My Latest Faves on Flickr

Go to my favorites

From the sea

An improved version of one I publishe don Flickr (increased satuaration of the coast to the left)

Photos from the Jurassic Coast

Just returned from a stunning trip to Britain's Jurassic Coast (we floated around Lulworth Cove and Durdle Door - well squelched was probably the more operative word considering the weather!) Not one to be put off by the weather I donned a silk dress, climbed down a cliff and got into the sea. Cold doesn't even describe it, but it felt kind of liberating :-) I've put the two best shots on Flickr but I had to post some of the beautiful scenery and some silly outtakes. BTW, the beach these were taken at is called the Man o War Beach.

Tune in, Turn off

Simply because it was one of the cheapest accessories I could purchase, I've just bought a polarizing filter (a Hoya Pro1 55m) to go on my kit lens. So, this week I've been playing with filters. The Hoya definitely adds a depth of colour. So I played with this a bit doing some indoor shots (although this is really not what a polarizing filter is best for - think sky and water, however I liked the grittiness it added to the shots). Then I played with photoshop's built in photo filters...so filtering already filtered photographs...and then I ended up converting to B&W so probably all completely pointless!

Here's the b&w version and the colour one is in my flickr account. Out of the two I'm not sure which I like best. As for the subject matter, may be a bit conceptual, but makes sense to me at the moment!

Photography Snobbery

An article appeared in the New York Times this week that annoyed me a little. In "Sepia No More" by Virgina Heffernan photography is classed as an art form that should be reserved for the Art College photographers who still shoot on film and post process in their darkrooms. Anything digital or that has been "photoshopped" is just not proper art. Heffernan particularly looks to Flickr and Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir (who's name she can't even spell) in her criticism. Stating that the whole of Flickr encompasses a certain common "style" (of digital manipulation) that is not considered a pure art form, of Guðleifsdóttir, this photographer she writes:

might have amounted to nothing in analog times, when elaborate deference to institutions, hard-won group shows and expensive years spent in unnoticed toil were the only way to success. But just as certain ne’er-do-well writers have found themselves in blogging, and failed filmmakers have taken to online video, these seemingly out-of-step artists have both invented and mastered the Flickr photograph. Other photographers have added still more levels of processing — including the otherworldly contrasts achieved with high-dynamic-range photography — to the quintessential Flickr image, and it’s becoming only more eye-popping and stylized.

And none of it looks like Diane Arbus or Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer many critics still consider the greatest of all time.

Well, blow me down with a feather, could digital photography perhaps be an art form in itself and it's photographers actually artists in their own right? I see Photoshop as tool, just like the paintbrush is the tool of the painter or the clay the tool of a sculptor. Arbus and Adams manipulated their pictures massively in the dark room, they didn't just come straight out of the camera. I don't see why I should be belittled for using a digital darkroom - it's simply more efficient. What's more what post-processing has enabled us to do is an abandonment of reality and I find that really interesting. Of course I don't consider myself an "artist" really, but through photography and photoshop, exhibiting on Flickr, I have found my means of artistic expression and creativity. It's just like publishing really, just because you get your work in a high brow journal / gallery doesn't mean it's the best piece of work in the world, just that some editor / gallery owner thought you were good. When you open up your art to the world, you open yourself up to the disapproval or acceptance of anybody and everybody and I get more through that. Oh well, each to the their own. Personally I don't consider a half-filled bag of sand being exhibited in the center of a big white room "art" (I'm still recovering from my last trip to the Hayward). All this art snobbery is a bit pretentious really!

Still life of a shell

This is a another version of the one in my flickr account that is slightly darker. A screen layer has been use don this version to lighten it a bit.

HDR and Tone Mapping

Inspired by Mysnapz "The Picnic", today me and the 450D discovered how to do auto exposure bracketing (AEB), which basically means taking a series of pictures of the same thing at different exposures. The notion behind this is that you can then blend these photographs together to create what is know as an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photograph, an image that will reflect the range of brightness levels that exist in that particular scene (complete black to white). To merge the photos together you can use photoshop's "Merge to HDR" function or a nice bit of software (free trail available) called Photomatix. Once you have merged into HDR you can play around with "tone mapping" (settings automatically pop up with Photomatix or photoshop tutorial here). This allows you to play with the tonal detail displayed and is really needed to approximate the appearance of HDR images.

The mistakes I made really were with the actual photographs - I only got 3 different exposures as auto bracketing only allows for 3, it is better to have more but as I was doing a self portrait doing it on manual (and running to and fro from the camera to change the setting) was really not an option. Secondly I left autofocus on, this meant the pictures were slightly out of line. Also it's important to set the aperture, because changing aperture (ie having it on auto) also changes depth of field. Basically you want exactly the same photograph many times, all settings the same, apart from the exposure.

The output is the image above. It took a bit more photoshopping than I'd have liked - mostly because the outline of the body was a bit to blurry because of the autofocus. But other than that and adding a slight softfocus and tweaking the tones, it came straight out of the camera (three times). You can see below the progression to the finished image.

Three photographs taken at standard, decreased and increased exposure.


Merged to HDR

The Canon 450D - the start of a new era

So now I have a grown-up toy, the brand new shiny spanking Canon 450D. I agonised for weeks over what my first DSLR would be, in the end it resulted in a standoff between the Canon and the new Nikon D60 and me bending the ear of the nice young man in Station Cameras for a couple of hours. At the end of the day I went for the pricier canon, for no reason other than it just felt "right" in my hands, had more buttons, and was a bit lighter.

My point and shoot Olympus (God Bless) had much of a DSLR's functionality (minus the lens'of course) and during our two year relationship I learned all about things like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, MF etc etc. However, it stopped hitting the mark about 6 months ago. All those little niggles that go unnoticed during those euphoric beginnings when you are really "into" one another started to grate more and more as time went on. The ISO range was limited, the colour matching sloppy, the f.levels just didn't fulfill expectations, and I grew bored of the way it looked and sounded. My eye started to wonder to other cameras, cameras that were more versatile, more fashionable...cameras that had bigger lens'. The Olympus (God Bless) and me were compatible for a long time, but I changed, I wanted more, and it was finally time to move on.

So now I have a new camera in my life. We are still discovering eachother and we haven't produced anything noteworthy yet but that will come. First impressions - the sharpness, clarity and colour matching are FANTASTIC. The macro function on the camera is OK, but as expected I will need a good macro lens to do anything really close up. It's a tad annoying that I can't alter any of the settings on the pre-set functions (e.g. macro, portrait, landscape), not even the exposure, but I should learn how to do my own settings anyway. It makes a very satisfying "clunk" when I take a picture (and no it's not a fake clunk), and it is much speedier starting up and processing pics. Here are some images straight out of the camera (no photoshopping), nothing special.


Nice DOF on AV


As close as I could get on Macro


Also on macro and on an ISO of 800 as the inside lighting wasn't great. Monochrome setting.


My most fantabulous socks to see how colours come out! Pretty accurate!

Shell Set No. 3