Fearless

I'm having a few issues with the blogging side of things today so if I don't post this time I'm going to give it up as a bad job!

This is the last of my wedding posts from this wedding, I've done a couple as I was a bit low on wedding posts but after this I'm going to get back to some landscape stuff.

I was pretty nervous shooting this part of the wedding, the river was quite wide so there was quite a lot of stepping stones, it didn't help matters that one guy who went turned back as he didn't like the look of one of the stones. I was also aware of a number of spectators filming it on their mobiles and commentating on it as if they knew they'd be sending it to you've been framed! Luckily it went off without a problem and I got a lot of keepers. I had to clone out quite a few people on the banks but it's easy enough with Lightrooms spot removal and photoshop for the more tricky parts.

More of the traditional stuff

Not too traditional mind, I try and avoid the getting in the wedding car shots whenever possible. As mentioned previously, I did have a lot of time with this couple as they are close friends so as a result I have quite a few to post, I might put a slideshow up at some point too.

These are more the traditional black and whites which I really love. The shadows are slightly warmer than a straight black and white and a decent vignette also help the image along.
I won't go into the exif data other than to say I was at a higher ISO than I should have been in bright outdoor conditions but only 400 so not really noticeable. It's never a good idea to step out of a dim church into the sun and start papping everyone at ISO3200!

The Bride and The Veil

We had a great wedding at the weekend and I have a number of shots to process but I thought I'd post this one. The wedding was at Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire, it was a fantastic location and the weather was great. The couple are good friends of ours so it was a bit of a bus man's holiday but they were up for anything in terms of photography which is always good, you'll see what I mean if I post some shots of them walking on the stepping stones on a pretty wide river. There was a light wind so every time the gust picked up I tried to get a flowing shot of the veil, this being an example. I did a little HDR work to really bring out some detail in the veil back of the dress but not a great deal. The shot was converted to mono with silver efex so it has some authentic film grain too. The shot was taken at ISO400, F4, 1/4000 at 35mm (all the fours!)

Black & Whites with lots of Grain

Last night I was messing around with a technique I had seen using soft focus and digital noise to try and replicate an old photography style probably similar to Holga type photos. It relied heavily on the image being slightly out of focus, converted to black and white and a lot of grain added.

Grain is the film equivalent of noise in digital and a lot of the purists say it can't be replicated, where as noise is a pretty horrible by product of shooting at high ISOs, grain can add another element to the photo. I originally though it would be better to use a high ISO (say, 3200) and try and add grain digitally. However the noise is a little uneven and seems to almost create bands on the image, especially if you increased the noise further by increasing the exposure in Lightroom.

With this image, and yes it was taken quite quickly with little compositional thought, I did use a high ISO and wide aperture and tried not to focus on anything in particular. I then used silver efex (a photoshop plugin) to do the conversion and add the grain. It is very user friendly and can add a wide variety of grain effects. I went a little overboard on this example perhaps but I think it could be used quite effectivly in future, possibly for those wedding shots that are good but let down slightly as they aren't quite tack sharp. This was taken at ISO3200, f/2, 1/1000 at 50mm.

Cows Week

A couple more from the back catalog, I have not done a lot of processing with these really but as you will have noticed I'm back in Black and White mode, I really wanted to use one of the cows bright orange colouring but it just wasn't happening. I was a bit annoyed as when I was snapping these my mate was getting shots of the bull, which I thought was probably a little more photogenic but I had not noticed him until we were leaving, breaking one of my main rules - Avoid the 'walk up' shot and have a look round. Anyway just thought I'd put these up to keep my post rate up.

Smooth Infrareds

I got an infrared filter a few fays ago and have yet to use it, it's just so much easier getting a similar effect in the digital darkroom. This is a shot I have processed largely using silver efex pro. I like the IR effect, especially on the sky but I'm not a great fan of the glow you tend to get from traditional IR photos. The benefit of doing it digitally is you can experiment and see the results straight away. With this shot I wanted to retain some detail in the grass and the leaves that the IR glow would lose.

