Hello, February …

No posts for a week, and no photographs uploaded to Flickr … oh dear …

With the cold weather and snow that we had down here since the weekend, it would be ridiculous not to have taken the camera out and gone shooting. Unfortunately thanks to some IT problems (which have taken three days to sort out), and there being so much snow that I haven’t been able to get the car off the drive, I really haven’t been able to take advantage of the opportunity! I did take a few family pictures yesterday, and got out with Joshua to Ashdown forest this afternoon, but haven’t had a chance to look at the photos taken and don’t hold high hopes that they’ll be right for posting. I also shot a roll of 35mm (in a Lomo LC-A) which I need to get processed.

Oh – and I nearly got a perfect shot of a fox foraging in the snow, but the fox clocked me before I could press the shutter

Lessons learnt? Get your priorities straight and don’t miss an opportunity!

… and try again

Due to family issues I ended up spending today at home at short notice, and decided to take advantage to have a second attempt at shooting my “Ashdown forest” image.

One note to myself for the future – if you’re intending to walk any distance on Ashdown, wear decent boots. I forgot to pick mine up on the way out of the door, and decided to risk the walk in shoes rather than spend half an hour coming back for them. I just about got away with it, but not keen to repeat the mistake!

This time, not having Joshua with me, I was able to take a wander around to find a better composition for my image. Once I’d set up, I was also able to wait for the light to come – the sun was behind the clouds, and there were occasional sunbeams visible. I actually had the opportunity for a fantastic shot just as I finished setting up, but this was ruined because the last time I used the camera I was shooting with manual focus and had forgotten to turn the AF back on. Good composition, great light, but everything totally out of focus. However with a little patience (about 10 minutes waiting) another chance presented itself.

HDR do you do?

An “HDR” (High Dynamic Range) image is a single image produced from two or more different exposures, combined to increase the overall dynamic range. I won’t go into the technicalities of “LDR”, tone-mapping and the like here, if you want to know more I suggest Wikipedia, or search Google or Flickr.

I’ve tried on two or three occasions to produce an HDR image using Photoshop CS3, without success – CS3 doesn’t like using images with different exposures produced from the same RAW file, and even when I’ve done it “properly” by bracketing exposures in-camera it hasn’t worked.

There are alternatives to using CS3 – you could always try doing something by hand, or there are other applications out there such as Photomatix. Doing it by hand requires a great deal of skill, care and attention whilst Photomatix has to be paid for – neither particularly appealing just to try out the concept.

Dark Field

Decided on the way home tonight to have a second attempt at some dark field lighting. Time was at a premium, so rather than mess around trying to put together something wonderful with glasses, decanters etc I grabbed a handy glass paperweight.

The principal of dark-field lighting is to have a transparent object on a black background, and light only the edges of the object to define it. This is because if you light from the front, you either light everything (including the background) and still can’t see your subject, or (likely with glass) end up with the subject reflecting the light back and not being able to see any detail. I understand you can also use this approach with glossy objects, but I’ve not tried it.

In practice, what this means is putting the subject on a black background (here it was a piece of black card) and then firing a flash from behind the paper directed at the paper. Through the wonders of physics this has lit the edges (including the inscription) but not the rest of the faces.

This one isn’t perfect (by a long stretch), not least because of the blemish under the ‘O’ of ’soul’ – I think this was a fingerprint that I missed when polishing it – but I’m quite pleased with it as a proof of concept.

Try, try again

Decided this afternoon to take Joshua (my six-year-old who has just been given a “new” camera to replace the ancient point-and-shoot that he recently dropped one time too many) up to Ashdown forest for a photo-walk. We went up two or three times last year, he really enjoyed himself, and I took some shots that I’m quite proud of (in addition to several that were immediately deleted).

Whilst grabbing the camera bag from the spare room, I noticed that the storm clouds were gathering again – they were on and off all day – and that there was some unusual banding in the clouds. Since the camera was at hand I quickly took a shot out of the window and then headed out.

At the forest we left the car at one of the numerous parking areas (“Smugglers” for anyone who knows the area) and took a short stroll. Shorter than expected in fact, because it was (a) very wet under foot and (b) surprisingly cold in the wind. However I spotted what looked a likely winner – a path leading from left to right up a hill, ending at a clump of trees on the horizon, with a suddenly picturesque blue sky and white clouds above. Surely this would be perfect – so I made a few exposures (five, I think), helped Joshua take a couple of pictures, and headed back to the car.

Erm … NOT dark field?

On the drive home tonight, I decided to try my hand at “dark field” lighting – a technique where you shoot an object against a dark background and attempt to define it by lighting only the edges of the object. It’s very useful when shooting something transparent – like glass for instance. I’ve previously had a stab at “light field” lighting, which is practically the exact opposite, with some success.

However for some reason I ditched this simple idea and decided instead to try to shoot a “film noir”-esque image. Unfortunately Mrs Wakeling was going out so I had to resort to modelling for the shot myself …

Photo Resolutions

So they’re a little very late in coming, but here are my photographic resolutions for the year:

• Shoot more!

Well that’s maybe a little woolly, so maybe I should expand a little.

• Shoot, process and upload to Flickr at least one photograph each week – I tried to do this starting middle of last year, but only managed it for a month or so in the summer before work intervened. I’d like to try a photo-a-day challenge, but realistically I need to discipline myself to achieve the weekly target first!

• Shoot fewer but better images – my “keeper ratio” varies wildly, going as high as 50% and as low as 10%, particularly when shooting at the Eastbourne Airbourne air show … or children … especially children skiing! I think that the real downside of digital photography as opposed to film is simply that because taking an image is practically free there’s a tendency to just point and keep on shooting. This has a cost later down the line, in time – until recently I could easily take months to sort through my images, delete the chaff and process the keepers. This in turn starts to lower the enthusiasm to go out and shoot …

From coldest Eridge …

Don’t know about you, but around here it’s been just a touch chilly recently – overnight lows of -8°C (about 18°F). Now obviously that’s nothing compared to some places, but for south-east England in January it’s pretty cold.

As a result of the cold there have been some fantastic views for the last few days – particularly when the frost started to gather onto trees – but alas I was too busy at work down the week to get out with the camera and capture some images during daylight.

Thankfully I was able to spare some time yesterday to spend quarter of an hour wandering around Eridge station yesterday with Joshua in tow, and managed to get a couple of shots that I’m pleased with. Particularly lucky when today the temperature suddenly rose to well above freezing (up to 7/8°C) – so if I hadn’t been out with the camera yesterday I’d have missed it entirely!

This has me wondering – I think most photographers can think of occasions where they could have got a great image if only they’d had their camera/correct lens/flash/filter and so on. What’s the one that you most regret not being able to capture?

Two other images available on Flickr, click through to view.

Oh no, surely not another photo blog?

Well yes – and no.

The purpose of this blog is to talk about and develop my photography. I’ll be posting some of the images that I’ve taken, sharing my thoughts, talking about projects and challenges that I’m involved with, suggesting some places to visit, and anything else that I think is interesting or useful. Although I’ll be trying to keep to photography there’ll probably be the occasional off-topic post – hopefully you’ll bear with me if these aren’t of interest (or drop a comment to that effect!) One thing that I’m keen to avoid is using this as a place to simply drop a series of photographs without some information or context – I don’t have a problem with other people doing it, but it’s not really something that appeals to me.

Why have I started the blog? Primarily to help maintain my focus on photography – particularly to keep it high on my priority list when work starts to get in the way – and give myself an extra reason to regularly go out (or stay in) and shoot images. If I can share some information and keep a few folks entertained along the way, I’ll consider that to be a success.

Here’s to the future …