Thinking small...

I’m just not even going to comment on the inactivity of this blog this time. I’ll just say I’ve been busy and leave it at that! Sorry…

When shooting landscapes it’s very easy to be tempted by the ‘big picture’ and miss the little details. Recently I’ve been making a conscious effort to home in on the smaller elements of the scenes I’m shooting in the hope of creating a more intimate view of my local landscapes. I’ve visited the Mediterranean twice this year, once to Crete and once to Malta (images will show up eventually!) and as beautiful as these places were it made me want to spend more time finding what it is about the places closer to home that I really love. It’s quite amusing really; when you haven’t been abroad for a while and you’ve been flicking through a few travel photography magazines you can find yourself feeling frustrated with the photo opportunities you have available to you at home. Then when you jet off to somewhere exotic you’re still frustrated with landscape back home because you realise how much potential it has, but for some reason you haven’t been able to make the most of it! I really love the British coastline and want to show this in my images. So we’re ‘thinking small’ for two reasons now; 1) we’re forgetting the temptation to travel abroad to find inspiration, concentrating on what we have at home, because we’ve realised how impressive it is and 2) we’re looking closer at the landscape to find what makes it impressive to us, in the hope of portraying an intimate picture to people from other places. Looking for the little details…

Recently I was shooting the coastline at Whitburn, Tyne and Wear. This about 15 or so miles from my home in Chester-le-Street yet to be honest it is a totally foreign landscape; I hadn’t been until about a month ago! It was another of those “how did I miss this?” moments because I was genuinely impressed with the shape of the tide-worn geology. The first visit consisted mostly of ‘sketching’ with my Powershot G12; exploring the possibilities without lugging all of my gear around with me. As luck would have it though the light on this day was far better than the two subsequent visits. When I finally took my ‘proper’ gear with me it was very overcast and the land looked very flat. Rather than being disheartened though I chose to focus closely on the luminescent green seaweed that I’d previously noticed coating the rocks on the shoreline. I love the way the seaweed seems to flow over the rock like the water that sculpted it and left it that way on the previous tide. After a few minutes of wandering I found the line of rocks you see in the images here.

I didn’t place them like that; the scene was all arranged by the sea. The placement was perfect and just screamed to be photographed. It took me a while to find a composition I liked but I think I’m happy with the end results. If the sun had been out, managing the exposures would have been far trickier and the light wouldn’t have been as soft and flattering. I think shots like these are quite literally portraits of a landscape and the overcast sky in this case provided our softbox quality light.

Images such as this are about what you leave out of the frame and for me this set tells a far better story about the location than if I’d taken a series of wider views. You don’t always need dramatic lighting because you don’t always need to create an epic picture; delicate and understated are qualities just as admirable; another reason to ‘think small.’     

Let’s leave it there because I’m starting to get philosophical and when that happens people tend to fall asleep! I like looking for little details (I’ve even created a new gallery on my website under the name.) Travelling abroad is great fun but sometimes it’s nice to think about what makes home, home, what you love about it and to communicate these through images…

Have a good week,

Peter :)

Heyy...I'm still alive! (from Scotland)

Ok so first of all I’d like to apologise for my absence of late; I’ve just been crazy busy with just about everything! I’m pretty sure I promised a post about my Farne Islands visit about two years ago but I will get there eventually (even though nobody cares now…including me)

Anyway, I’m away from home at the moment (I’m currently sat writing this in a small cottage about a stone’s throw from the England/ Scotland Border.) I’m staring out of my bedroom window at a wonderful, beautiful, wet, stunningly secluded, miserable, relaxing, depressing view of our private garden and wishing either the weather would improve, or the world would just go ahead and end as it’s been promising to do for weeks! 

I’m determined not to let the rain and wind (and lighting and flooding and mudslides!) stop my picture-taking however; I think it’ll be good practise to shoot in less-than-ideal conditions…damn my optimistic nature J I did manage to grab some nice (warm) shots the other evening when there was a dusk to speak of, so at least I got them in the bag early on (see below.)

