Fifty-Two (or more)

Self Reflection

2011-04-10T19:36:00.000+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	shutter priority
Focal Length	51.0mm
Aperture	f/2.8
Exposure	1/320 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

I'd never really thought about doing macro photos of ladybirds until Synflame's recent blog posting blew me away. A few days after that post I was out cutting up the Christmas tree (yes I know I should have done it months ago) when I spotted a ladybird moving slowly around the trunk of the dead tree. Fortunately for me it was moving very slowly making it "easier" to photograph. I added the Raynox DCR-250 macro lens to my camera, opened up the aperture to help with the reduced depth of field and set the fastest shutter time I could get away with. I needed the fast shutter speed as I was intending to shoot hand-held and keeping the camera still enough for macro work is exceptionally difficult especially when trying to photograph something which is moving around.

I managed to take just twenty-one photos before the ladybird decided to wander off into some long grass, which I took as a sign to get back to chopping up the tree. Of those twenty-one photos only two of them were usable and one had a slightly better composition and so becomes this weeks photo.

I was actually reasonably happy with the photo as it came out of the camera, so I haven't done any post processing to correct the white balance or colour cast. I did, however, mirror the image. I never thought I'd do that to a photo, as I like knowing that I'm looking at a photo that shows what I could have seen with my own eyes (which is why my HDR work tends to be on the subtle side) but in this case I thought having the viewers eyes led up and right through the photo worked better. Just for comparison on the left you can see the original image. Do let me know which you think is better -- I'm guessing those with a first language which runs left to right will prefer the mirrored image, whereas those who read right to left may prefer the original, but I'd be interested to know if that is true or not.

And if you are wondering why the title of the post is "Self Reflection", well you can just see my head silhouetted against the back of the ladybird. I hate having my photo taken so on reflection that is actually a good photo of me!

Stand On The Rock

2011-03-26T08:15:00.000Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	51.0mm
Aperture	f/5
Exposure	1/250 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

A few weeks ago we spent about five hours at the Old Moor RSPB reserve not far from where we live. We saw quite a few different species of bird including some wonderful Bramblings and a Mediterranean Gull. Unfortunately I only managed hand-held telephoto shots of the Bramblings, which while okay for identification are not photos I'm willing to show anyone else, and the gull flew off before I got the tripod set up. Ah well, you'll have to make do with this photo of a Black Headed Gull instead.

I got quite a few shots of him doing comical or weird things whilst standing on his rock but I think that this is the best of the bunch. So we'll let him sing his heart out, after all you can always "Stand on the rock, 'cause' it's alright".

As for the photo it was taken through the Raynox telephoto lens adapter I have because almost everything at a bird reserve is too far away for the normal zoom on my camera. Other than that there was no post-processing of the photo, which probably explains why the colours aren't perfect!

The Prettiest Of Traps

2011-02-27T19:27:00.000Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	aperture priority
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/2
Exposure	1/250 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

Back in June of 2010 I posted a photo of a buttercup taken using a macro lens adapter. I really liked the photo but as I explained at the time using the lens is actually really difficult due to the extremely narrow depth of field it produces. While I've played with the lens a few times since this weeks post marks the first time I've managed to take a photo I'm actually happy with.

Among the chilli plants on my study windowsill I also have a Venus Flytrap which helps keep any greenfly under control. I've owned a few of the plants before but have obviously never looked after them properly as they have all tended to die quite quickly. This time though I must be doing something right as it has decided to flower! In comparison to the violent nature of the rest of the plant the flowers are really quite delicate and I decided they were an ideal subject for practicing with the macro lens.

As you can see from this photo I setup the camera and macro lens on a a tripod (I actually used a hide clamp to bolt the post to the windowsill) and with a cable release to reduce camera movement. Once I'd worked out the composition I set about trying to get the image focused. I wanted to throw the background out of focus which meant that I wanted a fairly small aperture which in turn meant I had to be very careful with the manual focusing. In the end I figured out the aperture required and then took a whole sequence of photos at different focusing distances to ensure I got the shot. All told it took me about an hour to get one good photo, but I learnt a lot and I really like the final result.

Industrial Evolution

2011-01-22T16:34:00.001Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	13.4mm
Aperture	f/4
Exposure	1/60 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

This week's photo was taken back in October during a week we spent with friends on Skye. Of course it could have been taken almost anywhere in the world that has at one time or another been effected by an industrial change. Okay, so that probably doesn't make much sense but as there was little work done to the photo so what follows is more history lesson than photo tip.

Whilst in a bookshop in Portree I bought a copy of Wilfrid F. Simms' book Railways Of Skye & Rassay. Now I know that Skye is, as islands go, quite large but I didn't know that it contained enough railways to merit such a book. A quick glance, however, shows that some of these 'railways' range from just a few yards to a few miles and almost all of them are now no longer in use. While our friends now know a lot about Skye there were a few of the railways that they knew nothing about. Hunting for old railways seemed a good way of them seeing something new at the same time as us seeing more of Skye. We had already planned to spend a day exploring Sleat at the south end of the island so we decided to hunt down the Ord Quartzite Quarry railway.

According to the book the Ord quartzite quarry is situated just under one kilometre east of Ord on the north side of the direct road linking Ord village with the present-day A851. So as we got closer and closer to Ord we slowed down until eventually we spotted what looked suspiciously like a quarry and that roughly matched the map in the book.

The quarry was only active for fifteen years from 1945 to 1960 at a time when locally mined quartzite was in high demand. It closed down when it became more economical to use imported quartzite from Africa. The book suggested that not only was there no remaining signs of the railway but that the quarry was fenced off and no longer accessible.

Well the fence had gone, although the boggy ground made accessing much of the quarry area difficult. In among the grass and bog I did, however, find a rusty bit of metal which could quite easily have been track from a narrow gauge railway which you can see in this weeks photo. This piece of track was just laying randomly on the surface and there didn't seem to be any obvious sign of where the railway had originally run along the edge of the quarry.

Looking back at the photos I noticed that in fact the track bed is quite obvious in this wider shot of the quarry. On the right of the photo there are two parallel lines which run along between the quarry wall and the blacker boggier area of the floor. Given the map of the railway I'd bet that they are the edge of the original track bed.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that this is post number 32 and yet I'm into the second year of this blog. In other words, I failed miserably to post one new photo each week of the year. I'm still aiming for one new photo each week but I won't be beating myself up if I don't manage to stick to that. It turns out that while I take a lot of photos, only a few of them are interesting enough to warrant a whole post of their own.

Fire Insurance

2010-11-24T17:17:00.002Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	36.5mm
Aperture	f/8
Exposure	1/640 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

On my recent work trip to Beijing I had two days to see the sights before returning home (it was cheaper to wait two days than to fly straight back). I spent a good portion of one of those days walking around the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is a huge palace covering an unbelievable 720,000 square metres and over 8000 rooms! This gave me lots of opportunities for taking photos.

On most of buildings the roof lines are decorated by a number of glazed porcelain figures, which my guidebook claims are associated with water and are meant to protect the buildings from fire. Wikipedia has a slightly more believable description of each of the figures, but for now I'm sticking with the fire insurance idea! To give you a better idea of the figures here is another photo I took (actually of a different building, but you get the idea).

The terrible air quality in central Beijing allowed me to shoot directly into the sun without a filter to produce some interesting images. Whilst I was relatively happy with the photo straight from the camera I have done a little post-processing. Firstly I used the object removal tool in Paint Shop Pro to remove a smear from the top left of the image (I must have caught the lens at some point). I then used the smart photo fix tool to darken the shadows slightly in order to enhance the silhouette feel of the image.

Beware Of Trains

2010-10-23T16:59:00.001+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	8.8mm
Aperture	f/2.9
Exposure	1/140 sec.
ISO Speed	200
Flash	off

Those of you who read my main blog will know that we recently enjoyed a trip on the Jacobite steam line from Fort William to Mallaig on the west coast of Scotland. Steam trains always give plenty of opportunities for great photos (or at least I think they do) and whilst I did take quite a few photos of the engine this weeks photo is a little different.

Having crossed over the famous Glenfinnan viaduct the train halts for about 10 minutes allowing the passengers to disembark and visit the coffee shop, museum or just walk around the station. Unfortunately you can't get anywhere near the engine whilst it's stopped at Glenfinnan. The train is too long for the platform so the engine pulls past the station and passengers in coaches towards either end of the train have to walk down the train and exit via a coach in the middle. So if you want a steam photo from Glenfinnan you have to get inventive.

We'd wandered around a little and ended up stood towards the back of the train near the signal box. Steam was being released from the couplings between most of the carriages forming small ephemeral clouds (this release of steam is part of the braking system and is fed all the way along the train from the engine -- for lots and lots of details on how this, and steam engine in general, work then I'd recommend you read How Steam Locomotives Really Work by Semmens and Goldfinch). I thought that a black and white shot of the train and signal box through the steam could be quite atmospheric and reminiscent of numerous old movie scenes. So I took a few photos and then got back on the train. Unfortunately, as you can see, the original photo isn't particularly great and even a black and white conversion didn't really produce an interesting image. Instead of just giving up on the photo I decided just to play around and see what I could come up with. Having tried quite a few different approaches I eventually settled on roughly what I wanted. The one thing that was made really obvious by a straight black and white conversion was that the modern health and safety sign really popped out of the image and so I would need some way to soften the effect. It was at this point I hit on the idea of doing a Schindler's List style image (for those of you who haven't seen the film, it's in black and white apart from a red coat worn by a little girl), to separate modern from old.

Once I knew how I wanted the final image to look it still took me a while to figure out the best way of getting to the final image (note that while I think that what follows is probably the best way of producing the image it is certainly not the only one). In fact this is probably the most complex image I've ever produced, certainly the most complex on this blog. Whilst HDR and panoramic images may take more processing they are almost totally automatic, whereas this image requires numerous manual steps and multiple layers to achieve the required look. I'll start by showing you the four main layers in the final image and then walk through how I created each layer and how the layers are then combined.

Now you have seen the four main layers here is a screenshot of the layers palette to go with the following description of how the image was created.

The first step was to create the base photo from the original (the first photo in the row above). When I took the original photo I'd kept the train vertical in the image but I hadn't realized just how daft the leaning signal box and post would look. So I straightened the original image, making the top of the Glenfinnan sign horizontal. This gave me the "Straightened" layer you can see in the layers palette on the left.

