still I have so much to learn.

I’ll try not to leave it so long…

Mountain View

Mountain View, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Another week another trip away.

This time was more fun though, an outward bound/team building course in the Lake District, near Lake Windermere. Just a few hours away from London is this rugged world that is not a unlike Highland Scotland but a lot closer and easier to get to! There’s loads of shots of the course on my Picasa site.

Given that we were going to be spending a lot of time out of doors, on the water and the forecast was for snow, I decided to leave my DSLR at home and used my Kodak M863 point and shoot. The last point and shoot I used was a Canon IXUS 2mp job…it was well built but the picture quality was awful. The Kodak is amazing! For £60 you get video, decent shots and the camera seems very ruggedly put together, surviving being splashed, dropped and knocked about. Okay the images are a bit noisy and get progressively poorer as you loose light, but for quick snapshots who cares?

This weeks shot was taken in the snow looking towards the hills at Teabay…a lovely part of the world, the film ‘Withnail and I’ was filmed not far from where we were staying…I loved it. Nothing fancy has been done to this shot, either in the execution or in post processing, just Point and Click!

Birmingham Pano

Birmingham Pano, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Spent last week on the road and was fortunate enough to spend a night in the Hyatt in Birmingham city centre. I’ve stayed plenty of times in the past but have either not had my camera or not been on a high enough floor to get a decent view of the surrounding area.

Finally the gods of hotel booking smiled on me and I got a room on the 19th floor and had my camera so I could get some half decent photos. I didn’t have a tripod so had to improvise with various bits of furniture/cushions and pillows.

The above shot is actually two photos stitched together using the excellent ‘Photomerge’ feature in Photoshop. I think these shots had an exposure time in the region of 20 seconds. This was enough to capture the detail in the clouds and blur the cars headlights a little. Annoyingly, there is a slight reflection of the hotel rooms curtain on the left hand side of the shot. I’m sure there’s a way that I could photoshop it out, but I didn’t think the shot was worth the effort.

Not a lot else to report really, it’s been another busy work week…and this week is shaping up to be just as bad. Hopefully I’ll get out and about at the weekend.

Winter road

Winter road, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Happy New year!

I assume if you’re reading this you take photos. I’m also assuming that you use flickr or something similar to share your photographs.

I was using the excellent bighugelabs.com flickr toys and was messing with their DNA tool to see what my most popular flickr pictures were last year.

The top 10 pictures garnered over 3,000 hits, which is small beer compared to most photogs, but for an amateur in his first year, I feel really pleased. 2 of my photographs also featured on flickrs ‘Explore’ feature, which I’m also chuffed about.

Out of my top 10 pictures, 7 of them where HDRs and 3 of them were colour toned ‘fine art’ style pictures. It’s clear you have to do something unusual or original to stand out…or perhaps my photography just isn’t good enough to stand on its own two feet and needs post processing in order to get the attention.

Now I’m no expert, but here are the top 5 things I’ve learned to get a little bit exposure on flickr:

1. Comment on lot’s of photos. Comments are reciprocal, if you comment on someone’s pictures; they will come and comment on yours. You can then befriend them and comment regularly on each others pics. I’ve made some very good friends on flickr who have really helped me with my photography. I’ve heard it a hundred times and agree with it – “The best way to take good photographs is to look at other peoples.” It is so true.

2. Post images that look good as small thumbnails…either bright colours or simple shapes seem to attract people. If someone is scrolling through lots of pictures you want something that really pops out. Once you’ve established a “fan base” you can post whatever you like.

3. Personally I believe a few good pictures is better than lots of average ones. However, there are many people that disagree, I think a lot depends on your subject and style, personally I post 3-4 images a week. Find what works for you.

4. Groups – submit your photo’s to groups. If you have a taken a niche picture of a mushroom or a hot air balloon or an empty park bench, you will find a group full of people on flickr who are passionate about the subject and experts on photographing it. Every group has a forum and some of these are brilliant sources of information/advice.

5. Tags – Are still a popular method of finding pictures. Tag your pictures with anything relevant, so the picture on this post has the tags like – road, Scotland, Nairn, Highlands, HDR, “High Dynamic Range”, Clouds, Winter etc.

Finally, I'm thinking about a year long project....I was inpsired by the excellent "my tree" set by Zach Stern...I think I'll do something similar.