Highland Cattle

I got this one a few days ago at the end of a bit of a photo walk, We came across a field of highland cattle who must be fairly used to visitors. I managed to get closer and closer until after about 10 minutes this one came over to check out what was going on. This was taken about 0.5 a second before he licked the front of the lens. I wanted to get really wide so I was at 16mm at f/5.6 and 1/250 to ensure there was no motion, I still had a circular polariser and an ND grad on the lens, as I'd been shooting landscapes so I had to pump up the ISO to 400, the colour version has quite vivid blues from the sky and oranges from the cattle but I like the mono version as it accentuates the low sun side lighting we were getting, especially on his nose!

Boat at Low Tide

I've just come back from a few days in the Lake District and have started processing some shots. This one was one of my favorites. I used a very low angle to really include pebbles and hyper focal distancing to ensure all but the very closest stones were in focus. I have a colour version which I really like but I've decided to post this mono version. I'll hopefully put a few more up this weekend. As I didn't have my tripod I had to make sure any exposure had to be over say 1/100 as I was lying on the pebbles I wasn't confident to go any slower and keep the camera steady. I had a 3 stop ND filter attached to keep the sky from going places it shouldn't! This was taken at 16mm at ISO200, 1/160 at f/9.

Architecture in Leeds

I was on a shoot in Leeds last week that called for some architectural shots so I headed for the townhall with a view of doing something with the columns. I wanted to concentrate on the transition of light to shadow on the circular pillars and the shadows they were casting, as I had a feeling I would be doing a mono conversion. I was using my 70-200 lens as I wanted to isolate certain details, I knew if I had my wide angle on I was bound to get some bystander as it was quite busy and I didn't want to spend hours cloning out afternoon shoppers. I took quite a few shots like this but I stuck with this one as I liked the leading line element to the black door, I was lucky with the shadow of the lamp above it too. This was taken at 70mm, f/4 @ 1/400 ISO100.

Last Macro

I'm putting this one up because it'll probably be the last shot I take with my sigma 50mm macro lense as I'm selling it, I'll probably be tempted to buy another at some point but the proceeds will go towards it's bigger (heavier) brother. Anyway this was just a quick shot of an echinacea plant (I think) Taken at f2.8 50mm, ISO800 1/30, I was surprised there was no camera shake, especially as I was in an odd shooting position. I processed it with niksoftwares silver efex pro. If anyone is thinking about getting this lense my advice would be to go for it, you won't be disappointed, although the longer variants (105/150/180mm) are probably better for insects.

Back in Black

This is one I got last night during a break in editing wedding stuff, haven't done any landscapes for a bit so it was nice to get out. I was trying a new (ish) black and white plugin for photoshop called silver efex (by niksoftware) it seemed pretty good, it's one of these that claim to replicate film black and whites etc. I was going to take out the tower but thought I'd just leave it in as it was only a snap shot really. Shot with a 3 stop ND filter at f16, 16mm, 1/10 ISO100.

Contrast

Contrast is the dissimilarity or difference between things, acording to wiki.

I'm adding this because I submitted it to a contest on my favorite photo forum, talkphotography.co.uk. It has contests every month and I sometimes have a punt, this months subject was contrast, quite a tough one really, a lot of black and white images as you might suspect, heres my take on it.
A simple flash setup with lighting coming from a single 580EXII to the left the black polo was changed in CS3, not as easily as I first suspected. First I applied a layer mask (cutting out the polo using the pen tool) and just added an inverted adjustment layer, the problem with it is it turns the black shadows white which isn't what I wanted. I went back to the layer mask and used a levels adjustment to just bring down the levels of white and grey to black.