Given that I was going to make the health and safety warning into the focal point of the image I decided that a stationary train wouldn't have quite the same impact as a moving train (more danger so more need for the warning). So I duplicated the Straightened layer and then applied a motion blur to the new layer making it look as if the train was travelling forward at quite a high speed (60% with an angle of 240 degrees). This gave me the "Moving" layer, which you can see in the 2nd photo in the row above.

To combine the moving train with the stationary signal box and sign I grouped the two layers together putting the moving layer at the bottom (this gives me the "Coloured" group) and then created a mask layer, called "Train Mask", which I hand painted to allow the train to show through. This was by far the most time consuming part, but once it was done I had a coloured image of a fast moving train, which you can see as the third image in the row above.

Given that I knew I would need both a colour and a black and white version of the image to create the final effect I was looking for I duplicated the "Coloured" group, which I could then convert to black and white. I could have done the conversion in a number of ways but I wanted to use the black and white film option as I think it gives better results than using an adjustment layer. Unfortunately you can only use the black and white film tool on a raster layer so I merged the group down into a single layer and then converted to black and white (using a RGB filter of 0%, 0%, 100%) whilst increasing the local contrast to add depth to the image (I used brightness/clarify values of 0/50). This produced the final image in the row above, where you can see that certain details, especially the health and safety and station signs, stand out more.

To create the final image I then created a new mask layer to allow just the health and safety sign to show through from the colour image. This was actually quite easy as it is an almost perfect rectangle due to the straightening of the original image. The final touch was a little selective burning of the image to darken both the white board at the bottom right and the objects in the train window (I did try and use the clone brush to remove these but I couldn't get a satisfactory result).

Now I know that it may not really be everyone's cup-of-tea but I really like the final result. The health and safety sign still stands out from the image but it actually isn't quite as in your face as it is in the pure black and white version.

A Flying Barn Door

2010-10-17T09:54:00.000+01:00

Camera	Fujifilm FinePix A900
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	8.8mm
Aperture	f/2.9
Exposure	1/140 sec.
ISO Speed	200
Flash	off

I've been lucky enough to see Golden Eagles on a number of occasions but I'd never seen Britain's largest bird of prey; the White-Tailed Sea Eagle. I suppose, given that the RSPB recon that there are just 42 breeding pairs of sea eagle compared with 442 for the golden eagle, it shouldn't really be a surprise that I'd never seen one. What I didn't expect was to see my first sea eagle from the living room!

We spent a week of our holiday staying with friends in their house on Skye. It had been a bit of a wet morning so we'd stayed around the house, although we were intending to go out for lunch. Suddenly there was a shout as Brenda spotted a very large bird circling in front of the house. We didn't need binoculars to spot the white tail and to appreciate the enormous size of the bird (the wingspan is about 8 feet, which explains why it is often referred to as a "Flying Barn Door") but everyone scrambled to find them and to move Ken's telescope to useful position. Fortunately it decided to settle on some rocks about half a mile from the house and then sit there for well over an hour! Having had a good look through both binoculars and the telescope I decided to setup the Sony DSC-F828 camera with the Raynox telephoto lens adapter on a tripod and with the cable release to see if I could zoom right in and get a nice sharp photo to prove what I'd seen (and more importantly to make my parents jealous!). Unfortunately, as you can see in the image on the left, I wasn't overly successful. At about half a mile away even though the bird was huge it was well beyond the range of my camera -- I even had to add the red ring to make sure everyone could figure out where it was sat. I may have failed to get a photo but I wasn't beaten.

The view through Ken's telescope was fantastic, so I decided to try a little digiscoping using my smaller Fujifilm FinePix A900 camera in place of the human eye. Now given the zoom levels involved, digiscoping needs the camera lens to be held very close and very still against the eye-piece of a telescope. Most people use some form of adapter to hold the two together. Unfortunately I didn't have an adapter so I had to go old-school and just "hold the damn thing". This meant that whilst I took almost fifty photos I got only a few that were anywhere near being useful. The best image, which became this weeks photo, can be seen to the left. I hadn't used much, if any, of the camera's zoom function and so the image suffers from quite serious vignetting. Fortunately it was quite easy to crop out the section of the image that I wanted. I then processed the image using Paint Shop Pro's Smart Photo Fix dialog to bring out some of the details and to add a little colour (for the curious I used values of 0, -60, 10, 10, and 0 for brightness, shadows, highlights, saturation and sharpness).

To give you an idea of just how big a sea eagle really is I'll finish with one more digiscoped photo. The quality is quite poor (the original image was very dark and so I had to do quite a lot of work to make it useful which hasn't really helped it) but the presence of two hooded crows (which are the same size just different colour to normal crows) really shows just how enormous the eagle is.

United We Conquer

2010-10-16T11:32:00.001+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	16.7mm
Aperture	f/4
Exposure	1/250 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

One of the reasons that there hasn't been a post for a while is because we've been away on holiday. Fortunately the holiday gave me lots of opportunities to take photos so I'm hoping to get back on track for posting fifty-two photos this year.

This weeks photo is of the Commando Memorial just outside Spean Bridge in Scotland. During WWII the Commando's had a training base at Achnacarry (about four miles from the monument) and use the entire area for their training. The aim of the photo was to use the monument to show how the Commandos were united as a group (their motto is "United We Conquer") but often isolated from the rest of the armed forces as they spearheaded attacks into enemy territory. My idea was to shoot the top half of the monument against the sky, leaving the figures isolated against the rather plain backdrop. I took a number of such shots but I wasn't really happy with any of them. Fortunately I also took a standard tourist type shot of the whole monument. Cropping this photo down allowed me to get the image I was after. I didn't originally intend to convert to black and white but the cropped image was obviously of a statue and I wanted something that at first glance would look a little more natural and given that we are used to seeing photos from WWII in black and white this seemed a sensible choice.

Accidentally In 3D

2010-09-12T09:40:00.001+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/4
Exposure	1/160 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

I know that not everyone enjoys 3D photos but I think that the photos in this post stand on their own so hopefully everyone will enjoy the post -- if you can't remember how to view the 3D images then see this previous post on the topic.

Back in July we spent a very enjoyable weekend in Herefordshire. As well as lots of good food, wine and company I photographed quite a lot of interesting wildlife. Quite a lot of the photos I took were of butterflies and day flying moths using the camera's macro mode. I was quite happy with most of the photos, especially those that were in focus, but I realised that I'd accidentally stumbled upon something interesting -- the 3rd dimension!

Normally when taking 3D photos you need to move the camera at least a few inches between shots in order to ensure an obvious difference between the two views. When taking macro photos though even a small movement can be enough to generate interesting 3D images. I didn't deliberately take 3D photos of moths and butterflies but I must have moved slightly between shots and stumbled accidentally into the third dimension!

I accidentally took quite a few 3D macro photos over that weekend but I choose the Burnet Moth as probably the best of the bunch. I really like the way he is sat on the thistle head and that one antennae sticks outwards towards you and one disappears back into the frame.

Aligning these images properly was actually quite difficult. As well as slight movements left and right, which given the 3D effect, I'd also moved forward and backwards slightly between shots which meant scaling one of the views so that they both matched. Fortunately I didn't have to figure out how to scale and align the images by hand as I simply added support for zooming to 3DAssembler and the auto layout mode did the rest!

Here is another 3D macro photo from the same weekend, this time showing a mating pair of Marbled White butterflies, and I'm sure that even those of you who don't really like the 3D photos can enjoy the separate views.

I've released the new version of 3DAssembler (v2.0.0) that I used to create the stereoviews in this post and whilst I've only shown the parallel versions of the 3D images 3DAssembler can also create the images as; cross-eyed, red-cyan, amber-blue and green-magenta. If you have the right glasses for these formats and want to use them then you can download the photos used in this post and create the 3D photos in which ever format you would prefer, enjoy!

Peaceful Coexistence

2010-08-15T10:33:00.001+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/4
Exposure	1/80 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

As you may remember from the last post we recently took a trip to Helmsley in North Yorkshire with the aim of spending some time walking around the walled garden. Between us we took a lot of photos in the garden (137 to be precise) while trying to keep out of the odd torrential downpour! Most of the photos were just of random plants that we liked though and not really worthy of showing to anyone.

In comparison to all the other photos we took I really like the one I've chosen for this weeks post and I think it is interesting enough to share. Photography wise it isn't really anything special. I just turned on the camera's macro mode, pointed the camera, and pressed the button. The hard part of course was hoping that the two bees would stay in sensible positions while I got the camera ready. I actually took three photos, this was the first, and by the time I took the other two they had moved and the moment had gone.

For those of you who are interested in wildlife I think I've managed to identify the two species of bee using this handy identification website. The bee on the left is a buff-tailed bumblebee (or in Latin Bombus Terrestris) whilst the one on the right is a red tailed bumblebee (Bombus Lapidarius). No prizes for guessing which is the Communist!

Helmsley Castle

2010-08-01T19:35:00.005+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto bracket (±1 EV)
Focal Length	11.7mm
Aperture	f/8
Exposure	1/400 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

A few weeks ago we had a day out to Helmsley in North Yorkshire. I've been through the village a couple of times in the car but have never stopped before. It's a really pleasant village and for it's size there is an awful lot to see and do. The intention was to wonder around the village and to spend time in the walled garden rather than a visit to the castle. I couldn't resist taking photos of the castle though especially as the weather was so changeable that every time I looked at it the light was quite different. I took quite a few shots from the same point as this weeks photo; some on auto, some on shutter priority mode and a few bracketed shots. The hope was that at least one of the photos would capture the interesting light. In the end I didn't get a single photo I was happy with but I did get a bracketed set which showed some promise.

In this set I had quite a lot of interesting clouds and yet I'd also managed to retain a reasonable amount of detail of the ruined keep.

My original intention was to use PaintShop Pro's HDR function to combine the bracketed shots and then to do a few minor tweaks to the brightness and saturation, in the same way I have with a number of other photos in the past. Usually I can get a feel for a photo when I just play around with the brightness and clarify sliders in the HDR dialog, but I couldn't find any settings that I was really happy with. In the end I settled on using a brightness of 10 and clarify of 90 to give the image on the left. There is plenty of detail in this image but I just don't think it's that impressive, and it certainly didn't really represent what I'd seen with my own eyes.

