Christmas lights

My friend , lighting designer Renato De Toffol was awarded the contract to design and set up the Christmas lights for the city of Olten near where I live.

The lights are beautifully designed and consist of "curtains" of fairy lights and large translucent balls which project stars onto nearby surfaces.

It was bitterly cold when I was photographing the lights and once or twice my 5D MkII wouldn't respond. This was solved by removing the battery from the camera and keeping it in my jacket for a while to warm up.

My son Thomas accompanied me and I learnt that he has a great eye for potential pictures. He would go off and scout a new location while I photographed the current one.

This is a photo that Thomas took of me standing on a dumpster after he suggested that the image would be better if I had a higher viewpoint.

This is the image that resulted. he was right  :)

Overnight after shooting the images it snowed quite heavily and I thought that it would be a good idea to retake some of the better viewpoints with snow in them.

Unfortunately most of the snow had gone and some of it had turned to slush by the time darkness came, so I was only able to retake a few images using the wet streets for reflections.

One of my favourite images from the night is of a water fountain. I decided to play around with it in photoshop. I took two images with all the same settings. One image was sharp and the other deliberately out of focus.

  

Both images 2.5 sec @ f11

In Photoshop, I overlaid the blurred image on top of the sharp one. Then I used the standard ersaer tool to "wipe away" the unsharpness on the figure of the lady. I quite like the effect.

The result 

You can see a few more from this shoot over on Renato's website here.

What do you think?

As ever. Thanks for reading and please leave a comment.

Converging verticals

I'm quite happy with my old version 6.0 of Photoshop. It does all the things I need (normally sharpening and a bit of dust removal) and probably lots of stuff that I don't. I bought it second hand (with license key) on a Swiss auction site a few years ago.

One thing that It doesn't do very well (in my humble opinion), although I'm sure you'll correct me, is to correct verticals. When I shoot buildings I really have to have all the verticals to be true. This is where PTLens comes in.

This super programme acts either as a plugin for Photoshop or as a stand alone application and will (amongst other things*), let you correct verticals, horizontals and even rotate your image. The programme identifies the camera and lens used and corrects any aberrations particular to that setup. This lens / body database is continuously updated to include the latest models.

This is what the screen looks like with an image loaded before correction.

You can see that PTLens has correctly identifies the camera / lens combination. I have "barrel / pincushion" selected to correct any lens defects. I also chose a blue grid to show me how much I needed to correct.

Screenshot two shows the screen after I entered the corrections I needed.

You can see that I have used the slider for verticals and scaled the image by 117% because correcting for tilt, gave me some black edges.

I love this programme and always recommend it. You can read more about it and see more examples by visiting Tom Niemann's website here.

In case you're interested, I would normally have stood further back to get this type of image but on that Sunday, There was a tree to my back and I only had my EF 24 f2.8 lens with me.

The picture and it's location can be seen on Google Earth by visiting here.

Thanks for reading.

* the other things include barrel distortion, chromatic aberration and fish-eye "correction".

The good old bad old days. Or, as time goes byte.

“Is digital photography making photographers lazy? Is it bringing in new talent who wouldn't otherwise have a chance to produce great "art" without understanding basic photographic techniques?”

In other words “Has digital made you a better photographer or has it made it easier for you to be a photographer?”

I got thinking about workflow and picture editing recently.

I read on Twitter about a cosmonaut who shot 35000 images during his time in space.

I see Tweets from photographers saying:

“A day of catching up on retouching”

“Catching up on retouching today”

“1300 images down to 107 selects… now to choose the final 10 images”

“Retouching marathon… 24 hours before I fly”

“1600 images down to 110 selects”

.. and so it goes on.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not criticising these very talented photographers, but when I read that they are shooting several THOUSAND images on a job then I get to wondering. Is this a case of "Spray 'n Pray?" I.e. Take loads of pictures and some of them are sure to be OK.

I have never shot that many images on one job but it seems to be slowly affecting me also. I recently shot a friends’ wedding and was amazed afterwards to see that I taken 680 pictures! Granted I had to reject 47 of them due to people blinking or the flash not going off and I’d been photographing constantly for eighteen hours but I’ve NEVER previously shot so many pictures on one job. I guess that this is due to my being raised with film. Previously I always knew that there were only 36 exposures to play with and that they had to be developed and that I wouldn’t see the results until they came back from the lab. This taught me about trying to get it right first time in the camera. I certainly do not want to spend half a day messing about on a computer after a job.

I was reminded of this a couple of weekends ago. I was in the French part of Switzerland and had set up my tripod and composed a photograph for a brochure shoot. I did a last minute check through the viewfinder. All verticals vertical? check. Horizontal lines true? Check. Then I noticed about six metres (about 20 feet) away a white object on the floor. I looked up and saw that it was a cigarette packet. Discarded by some Neanderthal too stupid to deposit it a bin.

I thought to myself. It's barely a speck and will be nearly invisible on the final TIFF file. I can always correct it in post production. Then it hit me. Digital photography is making me lazy. I went and deposited the packet into the nearest bin.
 

I have Photoshop. Version six to be exact. I don't need more as there isn't enough time for me to learn all its nuances. I use it mainly to spot my images, slightly sharpen images that the RAW conversion programme hasn't done properly and to correct converging verticals in photos where I didn't have a tilt and shift lens / camera combo with me on site. ( For that particular feature I use a Photoshop addon called "PTLens" by Tom Niemann)

All these things I used to do in the days when I used a darkroom. Dust would be blown off with some canned air, focus could be checked with the loupe under the enlarger and verticals corrected (somewhat) by tilting the enlarger head or at the taking process by either raising the camera (if possible) or using a tilt / shift lens.

If it’s people photography, then I may retouch a pimple or two but that’s as far as it goes. I’d like to think that the subject likes my pictures because it shows him / her as they really are. I get dismayed when I see the heavily airbrushed magazine covers on the shelves here. Beaming faces with impossibly flawless complexions. 

This image hasn't been 'shopped

I’m really trying with this post, not to sound like some Luddite who is afraid of welcoming new equipment and ideas. I'm not against technology but I use it sparingly.  I love the histogram feature on my camera. It gives me instant feedback and lets me know (most of the time), if I’m over or under exposing. But for most of the time, I shoot with the camera on manual and about half the time with the lens on manual focus. I still carry a Minolta light meter with me for those times when I want to have peace of mind regarding exposure. Granted, the instant preview is also good because now I don’t have to worry if my subject blinked or if a car or other object encroached on the image whilst I was taking it. It’s also good to give feedback to the model about the pose. In the old days, I’d have a mirror behind me (on studio shoots), where the model could see themselves and how the pose looked.

But even if digital went away tomorrow, I'd still be in love with the medium of photography and I'd still be able to limit myself to 36 pictures.


How many of today's current crop of rising star digital photogrpahers could say that?


Tom