I’m certainly not travelling light though; the relative closeness to home provided too many gear temptations and I can’t think of anything I’ve left behind! I’ve got both EOS digital bodies with me (my 450D and 7D) as well as my 10-20, 17-85, 70-200, 50 and 35-70mm lenses, plus a flash, radio triggers etc. and I’m hauling it all around in my Lowepro Vertex 200AW. I’m hoping to go back to the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens before we head home and we’re here ‘till Saturday so hopefully I’ll come back with some “Keepers.”

I’ll keep you all posted when possible…J   

Peter x

Shooting the blossom

First of all I’d just like to apologise for my recent absence, but I have been kinda’ snowed under with work, so…sorry! Unfortunately, the aforementioned work has also prevented me from getting out much with my camera, although I made a real effort the other day to make it up to the University Botanic Gardens, Durham to shoot another seasonal must…the blossom. I pretty much missed it last year and almost did again; a lot of the stuff had already fallen, no thanks to the recent spell of rain and wind we’ve experienced in Britain of late. There was just enough left on the trees to capture some reasonable, colourful close-ups. There’s a lovely area of these gardens called the Japanese Friendship Garden that’s surrounded by blossom at this time of year and while the trees weren’t as full as they might have been a week or so back, this was the first place I headed.

I had intended to shoot some wide-angle images, taking in a broad expanse of the garden, with the vibrant pinks and reds as the focal point. However, the slightly bare-looking trees didn’t seem to make a wide focal length appropriate. I therefore shot all afternoon on my 70-200mm optic, concentrating on isolating individual flowers and branches. Most of these shots were made racked-out at 200mm and wide-open at f/2.8 to throw the backgrounds out-of-focus. The large aperture also allowed me to handhold the shots, which although not ideal, was necessary due to my tripod not extending tall enough to shoot the hanging branches straight on. I composed these examples so that the backgrounds consisted of bold colours to compliment and/or contrast with the blossom. Most of the time I arranged the shots so that other blossom-filled trees were visible as a blur of complimenting colour. For the final shot here, I was shooting from a kneeling position, near the ground, with the bright blue sky behind. Ironically this image was taken in the car park, before driving away; the others were carefully framed and well thought-through, while this was basically a snapshot…click and go! It also happens to be one of my favourites from the shoot. 

f there’s one bit of advice I can convey about shooting boldly-coloured plant life such as blossom, it’s to do so under overcast lighting; sun spots and dappled light just ruin the atmosphere completely. The diffused light from the cloudy sky is perfectly soft and ‘wrap-around’, and is nature’s very own soft-box, studio light. The colours will be far more saturated than under direct sunlight to, but without looking false; they’ll be natural! I also like to underexpose slightly in these circumstances, which did here buy about 1 stop, as this further adds the “punchiness” of the tones.     

That’s all folks...!

I’ll try and post a bit more regularly than once every decade from now on J

Peter  x

A quick HDR tutorial

Love it or hate it HDR photography has become a highly popular technique and is seen by many as an essential tool for getting the best from certain scenes. For quite a long time I wasn’t too keen on the HDR ‘look’ and often wondered why I would want to ‘ruin’ my images by processing them in that way.  I’ve come to realise however, that when the photographer has an in depth knowledge of how to use their software the results can be stunning. The only reason I hadn’t thought this way before was simply because I hadn’t seen any ‘good’ HDR samples. It’s easy to go in all guns blazing and HDR everything you see and while this is a good way to learn (you’ll make all of the mistakes early on!) it’s the reason the technique has got a bit of a bad name.