To try and rescue something from the photos I turned to the Smart Photo Fix dialog. As you probably know from previous posts this allows my to adjust the overall brightness, the highlights, shadows, saturation and sharpness. Usually a few minor tweaks to the shadows and a small increase in the saturation brings an image to life. Unfortunately I couldn't seem to improve the image that much. I darkened the shadows, which helped pick out the brickwork, and increased the saturation to breath a little life into the grass (for the curious I used values of 10, -80, 10, 20 and 0), but a decent usable image escaped me.

I intended to file the image away and forget about it, until I saw Synflame's recent posting showing the inside of the Palace of the Grand Masters in Rhodes. Rather than showing colour photos he'd converted them to black and white and they were stunning (I'd be interested to see the originals for a comparison). So I decided to see if converting to black and white would improve my rather dull image of Helmsley Castle. I experimented with converting some of the original photos as well as the HDR attempt, but the best results came from using the HDR image. I could have just reduced the image to grayscale but I found that using PaintShop Pro's Black and White Film process produced a slightly better image (even though I didn't apply a colour filter). The final step in the processing was to apply the one step noise removal filter to soften the image slightly; I nearly always do this and I don't know if it is a problem with the camera, the processing or just personal preference -- I'd be interested to know what other people think.

So having thought I'd lost out on a good photo of Helmsley Castle I'm actually really happy with the final image.

Your Carriage Awaits

2010-07-31T15:03:00.002+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	51.0mm
Aperture	f/2.8
Exposure	1/30 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

Last weekend two of my work colleagues got married. Like us they didn't want a church wedding but did want somewhere with atmosphere. We got married in a barn (albeit attached to a very nice hotel), they chose to get married in a warehouse. Specifically they got married in an old railway warehouse at Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry. The room itself had fantastic walls and beams and was just perfect for a wedding. As an added bonus the museum ran the guests up and down a short section of track behind a replica of Robert Stephenson's Planet locomotive. So now you know the setup let's get down to discussing the photo.

Taking the photo was actually very easy. I was walking back from the toilets when I spotted the bride and groom stood near the engine. I took a couple of quick shots but didn't spend too much time thinking about composition or anything (my champagne was getting warm). The actual photo isn't actually that interesting. It's a little blurry and suffers from some horrible purple fringing (a known issue with the four colour CCD in the Sony DSC-F828). Having said that I quite liked the idea of a newly married couple waiting for the train. PaintShop Pro has an interesting feature that I've played with but never previously had a good excuse to use. The feature is called Time Machine and attempts to alter a photo to make it look as if it was taken at a specific point during the history of photography. There are seven different types of photos you can emulate; daguerreotype, albumen, cyanotype, platinum, early colour, box camera, cross process. I choose to use albumen which dates to around 1850, twenty years after the Planet was originally built. For comparison here are the other six types (in the same order as the previous list).

Some of these seem just a little pointless but having thumbed through old family photots I do quite like the look of albumen prints and I think this photo holds up rather well, even if no one is going to be fooled into thinking it is truly an old photo.

And finally, for all you steam train fanatics out there, I'll leave you with a few more photos of the replica Planet.

Up Close And Personal

2010-06-20T10:53:00.004+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	51.0mm
Aperture	f/4.0
Exposure	1/60 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

Until I tried to photograph the harlequin ladybird for the previous post I'd always been more than happy with the macro feature on the Sony DSC-F828. It turns out I'd only ever really used it to get close to relatively large objects, trying to photograph a 5mm insect wasn't something I'd tried before. The problem stems from the fact that the macro feature only works if you use the camera with the lens at it's minimum zoom. I'm not sure why this is the case but I assume that it is a side effect of trying to cram lots of features into a camera with a single non-interchangable lens. Given my experience of using a telephoto lens adapter with the Sony camera I decided to see if Raynox also sold macro lens adapters I could use.

It turns out that Raynox actual sell a number of different macro lenses that can be used with the Sony DSC-F828. Given a slightly more limited budget, than when I bought the telephoto adaptor, I opted for the Raynox DCR-250. Raynox describe this macro lens as providing 2.4x magnification in comparison to my camera's normal macro function. On another page it uses a different metric and describes the magnification as 8 diopter. I'm not sure if these are equivalent or not especially as I seem to get much more than 2.4x magnification using the lens. Unlike the previous lens I bought this one doesn't simply screw onto the end of the existing lens. The lens is only about 4.5cm wide, much smaller than the lens on the camera, and is attached by screwing it into a lens cap which you then place onto the camera. This of course makes it easy to use with any lens to which the cap will fit (the spring loaded mechanism means it will fit lenses with a range of diameters). Attaching the lens to the camera is the easy bit. Taking good photos with it is much more difficult.

The macro lens is designed to work at the maximum zoom level of the camera (so x7 or x14 if I use the digital zoom as well) otherwise you get heavy vignetting around the edge of the image -- in fact I didn't zoom in fully on the buttercup in the photo for this post and you can see the darkening in the corners. The main difficulty though is that the macro lens gives a very shallow depth of field. You can see this in the photo as well. The stamens are in focus but the middle of the flower isn't. This means even the slightest movement and focus can be lost. It also means that the auto-focus on the camera is practically useless. The best way of using the lens is to switch to manual focusing and then focus by moving the camera towards (or away from) the subject until it comes into focus -- not an easy option when the wind is blowing the flowers around just a little too much!

I'm certainly finding this lens much more difficult to use than anything I've tried before but I'm hoping that with some practice I'll start to get the hang of it and produce some interesting photos. There are plenty of photos on Flickr that use the lens so hopefully I'll get there in the end. Just to prove the buttercup photo wasn't a complete fluke and that I did manage to get some other photos in focus here are just a few more from my experimental trip around the garden.

The Ladybird Book Of...

2010-06-10T09:58:00.002+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/4.0
Exposure	1/80 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

I don't think there was ever a Ladybird Book Of Ladybirds. Even if there is such a book, when I was at the age to be reading Ladybird books, this little fella (no idea if this specimen is actually male; how do you sex a ladybird?) wouldn't have been listed as native to the UK. This is in fact a harlequin ladybird or to be more precise Harmonia axyridis succinea. It is native to eastern Asia but has been introduced to parts of Europe as a biological control agent to tackle infestations of aphids in greenhouses and gardens. It was never intentionally introduced to the UK but once it was well established in Europe it was probably only a matter of time before it crossed the channel (or maybe it flew through the chunnel). The first recorded sighting in the UK was in Essex in 2004 and since then it has rapidly spread north and west.

I've never really studied ladybirds before, and had no idea how many species there are in the UK, but when I spotted this one crawling across the garden I immediately thought it looked odd. Firstly it was very shiny -- you can see in the photo just how much the light reflected off the wing case. What I found really strange though is how the spots are in straight lines across it's back. That really just isn't British! There are a number of websites involved in surveying ladybirds in general and the harlequin in particular. The UK Ladybird Survey is interested in mapping the appearance of the 26 species of ladybird that actually look like ladybirds (including the harlequin). The Harlequin Ladybird Survey, however, is only interested in recording sightings of the harlequin ladybird and produces interesting maps showing the spread of the species over time. If you want to know why both of these projects are important then you should probably read an interesting blog post by Helen Roy which does a much better job of explaining everything than I ever could. And yes, before you ask, I've recorded the sighting with both surveys.

Whilst the entomology may be complicated the photo was actually quite simple. I left the camera on auto, turned on the macro mode and took the photo. Whilst the macro mode on the camera allows me to focus close to the end of the lens it only works if you don't use any of the camera's zoom functionality so I had to resort to aggressive cropping to get the image I wanted. I then adjusted the brightness and saturation a little (using the smart photo fix dialog with settings of -20, 20, -20, 45, 0 for brightness, shadows, highlights, saturation and sharpness respectively) before running the one step noise removal tool.

The War Of The Roses

2010-06-02T08:59:00.004+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	41.3mm
Aperture	f/2.5
Exposure	1/500 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

Across the battlefield the cry of howzat! rang out as yet another Lancastrian fell under the onslaught of the brave Yorkshiremen. The unfortunate Lancastrian was, on the occasion of this photo, Mark Chilton. Actually he appears to be a traitorous Yorkshireman, rather than a native Lancastrian, having been born in Sheffield -- shame on him!

As you can probably tell by now, I spent last Sunday at the Roses Cricket Match at Headingly watching Yorkshire attempt to bowl out Lancashire. We were actually due to go on Saturday for the first day of the match but the weather meant that there was no play so we went on Sunday instead. Lancashire won the toss and opted to bat first. We saw three wickets fall by the time we left at tea. The photo shows the last of these wickets being taken. Literally seconds after the shutter had closed the ball was in the safe hands of Jacques Rudolph. The match summary is a little more restrained than my opening description and describes the fall of the wicket thus:

The third-wicket stand had progressed to 81 when Chilton, on 42, edged Rashid and Jacques Rudolph flung out a right hand to grasp an excellent catch at slip. Lancashire 185-3. Stephen Croft joined Prince, who had reached 74 by tea when Lancashire were still handily placed on 192-3.

Anyway, that is probably enough cricket, let's get back to the photo. I was using quite a fast shutter speed in an attempt to keep the ball mostly circular in the photos rather than just a red blur. The downside (given that I was using shutter priority mode rather than full manual) was that the images are darker than I would like, and certainly darker than the view appeared to the naked eye. Of course increasing the brightness is a fairly trivial post-processing operation. So I increased both the brightness and contrast (to 25/25 in PaintShop Pro) and then increased the saturation to add a little more colour (I used the hue/saturation/lightness dialog with values of 0/10/0). I then adjusted the colour balance using the auto white balance tool and a slight increase in the temperature (to 4550). The final step was to run the one step noise removal tool. Given that you never know when a wicket will fall and for each ball you only get one chance to take the shot I'm pretty happy with this photo.

