Family, Photography and other misc news
We had a family party today to celebrate a birthday. While the children were playing I took a few snaps. Unusually for me I set the camera and flash to auto and just shot away. As usual it was a mistake. Shots like the one above, shooting into the sun, are always tricky for cameras. I really should learn to trust myself.
You might have spotted that I recently tweeted about my new C-Stands.
A number of you have asked “What is a C Stand”.
Well as I discovered, a light weight light stand is sometimes no good. An outdoor photo shoot a few months ago with the lovely Ashleigh nearly turned to disaster. I had a flash and brolly on a light weight light stand when a sudden gust of wind took the whole lot, and I had to chase it down.
Well my lovely wife has promised me, that see will make me some very useful sandbags, but I felt I needed heavy duty stands. The C Stand with boom arms is an incredibly versatile stand. Heavy, sturdy, with the boom arm capable of holding a hair light above the model and support a background.
While difficult to get to the destination, once there the heavy stand is essential for out door flash use. Outdoor flash is a favourite of mine, off camera, either as fill in or as the main light, using the sun as fill, it gives great results.
Even if you only have a standard hot shoe flash. Give off camera flash in daylight a go. Its well worth the effort.
I have had a lot of fun with SnapSeed on the iPad. Well now iPhone and iPod Touch owners can also join in the fun.
Now a Universal App.
Microsoft have just released a codec update allowing you to view your RAW camera files.
You can download it from here. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26829
If you a OS X user then just keep your OS updated to support the most common RAW files.
I am not sure car drivers realise how new tires feel.
A motorcycle relies on its tyres. Many people just replace there tires once the tread has gone but this is often a mistake. As the tyre is worn it becomes mishapen, and this affects handling.
The contact patch on a motorcycle is about the size of a credit card, thats a very small area to trust your life too. Once the handling starts to go off, replace your tyres. A bike with fresh tyres is like a new bike.
Nikon D200 SLR
Nikor 12-24mm F/4
15mm, 1/30 Sec at f/8, ISO100
Processed in Adobe Lightroom V3.4.1
On a Mac MacBook Pro, OS-X 10.7
One of our friends from work is starting the John O’Groats to Lands End Challenge today.
We have done it ourselves but most people would say we cheated as we used a motorcycle.
Tom is doing the challenge under his own steam, on a bicycle, good luck mate.
Check out his progress here http://www.thejogle.com/
Having had such a busy week, I am only now getting round to processing my images from last week and our long weekend in the Yorkshire Dales. A fantastic long weekend, but it being a biking trip the photography was limited.
During our exploring I made it a goal to visit a number of waterfalls. With the heavy rain earlier in the week the rivers were full and that meant the waterfalls were in full flow.
Without a tripod I was limited but I still tried to use long shutter speeds. I also bracketed extensively, as I was intending to HDR the images like the one above taken earlier in the year.
As I was going to HDR the images I set the camera to aperture priority. You want the aperture to stay fixed while the shutter speed changes, having the depth of field change will ruin your HDR image.
Recently I have been looking at a number of HDR images on line by other top photographers, and they often have a far better, more realistic quality then mine. In an effort to get a more real quality I have now started to combine HDR with digital blending techniques.
With the camera set for auto bracketing I fired off a number of shots then chose the above two, to combine for the HDR image. I then imported one of the orginal images and the produced HDR image into photoshop as two layers. I then, where I thought was necessary masked the HDR image to bring some of the qualities of the original file back.
The end result is still not realistic but still, for a HDR image I like it.
Watch out for the end of the month shot, I feel I will be using this technique again to produce my Photo of the Month! I’ll try my best to use digital blending to make it more realistic but with a hint of HDR.
Sorry for the lack of posts recently, after last weeks long weekend, it was followed by a hard week at work.
At the start of this week I had to pop down to London for a couple of days. I was travelling light, but still took the iPad. I fully intended to write a few blog posts but came across a very iritating but common issue.
Often during the day I came across free WiFi. Even at the hotel there was free WiFi in the bar, but at the end of the day after I had retired to my room to write up my notes for the day and update my blog, the internet access in my room was paid only.
I could walk in off the street, have a drink in the bar and use free WiFi, but as a paying customer who had booked a room for the night, who wanted to use the internet in his room, I had to pay extra for the privilege.
Not fair. So here instead of my usual update you get a quick rant instead. Sorry guys!
I love our iPad, and more and more Photography focused apps keep appearing.
SnapSeed is a app recently updated with RAW support, which is what attracted me to it. If your away with just your camera equipment and your iPad sometimes you want to play with your images and test out your ideas.
I shoot RAW and until now there has been a lack of applications for the iPad that support the camera manufactures RAW formats. Until now with the updated SnapSeed from Nik software.
Nik are a big player in photography processing, products like Silver Efex Pro, produce the best black and white conversion I have found.
This is not a review and not a recommendation, but it is a fun app. The image above was initially processed in Lightroom then during my lunch break last week I had my first real play with the application and produced this.
Have not had time to test the RAW support, according to their website RAW files are supported when Apple’s camera connection kit is used.
To keep the weight down on our motorcycle road trip we took, once SLR, two lens and an iPad.
The photo in the previous post was taken on my iPhone then processed on my iPad while I was on my road trip.
