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!