One of the highlights of the day, other than the fall of three Lancastrian wickets, was the red kite that decided to drift lazily over the ground. Unfortunately given the height it was at finding it with the camera wasn't that easy, especially not at full zoom. Anyway a bit of cropping and noise reduction gives a photo that at least proves what we saw. It isn't that unusual to see red kites around Leeds given that there has been a fairly successful re-introduction programme centred on Harewood House but this is the first time I've seen one over a built up area anywhere in the country. A nice extra to a really good day.

Of course nothing is ever perfect and the weather meant that only two of the four days of the match were played resulting in a draw. That's the second Roses Match I've been to and both have been drawn due to weather. I hoping that is a coincidence and that I'm not at fault for Yorkshire failing to annihilate the opposition!

Apologies to anybody reading this who was unfortunate enough to be born on the wrong, i.e. west, side of the Pennines!

Circling The Drain

2010-05-15T15:48:00.001+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	9.0mm
Aperture	f/2.0
Exposure	1/8 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

I was hoping to have lots of interesting photos from my trip to Sofia to choose from for this weeks post but unfortunately that isn't the case. Having got stuck under an ash cloud I had to sleep the first night of the trip on the seats at Munich airport. As a consequence I was just too tired to do anything but work, eat and sleep while I was in Sofia (you can read all about my travels on my other blog). So rather than yet another old photo I decided to get creative for this weeks photo.

In recent weeks hardly a day has gone by when there hasn't been some mention in the news of the current economic crisis, and specifically the current problems in Greece which threatens to destabilise the Euro in other countries including France and Germany. Given I came back from my trip with a pocket full of Euro change I thought I'd try and take a photo to show the current state of the currency.

I placed a single Euro in the sink and set the tap running. There was light through the window but I turned the room light on as well as I didn't want to use the flash to illuminate the scene as it would have bounced off the water (an effect I didn't want). I wanted to get close to the coin so that I could get as much detail as possible which meant using the macro function on the camera. Unfortunately the water kept splashing the lens which didn't make life easy. The other problem was that the auto-focus in macro mode seemed to have real problems focusing through the running water and onto the coin. I took about thirty photographs and only got one useable one, the rest were badly out of focus! The photo I took was alright but as you can see it wasn't really inspiring so I set to work in PaintShop Pro to see what I could do with it.

The first thing I did was to use the clarify option to draw out some of the detail in the photo. Usually you only need small adjustments with this tool, but I found that pushing the value of high as it would go (all the way to 20) actually gave the photo an interesting look that I quite liked. I then used the smart photo fix dialog to tweak the brightness and saturation. The aim was to make the wholes in the plug hole almost black but to make the reflections from the plug hole stand out more (for the curious I used values of 3, -50, 30, 10 and 0 for brightness, shadows, highlights, saturation and sharpness respectively). Whilst this improved the image quite dramatically it gave it an orange hue that I wasn't sure about. The fix for this was to use the colour balance tool to reduce the temperature of the image (i.e. move the colours from orange to blue). I used the smart white balance and then tweaked the temperature until I was happy with the results (the final value was 8410). I then applied the one step noise removal tool to soften the water at the bottom left which had picked up some noise during the other processing steps.

Now the photo certainly wasn't what I thought I'd be posting this week, but nevertheless I really quite like it and I hope that you do too.

Rippled Reflections

2010-05-08T17:04:00.004+01:00

Camera	Fujifilm FinePix A900
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	8.8mm
Aperture	f/2.9
Exposure	1/140 sec.
ISO Speed	200
Flash	on

It's been a busy week with work and so not only have I not had time to go out and take new photos I've not really had much time to spend working on old one's either. The reason I've been busy is that I'm going away to a project meeting in Sofia next week, so hopefully by the next post I should have been able to take a few interesting pictures (just one would be nice). So with that in mind I thought I'd look back to a previous work trip for this post.

I've been to work meetings in Bled, Slovenia on two separate occasions; in January of 2008 and 2009. The second time was exceptionally cold (I stepped off the plane into -17C) and snowy. If you read this blog regularly then you will already now how the lake in Bled looked as I posted a rather atmospheric photo from that trip which I called Misty Moisty Morning. The photo for this weeks post though comes from my first trip to Bled in January of 2008. So now you know what Lake Bled looks like in good weather! To highlight the two main items of interest here are a couple more photos from the same trip showing the church and the castle.

If you have read this blog (or posts about Bled on Tales from an English Coffee Drinker) then you will know that the church is actually the Pilgrimage Church of the Assumption of Mary. According to the official history of the site the current church dates to 1698 although there is evidence to suggest activity on the island as far back as the 7th century BC. I haven't managed to find out quite as much about Bled castle although according to it's website there has been a castle on the site since at least the year 1011.

Hope you enjoyed the photos and hopefully there will be new and exciting photos from Sofia for next weeks post!

The End Of The Road

2010-05-03T10:52:00.002+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	20.0mm
Aperture	f/4.0
Exposure	1/125 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

Whilst I am not a religious person I find churches really quite interesting places. There is always something to see, from interesting architecture to art or items of cultural or historical significance. The bigger the church the more there usually is to see, but often small or abandoned churches can be just as interesting. Certainly in England older churches often have graveyards and old gravestones can be exceptionally interesting; sometimes the inscriptions tell of obvious family heartache while some are fantastic pieces of art.

This weeks photo was taken when we were on honeymoon and staying at Dalhousie Castle just south of Edinburgh. The map showed that there were remains of a church right next to the castle grounds and so whilst we were wondering around enjoying the sunshine we went to take a look. There are some quite substantial bits of wall remaining and so it is clear that the building used to be a church, but what interested me (as usual) were the gravestones. A lot of the stones were well worn and so any writing was somewhere between faint and non-existent, but many still had clear carved decoration. It may seem strange to some people, but on a nice sunny day there are not many places as relaxing as an old churchyard, especially one with as much to look at as this one. The photo itself is straight from the camera and hasn't been edited at all.

Given that there isn't much else to say about processing the photo I thought I'd share a couple more gravestone photos. This one is from the Kilmuir Graveyard at the north end of the Troternish peninsula on Skye. This stone apparently marks the grave of Angus Martin and "according to tradition, this slab at the rear of the cemetery depicting a mailed figure, once marked the grave of an early Scottish king but was stolen by Angus on one of his forays to be placed in due course over his own grave; he is reputed to have carried it up on his back from the shore. Angus was known as Angus of the Wind because of his insistence on going to sea in all weathers; he was reputed to have married a Danish princess and had seven sons". To my mind this is probably the best stone in the graveyard although by far from the only one of interest; there is a large monument to Flora MacDonald, the grave of Charles MacArthur one of the famous pipers to the Lord of the Isles (I couldn't actually locate this one), and the grave of Dr John Maclean physician to the MacDoanld's at Duntulum who was commended by Dr Johnson for his wide learning.

And just to prove you don't have to go quite so far out of the way to see interesting gravestones here is a photo I took back in 1994 as part of a school history project (given the date it should be obvious that this photo wasn't taken with a digital camera but has been scanned from a 35mm film negative hence the slightly odd aspect ratio and lower quality) The photo shows an intricately carved gravestone in the churchyard of St Mary's in the Wood in Morley where I grew up. There has been a church on the same site since at least the time of the Domesday Book if not before (although the modern church dates to only 1878) so there are a whole stack of interesting gravestones to look at and photograph. Unfortunately the church and it's grounds have apparently now been sold to a developer as the congregation could no longer afford to pay for its upkeep; hopefully the gravestones won't be lost in any redevelopment.

A Partial Solar Eclipse

2010-04-25T11:52:00.004+01:00

Camera	Fujifilm FinePix A900
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	35.2mm
Aperture	f/16.0
Exposure	1/1024 sec.
ISO Speed	100
Flash	off

I took this photo back in 2008 when the UK last saw a partial solar eclipse. It was a work day and I'd forgotten about the eclipse until I arrived at work, which meant that I only had the small camera with me. I thought this was going to put an end to any photography as I wouldn't have enough control over the camera to get a decent photo. I assumed that to photograph a partial solar eclipse I would need to work with a very fast shutter speed to stop the image being completely blown out. Unfortunately the FinePix A900 doesn't have any manual controls, fortunately though the weather decided to help out a little.

I suppose it should have come as no great surprise that the day of the eclipse was cloudy -- I live in England after all! So I decided to try and use the clouds as a filter to cut down the amount of light reaching the camera and hence compensate for the lack of manual options on the camera. There were just two problems with this approach. Even wearing sunglasses and with clouds the sun is way too bright to look at directly which makes pointing the camera in the right direction more than a little difficult. The second problem was with the camera, and I don't know if this is limited to just the finePix A900 or to digital cameras in general. The problem seems to be that the LCD screen can't handle huge amounts of light. While the photos that I took are okay (only one of the twenty was usable but none of the rest showed any problems) when I pointed the camera at the sun the LCD went crazy. I'm assuming that what I was seeing was some form of buffer overflow manifesting itself as large purple blocks on the screen. At first I was worried that I'd damaged the CCD and had killed the camera, but as I said the photos are fine, and once you point the camera away from the sun it settles down and goes back to normal.

Given the problems involved in taking the photo I was quite impressed that I managed to get even a single usable image. The photo on the left is the original before I did some processing to it for this weeks post. The first thing I did was to crop the image to both make the sun larger in the frame and to give more prominence to the interesting coloured clouds in the top left. I assume that the colours in the clouds are an artifact from the camera as I don't remember them being that colour on the day. Artifact or not the colours in the clouds do add to the photo and I decided to make them more obvious by increasing the saturation of the image (I actually used the Smart Photo Fix dialog in PaintShop Pro with settings of -40, 45, 40, 60 and 0). The final processing step was to apply the single step noise removal option to soften the image a little.

The clouds in the final image reminded me a little of some of the famous images returned by the Hubble space telescope and I was more than a little surprised to read this week that the telescope has just turned 20 years old after being launched back in 1990.

The Secret Garden

2010-04-16T09:16:00.001+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto bracket (±1 EV)
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/3.5
Exposure	1/60 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

We've been on annual leave this past week and as well as doing lots of work in the garden and tidying up the house a little we took a trip to Wentworth Castle and had a very pleasant walk around the gardens. We took just short of 200 photos (198 to be exact) and while there are quite a few good ones I've chosen a view of the entrance to the Victorian Flower Garden for this weeks post.

