Sparklers & Orbs

Its not Christmas Eve, its not New Years Eve night and for once its not raining, so I deceided to head out with the camera for an hour or two after dark.

After much messing about and driving around (I hadn't scouted a location in daylight) I finally found a point where I thought my antics with the camera and steel wool wouldn't be disturbed. I know its all been done before but after a couple of hours up a dark country lane miles from anywhere, I came away with a couple of results I'm quite happy with.

There Is Something Hot Down The Back Of My Neck !!!





Tonemapped Stralis

A recent through the night job provided the opportunity to capture this Iveco Stralis of Volker Laser in a setting which I thought would lend itself quite well to a touch of HDR and tonemapping.
As I have said in the past, tonemapping is not to everyones taste, but Im quite pleased with the result.

Low Key Sakina

Despite the crazy subject matter (Sakina), I managed to get some decent results from my first play with a low key lighting set up. Just two images for now....

Fun With Abstract Patterns 2

Following on from my previous post, here are a few more abstract patterns.

Can you guess what they are? - Answers below the pictures.

Photo 1 - This is the unpainted steel beams and concrete slab in a new multi storey car park.
Photo 2 - This is an extract from a sunset behind silhouetted trees.
Photo 3 - This is the end of a Chocolate Labradors nose. (Thanks Arthur!!)

Fun With Abstract Patterns (Design Your Own Giftwrap)

With more and more companies printing wrapping paper to order, here is a little process you can use to design your own unique pattern of paper. Alternatively you could simply print and frame the result as an abstract piece of art.

Pick any suitable image that holds an area that you think will make a suitable pattern. Once you have had a go at this you will soon realise that just about any image can be used.

In this example I have started with a simple image of a green charm bracelet.

From your chosen image select and crop a small area of detail, I have have chosen to crop in on some of the beads. Note - for simplicity I have applied a square crop but it doesn't have to be square.

Now you need to create a new background layer which is twice the height and twice the width of your crop. So if your crop is 600pix x 400pix your new background layer would need to be 1200pix x 800pix.
You now need to drop your cropped image as a new layer on to the background layer.

Repeat this process a further three times so that you end up with a blank background layer and four copies of your crop layer sitting on top.

Ignoring the base layer you now need to manipulate three of the four 'crop' layers.
Layer one is left alone, layer two is flipped horizontally, layer three is flipped vertically and layer four is flipped both horizontally and vertically.

The four layers can then be arranged in four different ways as shown below.

Once you have chosen the layout you like you flatten all the layers to create one layer.

Make a note of the size of this document as you now need to create a blank background layer twice as wide and twice as tall once again, then copy across four copies of your flattened image.

With the four layers copied across, arrange, flatten, save and repeat this process until you reach a sheet either big enough for purpose or you simply achieve a pattern that you are really happy with.

The finished example using the green charm bracelet is shown below.

Lunchtime - 5 Minutes With A Polarising Filter

Washing up or a quick mess about with a polarising filter, no competition really.

The result of a 5 minute set up during lunch, and the first time I've actually had a play using a circular polarising filter on plastic products.

There will be more to follow I'm sure, but not today.... back to the editing.

Thirty Photo Sandwich - British Touring Car Vectra

Whilst spectating at the recent Touring Car qualifying I decided to try something a little different. The photo below is a composite made up of thirty seperate photos and shows the line taken by Tony Gilham in his Vectra around part of Oulton Park.

To take the photos, I set the camera up on a tripod, set both the focus and exposure manually and the tried to fire off photos at fairly regular intervals using a cable release. There was some trade of between depth of field and shutter speed, but I worked on the fact that the car would be that small in the frame and it didn't matter if it wasn't sharp all the way through the image.

In photoshop I then arranged opened the first two images as layers. I then erased areas of the top layer so that you could see the car coming through from the layer below. These two layers were then flattened and the third image introduced and the process repeated.

It was quite labour intensive but the result of the thirty images combined is shown below (click on the photo to open a larger example).

Whilst the result is far from perfect, it is a starting point and has given me a few ideas for some alternative uses of the technique.

Falcon 50 Cockpit - HDR

One of the frustrations faced by new photographers is that their cameras often don't record the image that they appear to be seeing. With practice and understanding how a camera sees the world, most people can start to achieve the image they are truly after but we should remember that digital cameras never see the full range of tones in a high contrast scene that we see with our own eyes.

A technique which is proving ever more popular is HDR photography. The idea is simple, shoot a range of images at different exposures that cover the whole brightness range of the image, then combine them to produce an image which shows detail from the darkest points to the brightest points in the image.

I'm still very new to HDR and haven't yet got to grips with tone mapping, but every so often I'll have a go to try to learn a little more.

Recently there was the opportunity to photograph the cockpit area of a Falcon 50 business jet, a good opportunity to try some HDR.

Shown below are just three photos from a series of seven that I took. As you can see at one end of the scale the cockpit detail is virtually black whilst the world outside the cockpit is acceptable, at the other end of the scale the cockpit is slightly overexposed whilst the world outside the cockpit is completely blown out with overexposure. By taking seven images at various exposures I had covered the full brightness range of the image.



Once the seven images were combined using HDR software the following image was produced. Whilst HDR isn't to everyones taste, and this is only a very quick rough and ready example, it does demonstrate what can be achieved.

A second HDR example

Its Like Marmite

The results of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography / Tonemapping are very much like marmite, you either love them or hate them.

The whole HDR process is new to myself and so far has proved complex, challenging and also very frustrating. Armed with a number of books just dedicated to this form of photography I'm slowly getting to grips with the basics, although I don't claim to have a deep technical understanding of the process yet. The one thing I am sure of, personally I love the effects that it offers, especially some of the more extreme results.

During some recent construction site photography I picked out a few images that I thought might just prove interesting after the HDR / Tonemapping treatment. After an hour on the computer the results are below, see what you think.