Acoustic Festival of Britain 2011 - Photography Permit

I have been lucky enough to have been granted a permit for the Acoustic Festival of Britain this year which gives me prime position at the stage allowing me to get some decent photos.  Looking forward to seeing Hayseed Dixie again as they always put on a really good show and this will be the first time seeing them in a festival setting.

http://www.acousticfestival.co.uk/

When photographing with available light = WIN

I recently attended a local dance performance as a spectator, I left the external flash behind thinking it would be off putting for the performers to be blasted with a flash.  Well it turned out the “pro” hired for the event had brought their flash and was not scared of using it.  They fired their flash directly at the performers no diffusers, reflectors or bouncing off a wall or ceiling, just firing face on from about 1.5 meters away.  They may have had their reasons but to me their photos lost all feeling and atmosphere of the performances, all the photos where lit up like a flood light and all light from the lighting rig used for the dance routines was blanketed in the light from their external flash resulting in unflattering harsh shadows.

After seeing what the their photos came out like I am glad I decided not to use my flash unit and instead use what light was available, it allowed me to take photos like this:

Post Processing - Selective sharpening, noise reduction and contrast boost.

 

Its times like this when a fast lens really pays off.

Revisiting old photos and applying new techniques.

I will often revisit my older photos to see what new techniques I have learned can be applied to make an “ok” photo something that has a little more impact.  Both photos taken below were just holiday snaps which I thought would look good but once I got the images off the camera and on to the computer decided something was missing or they lacked impact.   However this was before I started dabbling in post processing and by doing some selective sharpening, noise reduction, increasing contrast and playing around with the curves and saturation then you can very quickly and simply give a photo more “pop”.

Royal Parade in London

Fresh octopus in a restaurant on the Greek island of Skiathos

Why should you shoot in RAW instead of JPEG

So what is this RAW format I speak about? 

First lets see what happens when you take a photo as a JPEG.  You have lined up your shot and press the shutter button, the light passes through the lens and onto the image sensor from here the data is passed onto a processing chip in the camera which takes this data and performs various “enhancements”, it will sharpen (non selectively), increase contrast, saturation, brightness and will perform noise removal.  It will then compress the file as a JPEG by removing data which it thinks is not required, and there you have it, your JPEG image. 

The information that was removed when the data was compressed into the JPEG format is gone and cannot be retrieved, this missing data could have held useful details in blown out highlights or in the under exposed areas of your photos that had you known it was there may have been able to rescue in post processing.  This is where the RAW format sometimes known as digital negatives come into play.  The RAW format offers a deeper and richer tone to colours and offers more control over the exposure levels during editing.  Editing of a RAW file in post processing software will not degrade over multiple edits like a JPEG can.

Obviously there are uses for JPEG images, if your camera has a small buffer then shooting in RAW is going to affect the burst rate and will mean you won’t be able to take as many images in quick succession.  The file sizes when using RAW are what put most people off, for a 10megapixel camera a single JPEG image can be around 3-5meg in size whereas the same image in RAW will be around 40-60meg and so if you're not careful you will quickly fill your memory cards.

I will try if I get time to follow up this article with some examples of using RAW images to rescue blown out highlights or underexposed regions in photos.

Tabasco Eye Drops - Quick Tutorial

Seen this and similar shots around on Flickr so thought I would have ago at reproducing something along the same lines.

Click for a larger photo.

So this shot is composed of the following to shots:

Top Layer (With bottle cap)

Bottom Layer (Without bottle cap)

Once you have these two shots you need to add the to your post processing software of choice as separate layers with the bottle of Tabasco as the bottom layer.  You need to use the transform tools to rotate the bottle to match the same angle as the bottle you're holding and also resize it so the two bottles line up exactly on top of each other.  Now in the layers panel you want to add a layer mask to the top layer and set it to "White (Full Opacity)" not in your tools panel select the eraser making sure the eraser colour is set to white with a soft edged brush type.  The next step is really easy all you want to do is on the top layer erase the bottle top which should reveal the layer below which should be the bottle without a bottle top, you may need to mess around with the curves tool to make sure the colours of the two layers match).  The final stage differs depending on which post processing tool you have chosen but all you need to do is add small circle and select the colour to be the same as in the bottle of Tabasco, then add some motion blur to give the impression the drop is falling.  Depending on what package you are using you can even add some lighting and reflection to the drop to make it more realistic.