One of the entrances to this particular part of the gardens is through a short stone tunnel which runs under a viewing platform (probably dating to when the area of the garden was actually a bowling green). The darkness of the tunnel compared to the garden beyond was accentuated by the tall trees bordering the path up to the gate. It really did look like a hidden path into a secret garden. At the time I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to capture and so took a range of photos at different exposure settings as well as a couple of bracketed sets for creating HDR images. When I looked through the photos on the computer the following bracketed set stood out as the most promising.

So the first step was to use PaintShop Pro to combine the three photos using the HDR merge tool. As usual the default settings weren't really appropriate and so after some playing around I settled for using a brightness of 40 and clarity of 75. For some reason the merged photo exhibited quite a lot of noise and so I ran the One Step Noise Removal tool which cleaned it right up. I then used the Smart Photo Fix dialog (settings of 0, 0, -30, 30 and 0) to restore some colour to the photo. The photo to the left shows how it looks at this stage. Now I quite like this photo but I decided to make one more adjustment to get the final photo for the blog.

While I like the intermediate photo I wasn't convinced that it was quite right. I decided that I wanted to soften the image a little and give it a dream like quality. After playing around for a while I discovered that the Soft Focus option (with the default settings) resulted in something close to what I was looking for. I guess that given how much computer processing went into this weeks post it is probably an image rather than a photo but I'm reasonably happy with the result and if you all enjoy it then it doesn't really matter what we call it.

Fungi

2010-04-11T16:35:00.004+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/2.0
Exposure	1/8 sec.
ISO Speed	100
Flash	off

Sometimes I wish I could afford a full blown DSLR and a range of decent lenses. Not that my main camera isn't brilliant but the extra versatility of interchangeable lenses would allow me the ability to take a larger range of photos. There are, however, some photos for which my camera is ideally suited and which would be awkward or impossible to take with a DSLR.

The Sony DSC-F828 I own has a weird feature in that the lens will tilt up and down by about 30 degrees. Whilst this may, at first sight, seem a bit strange (I honestly thought I'd broken something the first time it tilted) it turns out to be exceptionally useful. You can take photos over a crowd of people by tilting the lens down and holding the camera up high whilst still being able to see the screen. You can also title the lens up and the hold it level to look down on the screen. This turns out to be great for taking photos of plants and especially fungi where you want to get low down to the ground. You couldn't get as low with a DSLR as the body of the camera would stop the lens laying quite so close to the ground.

Here is one of the first photos I ever took with the DSC-F828 (it's photo number 49) and again shows just how close to the ground I can get whilst still using the viewfinder properly. I've no idea what type of fungi this is especially given the rather tatty nature of the specimen.

The main photo for this week shows velvet shank growing on a dead tree stump in the garden of the previous house we lived in. At least I think it is velvet shank -- I've been through every page of Roger Philips' excellent Mushrooms book and it is the only thing that looks right. Apparently it's edible but given that I don't really fancy a horrible lingering death I didn't actually find out.

Just to round off the post here are three more unidentified fungi all photographed with the lens on the floor. These were all taken by the Coral Beach on Skye during out holiday last year if that is of any interest to anyone who could identify them!

Domesday

2010-04-05T16:46:00.005+01:00

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	16.0mm
Aperture	f/4.0
Exposure	1/60 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

So this weeks post (a few days late, sorry) isn't really about photography but more of a history lesson. I went for a walk yesterday along a section of the Trans Pennine Trail from Penistone around Oxspring and back to the house. There are plent of helpful way markers, notice boards along the route as well as this informative bench.

I've always been interested in local history but had never thought to look if Penistone, or any of the surrounding area, was mentioned in the copy of the Domesday Book that I own. The bench shows a simplified version of the entry which according to my book translates as:

In OXSPRING and ROUGHBIRCHWORTH, Swein had 2 carucates of land to the geld, and there could be 2 ploughs. Ilbert has it, and it is waste. TRE it was worth 20s. [There is] woodland pasture 6 furlongs long and 3 broad.

Apparently TRE stands for the Latin "Tempore Regis Edwardi" which translates to "in the time of King Edward", i.e. before the 1066 conquest. A few pages earlier there is the entry for Penistone which apparently translates as:

In PENISTONE, Alric had 10 bovates of land to the geld, and there could be 1 carucate of land[sic]. Now the same man has it of Ilbert, and it is waste. TRE it was worth 20s.

Whilst the post isn't really about the photograph I did do a little work on it for the post; adjust the colour balance and contrast to make the words stand out a little more than they did in the original.

Squirrel Vignette

2010-03-26T13:39:00.004Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	50.3mm
Aperture	f/4.0
Exposure	1/80 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

You may remember when I bought the Raynox DCR-2025PRO I mentioned that I had to use the camera at the maximum zoom otherwise the photos suffered from quite serious vignetting. Well there is only one problem; taking the lens off actually takes some time. When we visited Potteric Carr I found this was actually quite a serious problem.

Wildlife has a nasty habit of not holding still or appearing where you want it to. From one of the hides at Potteric Carr I was trying to photograph both small birds on the feeders and a pheasant and squirrel that were walking about just in front of the hide. I needed the extra lens to photograph the small birds but didn't have the time or the patience to keep taking it on and off to try and photograph the squirrel. So in the end I just took some photos at the lowest zoom I could manage with the lens attached. These are x15.4 zoom from the x7 optical zoom of the camera and the x2.2 multiplier of the Raynox lens. The problem though is the vignetting that occurs. Fortunately in this photo I actually quite like the effect. I'm not sure if this will be a useful technique for other types of scene but knowing I can produce this effect without relying on a computer is nice.

An Honest Little Owl

2010-03-19T16:39:00.004Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	50.4mm
Aperture	f/4.0
Exposure	1/80 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

Last week I argued that photographers should be honest about the digital manipulation they apply to their images. It is also important that we are honest about how the photo was composed. Good wildlife photographs can be very difficult to take (I'm not claiming that any of mine would be classified as good) as the subject matter is likely to be highly uncooperative. Maybe I could have got away with claiming that this weeks photo was taken with a combination of good luck and a telephoto lens but that wouldn't have been honest.

As you can see from this photo the owl was actually on display at a falconry centre and so was easy to photograph. For those who are interested I took the photo when on honeymoon at Dalhousie Castle and the Little Owl is called Puck.

If we are honest about how we took a photo then people don't feel misled. I'd say that most of us are open and honest about how we take photos, unfortunately the actions of a small minority mean that you can never be too sure if the photo you are looking at is of real wildlife or if it is staged.

I guess the moral of the story is that a good photo is a good photo; be open and honest about how it was taken and people will then choose how impressed to be!

The Angel's Bottom

2010-03-12T08:45:00.005Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto bracket (±1 EV)
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/2.8
Exposure	1/2000 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

When post-processing photos on the computer I feel that you have to be careful to ensure that the final image is still a photo. I believe that in most cases photographers should stick to fixing issues that could have been avoided at the time the photo was taken. In essence the resulting image should still look like a natural photograph. Sometimes though, no matter how hard we try the camera simply isn't capable of capturing the scene in front of us. For example, my photo of Ingelborough couldn't have been captured without the use of HDR software to combine multiple exposures. When I was producing that image I was, however, only ever trying to reproduce what I had seen with my own eyes. While computer post-processing can be a useful tool it can also be badly abused to produce images that are no longer grounded in reality; HDR is often abused in this way. Whilst such images may be interesting art I'd say that they were no longer strictly photographs. So this week I'm not claiming to show you a photograph but rather a piece of photography inspired art.

When I visited the Angel of the North I knew that the photos weren't going to turn out particularly well. It was cloudy and bright which meant that either I exposed for the sky or for the sculpture but there was no way I could sensibly expose for both. So I had a play with the camera's auto bracketing feature to take photos at a range of exposure values. Here you can see the three exposures that I used to assemble the final image for this weeks post.

I did assemble them into a single photo to show detail in both sky and statue but it was rather unsatisfactory, so I decided I'd abuse the HDR feature of Paint Shop Pro and produce an image that had no grounding in reality but that I quite like. Having now pushed the HDR idea to the limits I can see why people enjoy using it but I'm still going to stick to the fact that it is no longer a photo.

Just to prove that HDR can be used for good as well as evil here is another image of the Angel of the North and the one that inspired the title of this weeks post. I think this is a much more natural image and would even go as far as to say that it is still a photo! Given the right light I could have persuaded my camera to take this photo, but there is absolutely no way that I could have taken the main image with a camera -- it could only have been achieved on a computer. Not everyone will agree with this distinction but I guess that as long as we are all open and honest as to how an image was achieved we can leave the rest to personal taste.

Sunset By The Humber

2010-03-05T15:55:00.006Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/2.0
Exposure	1/100 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

In an early post on this blog I talked about the problem of correctly exposing landscape shots so that both the land and sky retained their detail. In this photo though I deliberately wanted to expose the photo for the sky only which causes all the detail of the land to be lost.

When taking sunset photos you often don't want to see any (or certainly not much) detail of the land. What you are interested in is the sky and possibly any interesting silhouettes that will add to the composition. Unfortunately the auto settings on your camera are quite likely to let you down. The image on the left was the first photo I took of the sunset and shows what happens when you leave the camera on auto. I've actually picked up lots of sky detail and some detail on the land. Unfortunately because of the long exposure time (1/20 sec) the colours of the sunset have been washed out and muted from what I saw with my own eyes. The trick is to set a much faster shutter time and under expose the scene. Changing the exposure changes the way colours are recorded. Some colours change dramatically as you under expose (yellows move towards brown) while others stay relatively unchanged (blues for instance). The trick is to choose an exposure that makes the most of the scene in front of you

The problem is that the LCD screen on most digital cameras isn't of the highest quality and so it is often difficult to know what exposure settings to use to capture the perfect sunset photo. With sunsets I often take lots and lots of photos at varying exposure settings to ensure that I end up with some that are "just right". This means that I end up with some that are over exposed (like the photo you've already seen) and some where I've recorded so little light that I've lost detail or changed the colouring too dramatically. For example, the photo on the left was taken with an exposure time of 1/200sec and the sky detail has been lost.