For those who have viewed my Flickr stream you’ll know that recently I’ve been trying my hand at interior, architectural photography and what I’ve become aware of is that if there’s one thing that HDR’s well- it’s low light shots inside a building with character. I’ve been exploring both old and new designs and one place I knew would be screaming for tone mapping is the auditorium of the Gala theatre in Durham City. It’s a modern building with a slightly futuristic plan and the auditorium is great mix of rustic and new. Since gaining permission took a little effort and I didn’t know if I’d be back any time soon I erred on the side of caution and took more images than less for each bracket. I was also on a time limit so made do with 5 exposures (it’s still better than three).

I merged the shots in Photoshop CS5’s Merge to HDR Pro software which is renowned for delivering nicely natural results; although this time I was looking for a something a bit more artistic. Since a few people have asked me how I process my HDR shots I thought I’d run through my workflow for the Gala auditorium shot from start to finish. So here goes:-

 I started my downloading the bracketed series onto an external hard drive (it’s better to merge from copies rather than originals as always to avoid corrupting your files) and since they were RAW files I accessed them through Adobe Bridge. I selected all five shots and went to Tools>Photoshop>Merge to HDR Pro.

This then gets Photoshop CS5 to merge all of the brackets into one image for tone mapping. After a while (and it can seem an age!) the HDR Pro dialogue pops up. As you can see the initial attempt PS made in its default settings doesn’t look that inspiring, but you’re presented with the series of sliders you can see here and we’re going to play with those in a moment.

Since I’ve already done the tone mapping for this image I saved all of the settings I chose as a preset; I called it Gala Auditorium1, so that I could call them all back later (which I guess came in kinda’ handy for this blog post!) Presets are awesome because they save you so much time playing with the sliders, trying to remember what you used before. I’ll often scroll through my list of presets and see how they look on a new image; even if they don’t work out of the box they may still get half of the work done for me.

I really was after bringing out all the little details in the wood panelling and the ceiling so here I’ve pushed the Detail slider all the way to 300% but compensated for the over-the-top look this could have given me by keeping the Radius and Strength sliders over to the left and pushing the Gamma to the right slightly to even out the balance of highlights and shadows. Speaking of these I brought out the shadows by pushing the shadow slider to 100 but also nudged the highlights to the right to keep a bit of overall contrast. I didn’t want to overdo things so kept the Saturation low and used a higher Vibrance amount to pick out the under-represented colours.

Lastly I did a quick S-Curves adjustment to kick the contrast a little further. That’s it for tone mapping- I hit ok and CS5 merged the shots for me.

The shot wasn’t quite there yet though- it was a bit flat and needed some more tweaking. For most of the editing in this case I used Adobe Camera Raw, applying some contrast using the Fill light and Blacks sliders and bringing out some more detail using Clarity and by sharpening. ACR’s adjustment brush came in handy for applying localised adjustments, whilst leaving other parts of the image untouched. I love sharpening here because you can really push things to the extreme without introducing any nasty halos and you can easily mask out any flat tones using the masking slider to avoid accentuating noise. There’s also the Detail slider here which can work wonders for bringing out textures such as in the panelling and the curtains around the stage. 

I then opened the image in regular Photoshop for some additional Levels, Curves and Colour Balance tweaks and for cropping. This time I chose a panoramic crop to emphasize the ‘ultra-wide’ feeling, using a 12in x 6in preset that I made. Since this was a theatre I thought it would be a nice touch to add a border above and below the image, simulating letterbox movie film dimensions (even though 12x6 isn’t officially a standard movie aspect ratio). I did this by expanding the canvas [Image>Canvas Size] and adding 15% to the Height field.

That’s it, done. There are plenty of other examples I could have shown you but this is as good as any! A lot of perfecting your HDR workflow and favourite ‘looks’ is down to experimentation and trial and error. I strongly recommend saving your settings as presets since you can always use these as a starting point for every image you tone map and you won’t have that frustrating experience of struggling to remember what you used before. There are a number of software packages to choose from- I just used Merge to HDR Pro because it comes with Photoshop. Why not try Photomatix or Nik software’s HDR Efex pro and see what you prefer?



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