Les Paul Guitar

Decided to try my hand at some black and white (b&w) photos of things around the house and thought my guitar was an obvious choice. 

For this photo i used the Canon nifty fifty (50mm 1.8) lens with a aperture of 2.2 to give a sharp but shallow depth of field (dof) in post processing (pp) I used the channel mixer functionality in GIMP to convert to b&w added a foreground to background gradient overlay to bring the focus of the eye onto the knob on the lower left quadrant of the photo. The photo was sharpened using a smart sharpening plugin and the contrast was increased to make the image pop.  Contrast can be increased alot more in b&w photos than would normaly be acceptable in colour photos and is the best way to make your b&w photos stand out.

Epiphone Les Paul Studio Guitar

Orion Nebula - Astrophotography

It was Astrophotography that originally got me into photography.  Once you spend x amount on a DSLR you quickly find that only using it on clear dark nights (few and far between here in the UK) is not using it to its full potential.  However the shots that you do get when the nights are clear, tracking mount works as it should, alignment is spot on and the laptop doesnt shut down because of the freezing cold nights then the shots that you can get are quite literally out of this world.  

Orion Nebula, Canon 1000D attached to an C80ED

Above is a shot of the Orion Nebula and the Runnng Man near the top this was achieved by attaching the camera to a telescope (basically just acts as a really big lens) via an adapter.  Using the LiveView functionality of the camera attached to a laptop you can focus on a bright star and then set the camera to manual mode and for this shot I set the shutter speed to be 13 seconds long and I had the ISO at 800 which was the sweet spot for the camera good light sensitivity and low noise.  This shot was composed of 50 of these shots and then using some very clever software (DeepSkyStacker DSS) stacked on top of each other allowing the random noise to be evened out while enhancing very faint details.  Stacking allows the photographer to create photos that would normally require very long exposures and super accurate tracking to avoid blur.  Even if you could manage to take a very long exposure of say 60 seconds or greater you then have the problem of light pollution having a very large affect on the shot, unless you are lucky enough to shoot from a very dark location.


If you are interested in doing some basic astrophotography then even without a telescope you can get some pretty amazing photos of the night sky, by placing you camera on a tripod point towards the night sky, set the camera to manual mode.  Set the shutter speed to be around 10-15 seconds, aperture to as wide as you can (lowest f number) and a resonably high ISO 400-800 higher if you know how noisy the sensor is.  Once you are ready to take the photo either use a shutter release cable to  avoid camera shake or a little tip if you dont have one is to use the cameras 2 second timer.  You may need to tweak these settings but you should see that the amount of stars you capture is incredible you may even get the hints of a galaxy like M31 the Andromeda galaxy or the Milkyway band showing.  Try combing multiple shots using DSS mentioned above to get even more detail and play around with the curves in Gimp or Photoshop to enhance the detail further.


If this is something you are interested in the give me a shout and I will post some tutorials and details on this and other shots.

In-camera black & white - What a waste.

There are a few reasons why people still resort to the in-camera black & white (b&w) mode, the two I hear the most is “ease of use” and the second “it allows you to be more creative in your shots” the second reason is because not all images make good b&w photos.  However my own personal thought is there is very little reason for someone with a decent digital camera to be using in-camera b&w mode.  The creative argument falls down when you can on most decent cameras shoot in photos in RAW, if you shoot in RAW and use the in-camera b&w the image you see on screen in b&w yet the RAW files will still contain all the colour information which would normally be lost if shoot as a jpeg.   This allows you to be selectively creative when shooting as it gives you an idea how the shot will look in b&w.