So the final image was captured with an exposure time of 1/100 sec and works really quite well -- lots of detail and colour in the sky without distracting details in the land portion of the image. The only work I did to the photo was to remove a few window lights from the building at the bottom left which I couldn't do anything about when I took the photo, but the colours are exactly as they came out of the camera.

For comparison here is the same photo after some work in Paint Shop Pro where I duplicated the photo to create two layers. The bottom layer held the original photo and the top layer was then adjusted to recover the land. I then deleted the sky portion of the top layer to allow the original sky to show through. This is similar to the first attempt to rescue the Ingelborough photo.

Why am I showing you this? Well I think it shows quite nicely that the foreground is distracting and doesn't add anything to this photo (unlike in the photo of Ingelborough). So using a fast exposure allowed me to capture more detail in the sky and to ignore the landscape resulting in what I think is a better picture. This version also shows just how much detail can be rescued from apparently black sections of a photo. I don't fully understand why but if colours are blown all the way to white in the photo there is almost no chance of recovering any detail. If, on the other hand, you expose for detail in the light areas of a scene you will find that there is always detail you can rescue from the dark areas. I haven't yet found a good use for this knowledge but I'm sure if/when I do there will be a post about it!

The Quiraing

2010-02-26T13:26:00.005Z

This weeks photo is of the Quiraing on Skye. Some of you will undoubtedly remember that I've blogged about this photo before, but as with previous posts on this blog I've spent quite some time this week working on the photo and so have a story to tell.

Bagpipes are a Scottish institution. I don't think anyone would argue with that. So if you had a business selling bagpipes or accessories than it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that your website would include some photos of Scotland. Earlier this week I was approached by just such a company regarding the photo of the Quiraing you see above. Mark Wygent makes and sells bagpipe reeds through his company Wygent Reeds. In the process of updating his website he came across my panorama from the car park people use to walk the Quiraing which I posted on Tales From An English Coffee Drinker and wanted to use it as the masthead image. I was more than happy for him to use the photo on his website but decided that I should put some time into improving it first.

The photo above is the panorama I originally blogged. It is okay but it suffers from a number of problems which I should have anticipated at the time I took the photos. You may have noticed that this post doesn't include the usual table showing the camera settings I used. This is because they varied widely between the 14 photos comprising the panorama. Usually the light across the panoramas I take doesn't vary enough to be a problem but in this case I was shooting into the sun and so the exposure levels and white balance are different on each photo. This means that each of the photos is relatively well exposed (the auto settings on the camera did a reasonable job) but that the photos don't overlap very well and hence the colours in the panorama, especially the sky, look quite odd. You can see the problem even more clearly if you look at two consecutive images before they are combined.

It became clear at this point that I had quite a lot of work to do if I was going to fix the photos to generate a better panorama. The first thing I noticed was that because of the overlap between photos I didn't actually need all 14 photos to make the panorama, just eight of the photos were needed. This allowed me to choose the better lit photos and discard some of the really badly coloured images. I then started with the left most image and compared pairs of overlapping photos to see if they needed adjusting. When the colours didn't match I used the colour balance tool in Paint Shop Pro; I used the automatic white balance setting and then increased the colour temperature to remove the blue hue. You can see how this helps by looking at the same two adjacent photos as before.

I think you'll agree that the colour match is now much better which will result in a much improved panorama. I used these adjusted photos to generate the new panorama and then the final step was small adjustments to the brightness, contrast and saturation. I'm fairly happy with the final result although it would have been so much easier just to have remembered to at least lock the white balance between photos at the time I took them -- another lesson learned!

The Odd One Out

2010-02-19T08:31:00.005Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	51.0mm
Aperture	f/4.0
Exposure	1/200 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

I was hoping that our trip to Potteric Carr would lead to a great photo of a Bittern for this weeks post but unfortunately we weren't that lucky. We still had a great day out though and I took quite a few photos including the one I'm going to talk about this week.

We saw lots of interesting birds (see my other posts on the trip here and here) but the photo I like most is actually of very common birds; a coot and a lot of black headed gulls. As soon as we got settled in the hide that I took the photo from I knew the shot I wanted. The coot was slowly making it's way through a large mass of gulls and I knew that if I waited long enough I should be able to get a photo of the coot looking completely out of place. Not quite like an Everton supporter in the Liverpool stand at a derby match (that would be a gazelle in amongst a pride of lions) but still the odd one out. I only had to wait a few minutes before I got the photo. As you can see from the original on the left it needed quite a bit of post processing before I was happy with it.

The first step was to crop the image down. There were a couple of things that I felt spoilt the shot; the reflection of reeds across the top, the flying gull, and the two ducks top left. Fortunately these were all easy to crop out leaving me with just water, coot and gulls. The flying gull was probably the worst distraction and draws the eye more than the coot in the original photo so it had to go. The coloured reflection was also annoying as you couldn't see what it was reflecting. I tend to err on the side of doing as little as possible to a photo on the computer but on this occasion I think the crop was more than necessary. Whilst the crop has improved the photo the fact that it was taken on a cold, damp and grey day shows in the very muted colours that aren't very pleasing.

So in Paint Shop Pro I fixed the white balance (after talking about it last week I forgot to alter the camera setting, doh!) and then added some colour back into the image. All together this makes it look as if the photo was taken on a bright crisp winters day and I think you'll agree is much better than the original. I could easily have stopped at this point and the photo would have been okay, but I decided to experiment a little with another feature that has only recently been added to Paint Shop Pro; depth of field.

When taking close up shots you can often compose a photo with only a very narrow depth of field which means that both the background and near foreground are out of focus with just the subject matter crisp and sharp. This has the advantage of drawing the eye into a section of the photo and possibly hiding details that would have otherwise spoilt the photo. When shooting at such a long distance this isn't as easy to achieve using just the camera but digital techniques can be used to achieve a similar effect. For the final photo I used the depth of field tool to select just the horizontal strip the coot is walking across and I think it enhances the final image quite a bit.

Perigee

2010-02-12T09:04:00.003Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	51.0mm
Aperture	f/8.0
Exposure	1/250 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

I misspoke last week; I'd completely forgotten that I'd played with the camera and taken some interesting photos of perigee which I could have blogged about. So guess what... this weeks blog is about perigee and the reason you might want to use the white balance button if your camera has one. Let's start with a little bit of science before we get to the photo.

I'm sure that by now you will have all worked out that perigee is related in some way to the moon but for those of you who have never heard the word before, I thought I'd give a little astronomy lesson. Whilst we may often draw the orbits of planets around the sun (or moons around planets) as circles they are actually elliptical in shape. This means that as the moon moves through it's orbit there is a point at which it is closest to the earth and a point at which it is further away. These are known as perigee and apogee and the diagram probably does a better job of explaining this than my words on their own. Perigee occurred on the 29th of January and it coincided with a full moon giving us a good opportunity to photograph it. And so with the astronomy lesson out of the way let's move onto the photo.

Even though the moon was larger than normal I still decided to use the telephoto adaptor I bought for the camera and so I'm working at a zoom level of x30. Before I even tried to take a photo I knew that the auto settings would be of no use what so ever. They tend to do average metering across the scene to work out exposure settings and given the vast difference in light levels between the sky and the moon that was never going to work. So I switched to shutter priority mode, and spot metering. I experimented a bit but found that an exposure time of 1/250 second gave a pretty good picture and didn't require a tripod to get a crisp image. The photo on the left shows this first attempt. Whilst the photo is okay there are a few problems with it. First there is quite a lot of noise in the sky but more importantly the moon is yellow. Even if some of you happen to believe that the moon is made of cheese I can tell you that on the night in question it was white rather than yellow. Now I could have corrected this on the computer but I decided I'd try and work out how to get the right colour from the camera instead. Fortunately my camera has an option for setting the white balance which is just what I needed to ensure the moon didn't look like cheese. I cycled through all the white balance modes on the camera (other than fully manual -- I'm not quite ready for that yet) and found that choosing fluorescent gave the best match. According to the manual the fluorescent mode gives a colour temperature of 4000K and is used (not surprisingly) for shooting under fluorescent light!

The added advantage of setting the white balance properly is that the sky is now much blacker and the distracting noise is reduced. Whilst I could have accomplished that on the computer it would probably have taken quite some time and I'd prefer, where possible, to do as little post processing as necessary to retain as much quality in the image as possible. I wouldn't say I've now mastered the white balance but I'll certainly remember to use it in future.

Misty Moisty Morning

2010-02-05T16:28:00.006Z

Camera	Fujifilm FinePix A900
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	8.8mm
Aperture	f/2.9
Exposure	1/100 sec.
ISO Speed	200
Flash	off

Okay, so it has been an exceptionally boring week photography wise. I haven't taken a single useful photo and so am at a bit of a loss for this weeks post. So I'm going to show you an old photo and talk about another piece of photography equipment I've bought recently; this one is a lot cheeper than the telephoto lens adapter I talked about last week!

Lets start with the photo and explain why I thought it worth spending £3 on a new piece of photography equipment. The photo shows the Pilgrimage Church of the Assumption of Mary appearing out of the early morning mist of Lake Bled in Slovenia. The layout of this blog means that I can't easily use a bigger version of the photo, but if you want to see more detail then I have blogged this photo before so you can see it in all it's glory over on Tales from an English Coffee Drinker.

The photo was taken around 7am on the 13th of January 2009 in temperatures of around -17C. Given the small shutter button on the camera I can't operate it with gloves on and so my hands were fairly numb and I did have problems holding the camera still. I took eight photos to get the whole scene and after combining the photos here is how the panorama looked.

Obviously to improve the composition of the image I had to crop to remove the section of boardwalk and the tree branches from the right hand side. I also had to straighten the image so that the lake was level and the church spire didn't look like it was falling over.

There are cases where the orientation of the camera isn't that important but in images such as this keeping the camera level is vital, otherwise the final image just looks wrong. In this image there isn't much detail at the edges and so straightening the photo on the computer was possible. When taking panoramas or 3D photos keeping the camera level becomes even more important. The best solution of course is to simply ensure that you keep the camera level as you take the shot. The easiest way of checking the orientation of the camera is with a spirit level. There are a number of spirit levels available that fasten to the head of a tripod but as I don't currently own a full blown tripod they aren't an option. So the solution I've opted for is a 3-axis spirit level that simply clips into the flash hot shoe on the camera. It fits on my main camera perfectly and is in my field of view when I'm looking at the LCD on the back of the camera and so is easy to check. Of course this wouldn't actually have helped with the photo I took in Bled as the small camera I travel with doesn't have a hotshoe.