Weddings

Hi Everyone. Seems like ages since my last post, I've been a bit busy with wedditing (Weddings followed by editing) I could do with getting up to the lakes, the weather has been really changeable but it makes for some great landscapes, as long as you don't get soaked to the skin! Anyway this was from a recent wedding, I decided to do a little HDR on the dress with a black and white conversion which I thought looked quite cool. I used Dynamic Photo for the HDR and then CS3 for the BW conversion. I really liked the sky in the mono conversion.

One Man and his Dog

Granted the man and his dog are a fair way away in this photo but I had my wide lens on so this is the best I could do. This was taken during a nice spell of hot weather in the Pembrokeshire National Park. I'm endeavoring to do more landscapes using the sun as a focal point in the harshest of conditions (in lighting terms) for no other reason that the sun gets up far earlier than I do. I'm still getting shots during the golden hour at sunset though. The sky was kept from being blown out by my trust 3 stop graduated filter, I really liked the star burst effect this gives. There was minimal processing with this shot, just a quick mono conversion in Lightroom and a few dust spots cloned out. Taken in full manual mode. ISO320 1/100 sec f/11 at 17mm.

Landscapes Part 2

A similar one to yesterdays post with slightly different colours used during the mono conversion. I had to wait a while for the light to be right. Again processed in LR for clarity and spot removal, I really need to give the sensor a bit of a scrub! This one was taken in aperture priority, as most of my landscapes are, exposing for the land and using a 3 stop graduated filter to keep the clouds from blowing out.
The data was ISO100, f/16, 16mm 1/13 sec. Hopefully I'll process some lake shots today and resist the urge to turn them sepia!

More Black & White Trees

Thought I would put this one up to keep ticking over, not an award winner I'm afraid but it what can you do. There has been some interesting weather at the moment, plenty of cloud breaks for the sun to peep through (and cloud bursts to soak you and whatever camera gear you have out at the time!). I wanted to do another high contrast mono similar to my infra red shed I posted a while back, which incidentally is being published in the May edition of Practical Photography (out April 23rd) if anyone cares.
This was taken at ISO100 f8 16mm 1/100 Sec, I had to use f8 because I was without a tripod and I had a polarizer on. I tweaked it in lightroom and then added a BW adjustment layer in CS3. For anyone who uses Ligthroom, version 2.0 is now out for free beta testing, so you can try it and report any bugs you find.

Infrared Shed

I was in the peaks again yesterday, went for a nice walk around Froggart. I spotted this shed and tree from the car and quickly jumped out to get it. I was using my new wide angle lens (16-35 L) which was an absolute joy, it's nice to be able to get quite close and still fit everything in. I also had a polariser on which really brought out the blues in the colour version, but as I'm still in a mono mood I'm only posting this one. It was taken at 16mm, f/16 for 1/15 sec at ISO100, I did have another version with a sheep's skull as foreground interest but I prefer this version because of the whispy clouds.

(Edit: I'm just putting the colour one up for some one who wanted a comparison)

Highlight Blending

As you can see I am still posting a few of the landscapes I took a few days ago, the weather hasn't been great recently so I have to play with older photos. This is a technique I used to merge a half colour, half black and white image on the basis of luminance values, I know that sounds a bit complex but it's a simple enough method. With this image I duplicated the layer and on the new layer I selected the highlights (ctrl+alt+tilde) tilde is the key above the tab key. I then applied this as a layer mask (this will look like a greyscale version of the layer). Nothing will change yet but if you then apply a black and white adjustment to the background layer only you should have an effect similar to this. You can always play around with the B&W sliders to get an effect you are happy with.

Ansel Adams Again

This was one from the same night as the previous post but from a different angle and obviously in black and white. This is another Ansel Adams type photo with the high contrast skies which really make the photo quite dramatic. The long shadows produced by the setting sun emphasise the mood, especially on the brickwork of the ruin. I had to dodge the middle right third slightly to get back some detail in the sky as it was betting a little too bright near the sun but other than that its just a case of changing the levels in the black and white adjustment layer (new in CS3) so the blue channel turns black.