I have often wondered why some people will take photos in this mode when you get far more creative scope doing this post processing (pp).   When I suggest you convert to b&w in pp I don’t just mean using the “desaturate” or “greyscale” button in Photoshop or Gimp which is the same as turning on the b&w mode on your camera (from now on in this post I will refer to Gimp to perform a b&w conversion) .  By far the best way to create a b&w image is to go into the “channel mixer” menu in GIMP check  “preserve luminosity” and “monochrome” and now play around with the various sliders to get the look your after.  The obvious advantage of using the channels in this way to create a b&w image is the flexibility it gives you, and allows you to create b&w photos that look more like photos taken with b&w film and a professional photographer adding grain actually works really well with b&w images it gives them more texture and a film like quality.

As you can see from the photos above there are many different version of black and white and the above images would only be possible if you have the colour information to start with (so don’t just throw it away).  Another advantage of shooting in colour is the ability to convert to b&w and do some “selective colouring” what I mean by this is having a b&w photo yet have elements in colour (if you are interested in doing some selective colouring let me know and I will post a tutorial on the subject).

Improve your photos - "Rule of Thirds"

If you want to improve the composition in your photos then read this:

One of the most common rules in photography is “The Rule of Thirds” and an easy way to improve the composition of any photo is to follow this rule.  The idea behind this rule is to prevent the subject matter from being in the centre and landscapes to stop the horizon from dividing the photo in half.  Studies have shown the human eye naturally travels to the corners of an image away from the centre, artists for centuries have used this rule when painting.  

So how do you use the rule? 

If you check out the diagram above you can see that I have marked in green where the lines cross this is where you should place points of interest in the photo while lining the subject up with one of the lines.  So for example if taking a portrait photo you would want the eyes to be on or near green dots or in the case of person you would line the body up with on of the vertical lines while having the head/eyes fall on one of the intersections.  If you are taking a photo of a landscape you would have the horizon follow one of the horizontal lines which one is up to the photographer to decide which looks best.  

Here is an example:

Following this simple rule can improve pretty much any photo however as with all rules there can and are exceptions, but to be able to break these rules you must first master them.

Phatch : Quick batch photo program

I would like to share with people a fantastic application in Linux which has made life a lot easier when batch editing images. Its called Phatch (PHoto bATCH)  http://photobatch.stani.be/ it allows me to write EXIF info, add borders, watermarks, resize, rename, crop etc to individual images and whole directories of images and even to create custom actions.  I have found this to be one of the most useful tools I use on Ubuntu Linux (I believe its now in the Ubuntu repositories) and has an easy to use GUI.

Enjoy.

Mother & Baby - Elephants

Took this while on safari in Kenya, i think this was in the Masai Mara region.

I have adjusted the curves in Gimp, increased saturation by 5, dodged the baby and also the mothers ear to bring out some the detail (maybe a little too much, you decide) and also added a FG->BG gradient. Oh and also cropped a little round the edges.

Prints now on display at Liverpoolgallery.com

A small selection of my photos are now on display at the Liverpoolgallery.com and can be purchased through here.

Thank you to Anita Smith for arranging this.

Telgraph Picture of the Day 19/10/2010 - The Great Migration

One of my photos has been selected for the picture of the day in the Telegraph.co.uk:

Pictures of the day: 19 October 2010

This photo was snapped from our safari vehicle as we entered the Masai Mara in Kenya.  The image shows the otherside to natures "Seventh Wonder of the Natural World."  The wildebeest in this photo are the unlucky ones that ever made it across the river in the great migration and get washed down stream to this bend in the river, ending up as food for crocs and vultures.

The beginning!

I thought I would set up a blog so that I can keep people informed about my various photography projects and bore you with technical details about photos and also a place for you to ask questions about some of my photos.

Hope to post more on here when i get my website up and running, watch this space.

http://www.naylorsphotography.com

Regards,

Tim