I've got a couple of trips planned over the next few weeks so hopefully I'll have lots of new photos to blog about rather than having to talk about an old photo again next week.

Long Tailed Tits

2010-01-29T08:33:00.007Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	51.0mm
Aperture	f/2.0
Exposure	1/30 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

Whilst this is probably the best photo I've ever taken of Long Tailed Tits I am aware that it isn't actually the greatest of photos. This week's post isn't really about the photo though, but about a new piece of photographic kit we've just bought.

When we bought our first digital camera we wanted it to replace both the point-and-shoot film cameras we both owned as well as having a reasonable zoom to allow us to take a wider range of photos. As you already know we bought the Sony DSC-F828 which is capable of being used to take some brilliant photos. I have, however, always been more than a little annoyed about the marketing description of the zoom feature. The camera has a x7 optical zoom which, at the time we bought camera, was about as good as you could get without buying a full blown DSLR and paying a lot for a telephoto lens. As well as the optical zoom the camera has a digital zoom that was advertised as "up to x35". This actually comes in two varieties; precision and smart. The precision zoom is a x2 multiplier giving a very good quality x14 zoom. The smart zoom, on the other hand, is almost useless. It doesn't actually zoom the image as such, it is more like a crop. Basically it crops a section from the middle of the image and then scales it up to the selected image size. So you can only get the advertised x35 zoom (actually x36 as it is a x5.1 modifier on the x7 optical zoom) if you are willing to drop the recorded image down from 8 megapixels (3264x2448) to VGA (just 640x480 pixels). You can get exactly the same effect (sometimes even better) by taking a photo with the precision zoom and then cropping it on the computer. The problem is that with such few pixels the image is very blocky and the photos certainly aren't worth printing. So apart from a few brief experiments when we first got the camera I have never used the smart zoom function and have always felt a little cheated.

Sony do sell a number of accessories for the DSC-F828, including an improved macro lens and an ND filter which attach to the end of the existing lens, but nothing that would give me a useful zoom above x14. I'd never really thought about seeing if anyone else made accessories for the camera until a few weeks ago, at which point I came across the Raynox range of high definition lenses. Whilst they make lots of lenses and adaptors their site allows you to easily list all the products that are compatible with a given camera, for example the Sony DSC-F828! They make a number of telephoto lens adapters that would fit my camera but I've bought the DCR-2025PRO which gives me a x2.2 multiplier and with the full optical and precision zoom of the camera gives me x30. Finally the ability to zoom in and still take high quality images.

Even before I'd tried to take any photos I was impressed. The lens is a solid chunk of glass and metal that feels well built. It comes with a huge lens shade, carry bag and adapter rings allowing it to be used with a number of different cameras. I've had the lens for less than a week and so haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet, but I did take a bunch of comparison images from my study window to get an idea of just how good it is.

Reading left to right and top to bottom, we have firstly just the x7 optical zoom of the camera. In theory this will be the highest quality image of the four as it doesn't involve any digital zoom, but as you can see I can't get that close to the Long Tailed Tits on the feeders. The second image is x14, which is the optical zoom boosted by the x2 precision digital zoom. Image quality is still high but I'm also still a long way away from the birds. The third image shows the new Raynox DCR-2025PRO in use. The camera still reports a x14 zoom as it doesn't know about the lens adapter but it is really x30. This is the best of the four images; good optics and a precision digital zoom giving an image I can print and use. The final image shows the smart x36 zoom. As you can see, whilst I can get a lot closer to the birds the quality of the image is very low. I have tried printing a few of these images in the past and they are so poor it really isn't worth the money. There are of course two other combinations that I haven't shown. First I could have a x15 zoom by using just the camera's optical zoom and the DCR-2025PRO, but this doesn't give images that are much better than those achieved using the precision zoom and they suffer from quite serious vignetting because of the length of the lens. The other option would be to use the DCR-2025PRO with the smart zoom which would give me almost x80 zoom, but low image quality. I suppose this might be useful for photographing very small things at a great distance but I can't imagine that I'll use this option much given that I can achieve the same thing by cropping and scaling the high quality x30 photos.

One problem with such large zoom levels is camera shake. The higher the zoom the more any slight movement shows up in the final image. I don't own a tripod that will hold the weight of the camera (especially not with the extra 275g of lens attached) so I took the shots resting the lens on the window frame and trying to hold the camera as still as possible (the next photography related investment is going to have to be a decent tripod!). I still needed quite a fast shutter speed to get sharp images so I have done some minor work on this weeks photo. Using Paint Shop Pro I adjusted the white balance, used the default smart photo fix settings and then applied the one step noise removal. The final step was to crop the image down to just the section I wanted.

So while this weeks photo was nothing special, I'm hoping that in future I'll be able to take some more impressive wildlife photos that I can then blog about.

Lyon At Night

2010-01-22T09:51:00.006Z

Camera	Fujifilm FinePix A900
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	8.8mm
Aperture	f/2.9
Exposure	1/5 sec.
ISO Speed	200
Flash	off

Okay, those of you who read my main blog, Tales from an English Coffee Drinker, may well remember this weeks photo as I blogged it during my trip to Lyon last October. Don't worry though I'm not running out of ideas for this blog and recycling old stuff; there is a new story behind the photo and I've done some extra work to it this week as well.

Lets start with the taking and processing of the photo. When I travel with work I try and make sure that I only need to take hand luggage. This simplifies my life a lot but does mean that I don't have the space to pack my main camera (the Sony DSC-F828 is big and heavy and would take up about a third of my hand luggage). So for travelling I have a small point-and-shoot camera, a Fujifilm FinePix A900 that I bought a couple of years ago when I visited Bled for the first time. It's perfect for travelling but does rather lack much in the way of options and settings. For example, it has an option to set the ISO level where the only setting you can choose is auto! It does have a scene selection mode though which does a reasonable job of choosing appropriate exposure settings.

So for this photo of Lyon I set the scene mode to Night which apparently gives "clear shots of night scenery and illumination". I didn't have a tripod with me (I'd managed to forget to pack my gorillapod) and so tried to hold the camera as still as possible on the top of a wall. I couldn't get the whole scene in a single shot so took the following three photos.

I then used Microsoft's free Image Composite Editor (ICE) to stitch the photos into a panorama. When I chose the photo for this weeks post I actually went back and did some work on the source images before stitching them together. You'll notice that the right hand image is spoilt somewhat by the large crane. I used the brilliant object removal tool in Paint Shop Pro to replace it with sky before stitching the improved panorama in this post. I really quite like this photo and it shows that even with a cheep digital camera and little control over the settings it is still possible to take good pictures. It turns out that someone else liked this photo as well.

Towards the end of November I got a rather odd e-mail asking me if I had actually taken this photo. At first I was worried that someone was trying to take credit for my photo but in fact they were looking for permission to use it. SIMPACK, a German company that develops software for simulating multi-body systems, is holding a training course in Lyon in March and their marketing people had been looking for photos to use in the brochure -- my photo appears on the second page. Note that they removed the unsightly crane by simply cropping the right hand side of the image.

This is the first time anyone has asked permission to use one of my photos, but if my technique improves maybe it won't be the last!

Drip, Drip, Drip

2010-01-15T15:24:00.010Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	7.1mm
Aperture	f/2.0
Exposure	1/800 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

As most of you will know the last week or so has seen rather cold weather in the UK. As well as seeing lots and lots and lots of snow our house seems to provide the ideal environment for growing icicles. We have had quite a lot of icicles hanging from the guttering, some around five feet in length. Most of the icicles have, however, grown in places not ideal to photography.

When I went into my study on Monday though I found that an icicle had grown right outside my study window. It wasn't the prettiest icicle but it was dripping quite regularly and an idea for a photo formed in my mind. I wanted to catch a perfectly spherical drop of water falling from the bottom of the icicle. The only question; could I manage to persuade my camera into catching the photo I wanted?

Related to the autobracketing option, that featured in last week's post, my camera also has a burst mode. When set to burst mode a single press (and hold) of the shutter button results in 7 photos with identical settings being taken in quick succession. According to the manual there is about 0.38 of second between successive photos captured in this way. My hope was that given how quick the icicle was dripping combined with the burst mode would mean that I wouldn't have to rely entirely on my reaction times to capture a drip before it fell too far. Of course to capture a falling water droplet I'd also need a fairly fast exposure time. So I set the camera to manual and started playing with shutter speeds and the burst mode. I quickly realised that to get the effect I was after I'd have to get really close to the icicle and use the macro mode on the camera. Even so, after about 10 minutes and 64 photos I gave up as I'd got rather cold and disheartened. About 20 minutes and a cup of coffee later I decided to try again and took a further 71 photos

When I sorted through this second batch I was amazed to discover that I'd captured the image I was after on the first attempt -- I'd even forgotten to turn on the burst mode! What I really like about this photo is the way in which only the icicle and drop are in focus yet you can still see the garden as the drop acts as a lens, giving a detailed, albeit, upside down view of the back of the garden (see the blown up section in the image just to the left).

The original photo was okay but I did do a little cleaning up using Paint Shop Pro. Firstly as I hadn't held the camera perfectly straight I corrected the image so that the drop was falling vertically downwards. I then corrected the white balance and adjusted the colours slightly to remove the blue tint from the image (for the curious I used the colour balance dialog to adjust the white balance and then the smart photo fix with the suggested settings to correct the colours). The final step was a quick noise removal to soften the background a little. It may have taken about 40 minutes and 134 wasted photos but I'm pretty happy with the result.

Ingelborough

2010-01-08T13:21:00.007Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto bracket (±1 EV)
Focal Length	14mm
Aperture	f/7.1
Exposure	1/250 sec.
ISO Speed	64
Flash	off

The automatic settings on most digital cameras are great when the scene you are shooting is evenly lit. Unfortunately we don't have to try too hard to find interesting things to photograph that are unlikely to be evenly lit -- landscapes are an obvious example. Good landscapes (usually) consist of a mixture of interesting land and interesting sky which can often require widely different exposure values in order to capture all the detail. Let only a small amount of light onto the sensor (or in days of old film) and the sky will be full of detail while the land is mostly black. On the other hand if we allow enough light to fall onto the sensor to capture details in the landscape the sky gets blown out, often to the point where there is no detail left at all, just a bright white sky. I've been disappointed more times than I care to remember by landscapes ruined in this way.

