Young Coots, Greylag Geese and Great Crested Grebe’s

A pleasant morning was spent at Hartsholme Park yesterday before I headed to the gym. There was three of us shooting, Chris Bennett, my lovely wife and myself.

It was fairly quiet, as usual a few Heron’s but not as many as usual, Greylag and Canadian Geese, but still not as many as usually flew in to visit the lake.

We walked around the main lake heading for a Coots nest when we spotted a rather tame Robin.

He seemed quite content while three photographers pointed their long lens at him and snapped away!

To get to the Coots nest you have to cross over the lake via a bridge at the southern end. As we approached Caroline spotted a couple of adult Coots diving for food, and feeding it to their young who where swimming nearby. Then a couple of Great Crested Grebes also appeared, one diving for food while the other stayed on the surface. The one that never dived looked a little odd, and it took a while before we realised that one had young tucked away on its back.

The Coots were mainly feeding under the bridge, but the Grebe’s were wandering all over the lake.

Once they had disappeared from view we crossed over to the West Bank of the Lake and headed to the Coots nest that we had been watching for a number of weeks now.

We had seen it being built and now the young were getting bolder and briefly leaving the nest.

A fun morning, certainly not as many birds as usual but it was great to see how the Coots were getting on, and good fun spending the morning photographing with Chris and Caroline.

Editing and Post Production – Lightroom and Photoshop

Editing and post production has always been part of photography. The early glamourous, portraits of 30’s, 40’s and 50’s movie stars were just as highly edited as today.

Today in the modern digital age, we use tools like Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop, back then they used to employ specialist retouchers, these skilled artists would draw on the actual negatives, often large format negatives 5 x 4 inches. Skilled use of a scalpel would remove any spots and blemishes. Once printed, then careful use of a paint brush and paint would finish up the touching up before the final prints went out.

I use Adobe Lightroom for all my images to process and manage my images, and I occasionally take some of them into Photoshop.

 

Charlotte is a wonderful model who needs very little post production, but a little skin softening in Photoshop plus a vignette and tint in Lightroom finishes the image off nicely.

I’ll have to write some posts about workflow and editing.  Its not as hard as you think but does require the right tools and some patience.

Soft Light in the Studio

Photography, means painting with light.

Light is key, it will make or break your photograph.  Warm soft light illuminating a landscape at dawn or dusk.  Harsh direct light acting as a spotlight at noon.

Choosing the right time of day, the right conditions is 90% of the battle.

In the studio with modern flash equipment and modern light modifiers one can create what ever lighting effects you can imagine.

My studio work is a mix or portrait, glamour and art-nude.  For these styles of shoot, I often want soft gentle light.

I have used a variety of brollies and softboxes over the years and have always been impressed with the Elinchrom Rotalux range.

It is because of this I have purchased a medium sized Rotalux for use out on location.

With the front diffuser left off, it can be used as a brolly, giving a slightly softened effect but with a bright edge suitable for fashion and glamour.  With the front diffuser fitted it is simular to most other diffusers on the market, soft light but with a slightly hotter centre.  This particular model also has an extra inner diffuser that can be fitted to stop the hotter centre and provide an even soft light over the entire surface.

RBPhotographic Shop Coming Soon

You can now see some new links at the top of the page.  The most exciting is our new Shop.

The shop is not live yet, were still in the process of setting up, but I hope to go live on 1st July 2011 for USA sales and a few months later for Europe.

Here I will be offering limit edition prints, fine art prints, and free ecards.  Have a look and tell me what you think and feel free to try out the free ecards now (not available on all images).

Visit www.rbphotographic.co.uk and the new shop, have a good look round, first ten people to email enquiries with a comment on the new shop will receive a free coupon entitling you to a 50% discount from the shop.

Discounts valid from the launch of the shop for 3 months.

Baby Coots and other Birds

A fairly quiet week photographically but I managed to get all my studio shoots for June all booked up. If your after a portrait session for July feel free to drop me an email

Today I spent the morning with Chris Bennett photographing the local birds round the lake at a local park.

As usual when you plan these things, the light conspired against us but we got a few nice shots.

What was nice to see is that the Coots that were building a nest on the far side of the lake now had young.

Lightroom 3.4.1

Update released for Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Camera RAW.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.4.1

The Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 3.4.1 update includes these enhancements:

• Additional camera support for several new camera models including the Canon Rebel T3i, Nikon D5100 and Fuji FinePix X100
• Corrections for issues introduced in previous versions of Lightroom 3
• The Lightroom 3.4.1 update includes an important correction for a bug introduced in the Lightroom 3.4 release”

HDR in Practical Use

HDR.  Usually used when the dynamic range of the view extends beyond the range that your sensor or film can capture.

Its also of use when you want to give a real boost to an image.  If you look at the image above, it has a lot of potential but the light is not right.  This is where HDR can be used to really give your picture a boost.

That boost that can give an unearthly feel to an image, or a cartoony feel to an image, depending on how you process the files.

When I saw this view I knew that the unearthly feel that HDR can give would give a fantastic looking image.

For my HDR work I use a product called Photomatix2. I make basic adjustments in Lightroom first then, export the files into Photomatix to combine them and produce the HDR file. It is then imported back into Lightroom.

Photomatix has a number of presets such as Normal, Smooth Skies, Painterly and Gunge. For this I picked Grunge, the most over the top option.

The downside of this option is that while it is capable of fantastic and dramatic images, it really makes the greens go completely outrageous.

After giving the image a few tweaks to make the best out of it I then saved it and took it back into Lightroom to fix the Greens and apply a couple of grad filters to darken the sky and the bottom of the picture. All in all just a few minutes work to produce and image that reflects more closely the emotion of what my eyes saw and not what the original capture produced.

Lightroom bug for JPG Shooters

The Adobe Lightroom team issued an important announcement concerning a bug that can affect jpg users.

“The Lightroom and Camera Raw team would like to inform you of a potentially severe bug that was introduced in the Lightroom 3.4 and Camera Raw 6.4 update.  Please note that this bug only impacts customers who are saving metadata to JPEG files with a rare characteristic.(JPEG files must have an unusually large block of private camera data included in the file to be susceptible to the bug*)   This scenario is so rare that we do not believe that it is necessary for customers who have already upgraded to revert to the previous version of Lightroom or Camera Raw.  However, the bug could cause image corruption which falls within our highest severity category of bugs.  The team believes it’s very important to notify you of the risk and provide an estimate of when we will be able to deliver a correction in the form of Lightroom 3.4.1 and Camera Raw 6.4.1.  We intend to have these updates available by Friday, May 27th.”