One of the features on my main camera is autobracketing. When enabled the camera takes three photos in succession each with slightly different exposure settings. I haven't used this setting in a while but back in 2006 when on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales I experimented with it a little. The autobracketing doesn't work in the fully automatic mode so I switched to setting the shutter speed by hand. I would point at the scene, adjust the shutter speed until I thought the display matched as well as possible the actual light conditions, and then press the button to take the photo and the camera would take three photos in sequence; the settings I'd set and one photo, 1 exposure value, either side leaving me with three slightly differently exposed photos. My hope was that one of the photos would have roughly the right exposure settings. Unfortunately this was never the case. I'd either get black land or white sky but never a good compromise. These photos languished in the bottom of the digital 'photo draw' until this week when I decided to revisit them and see if anything could be salvaged.

So my starting point was these three autobracketed images of the sun setting behind Ingelborough. As you can see the left hand image contains plenty of detail in the sky but the land is mostly shadow. Things are a little more balanced in the middle image which was the photo I actually set the camera to take. The right hand image contains the most detail on the land but the sky is almost completely blown out. What I really need is a way of combining information from the three images to create a single correctly exposed image. Just as with last weeks 3D image lets go back to the dawn of photography for my first attempt.

In 1857 Gustave Le Grey exhibited a set of seascape photographs taken in the summer of 1856 and the spring of 1857. Seascapes, like landscapes, are difficult to expose correctly. Most early photographers exposed for the sea which resulted in the sky being completely blown out. Le Grey, however, exhibited seascapes that were perfectly exposed. He had of course 'cheated'. The images were actually printed from two different negatives, one exposed for the sea and one for the sky. The image on the left is my digital recreation of this technique. In Paint Shop Pro (PSP) I opened the darkest image, showing the detail in the sky, and then added the lightest image, showing details on the land, as a second layer. I then used the smart edge freehand selection tool to select the sky on the top layer (with some feathering to hide the join) and then deleted it allowing the detailed sky to show through. I'm reasonable happy with the result although it should be noted that this approach will only really work where there is a clear divide between two exposure levels. For example, light shining through trees might benefit from the combination of two exposure settings but it would be impossible to manually merge two such images (unless you really fancy selecting the gaps between every leaf and trunk). Also the approach is really limited to just using two images which doesn't take advantage of the three bracketed images I originally took. So lets move from the Victorian era to the present day for an approach that will combine all three of the bracketed photos.

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a technique that allows you to blend multiple photos with different exposures resulting in an image with more details in the shadows and highlights then is possible with either the camera on it's own or the exposure blending technique I discussed above. Since it's introduction in the mid to late 1990's producing HDR images has usually required dedicated and/or expensive software. The explosion in HDR photos really started when Adobe added support to Photoshop, but at over £600 that is still out of my price range -- I won't pay more for software than I spent building the computer! The problem I have with HDR images is that people tend to abuse the process, resulting in images which have no grounding in reality. You only have to look at a few photos in the HDR pool on Flickr to see what I mean, although some people do use it sensibly and create fantastic looking images

I've recently upgraded the copy of PSP I use to the latest version (bizarrely called X2 and available from Corel) as the University I work for have a license allowing me to buy a copy for the grand sum of £2. One of the new features is HDR Photo Merge. So I have three differently exposed shots of the same scene and some HDR software, the approach to rescuing something from the original photo is now clear. On the left you can see my initial attempt at HDR. This is the raw output from the HDR photo merge, before I've spent time fixing the colours. What is important is that while it looks a little washed out there is detail throughout the whole photo. Some of the clouds are still blown out but only as badly as in the photo exposed for the sky anyway. Unlike most other HDR software PSP has a simplified interface for choosing the correct settings, allowing you to alter just the brightness and to clarify the image. Apparently these settings equate to setting the gamma and exposure and a local contrast operator. For the curious I used 60% for both settings to get this image. PSP can actually suggest settings for these two options if you don't want to spend hours tweaking the things manually, although it's suggestions of 36% and 27% respectively left the image a little dark for my liking.

The final step was to return some of the colour to the image that had been lost during the HDR merge. I could have done this in a number of ways using histograms, curves, colour temperature, channel mixers etc., but I opted for the simple Smart Photo Fix dialog in PSP. This allows you to alter the overall brightness of the image, the brightness of the shadows and highlights, saturation and sharpness. I could have spent days tweaking these numbers, especially as I wasn't at all happy with the automatically suggested values. In the end I went with values of -10, -70, -20, 50 and 75 respectively to produce the final image. I'm pretty happy with the result, although the blue in the sky might be a little bright for some people. In the future I'm certainly going to try both HDR and the old fashioned layering of images in order to make sure I get the most from my photos, especially when the lighting conditions are tricky.

Stereoscopic Snow

2010-01-01T11:39:00.029Z

Camera	Sony DSC-F828
Exposure Mode	auto
Focal Length	7mm
Aperture	f/2
Exposure	1/30 sec.
ISO Speed	100
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In Penistone it snowed quite heavily for much of the 20th of December 2009. In fact it snowed so much that all our guests who had been staying for the weekend left early as they knew it would take longer than usual to get home. Around four o'clock the light was fading fast but the snow had temporarily stopped failing allowing me to take a few clear shots of the snow covered garden.

Whilst the photos are nice I don't think that on their own they are particularly special. However, I took a few photos from view points about 8cm apart and this allowed me to experiment with stereoscopic photography to produce a 3D view of the garden.

I've always had an interest in 3D images and films but have never previously tried to create a 3D photo myself. Until recently when I thought of 3D images I always thought of the red-green images that require tinted glasses to view properly or projection systems using polarized light which require expensive pairs of projectors and glasses. Both of these approaches have their problems; the red-green images never look great as small differences in the printed ink and the tinted glasses tend to distort the colours and while the polarized light images always look good they aren't really an option for most of us given the associated costs. The answer to producing good 3D photos is to forget modern technology and use a good old fashioned Victorian approach to making and viewing 3D photos.

Not long after the advent of photography people started experimenting with taking 3D photographs. This was achieved by taking the first photo, shifting the camera slightly and then taking a second photo. When the photos were then printed side by side they could be viewed through a stereoscope which would present a different image to each eye tricking the brain into seeing the scene in 3D (anybody who has ever used a ViewMaster should understand what I'm talking about).

The idea of trying to replicate the Victorian way of making 3D photos only took hold when I recently bought a fascinating book called A Village Lost and Found. I wrote a blurb for the book on my book blog but that description really doesn't do the book justice. The book reproduces a full set of 59 3D photos taken by a true 3D pioneer, T. R. Williams, during the 1850's. The photos show everyday village life and are fascinating when viewed in 2D but when viewed with the accompanying stereoscope they really spring to life. Unfortunately the book had a rather limited print run and I believe that it is now out-of-print. Hopefully there will be a second printing soon for those of you who would like your own copy of this fantastic book.

The OWL stereoscope supplied with the book is a brilliant little device. It folds flat for easy storage in the slipcase with the book but can be assembled in seconds. What makes it really useful is that is can be used to view any 3D photos not just those in the book (it actually works only with parallel 3D images, where the image for the left eye is on the left and the right on the right but as this is the common format...). Given how useful the stereoscope is it is nice to see that they are on sale separately from the book, so if you are interested in 3D photography I'd certainly recommend buying one. So given that I own a stereoscope and enjoy experimenting with different photo techniques it was only a matter of time until I tried taking my own 3D photos.

The first step is obviously taking the two photographs. I took the right hand image first by resting the camera against the right hand side of the back door. I then tried to keep the camera as level as possible and moved it about 8cm to the left before taking the second photo. This is known as a sequential 3D photo as the two images are taken in sequence and not at the same time. In my case there are a few seconds between shots, whereas T. R. Williams has a gap of minutes between the two images. This approach means that you can only take 3D photos of static scenes. Anything that moves between the time of the first and second photo will ruin the effect.

Once I had uploaded the photos to the computer I then had to process them to get the best 3D effect. The first thing to ensure is that the two photos are level -- i.e. the horizon is perfectly horizontal in both images. I didn't have an obvious horizon but I corrected the images so that the top of the low wall was horizontal in both. The second step was to then line up the images vertically. Our eyes are in the same horizontal plane so the only difference in the two photos should be a slight shift of horizontal viewpoint. In this case I ensured that the now horizontal wall top was at the same vertical position to line the two images up. I then cropped the top and bottom of the images so that they were the same height. Unfortunately there were a few snowflakes in each photo that didn't appear in the other one and these spoiled the 3D effect quite badly, so the final step was a little re-touching (the clone tool in Paint Shop Pro) to remove the snowflakes.

Now you can use the OWL stereoscope to view the image on the computer monitor but it isn't easy, especially as I was worried about scratching my new LCD screen! Fortunately it is possible to see the 3D effect without the stereoscope (although it can give you a headache if you do it for too long) using a technique known as freeviewing. If you can see Magic-Eye pictures then you already know how to freeview and the same approach will allow you to see the snowy garden scene in 3D. If you don't know how to freeview then the trick (with parallel) 3D images is to stare at the screen but focus on a infinitely far away point behind the screen. The two images should overlap presenting a third 3D image in the middle. If you need more instructions or help then this page is really useful.

Viewing on the screen is limiting though (with parallel images there is a limit on the image size) and so the best effect is achieved by printing the image and using a stereoscope. For this I've produced a large high-res version of the image. If you have this printed as a 7x5 photo (it cost me 45p at the local pharmacy) you should be able to slot it straight into an OWL and get the full 3D effect.

As a first attempt at taking 3D photos I'm quite happy. You can see multiple levels of trees at the back of the image, the washing line comes right out at you and the swing and bird feeder stand out from the slope. Having said that there is definitely room for improvement both in composition and technique -- as the objects were all distant from the camera I could have had a bit more horizontal movement to make the difference between the layers in the image more obvious.