Black & white forever

Fifty years ago everything I took was black and white. Then came colour ... then came digital and everything was colour by default. And yet ... some pictures still work better in black and white than in colour. This candid portrait of our Granddaughter; taken on Christmas day with available light was one of those pictures.

Lightly toned for warmth, in my opinion the colour version just doesn't carry the 'presence' that comes through in B&W. Nikon D80, 50mm, ISO 400, 1/45 sec @ f2.8.

Another one from the archives ...

This one was a real challenge; It was about the sky - a deep blue Canterbury spring sky. But, whenever I pushed the saturation and luminescence sliders to get the depth of blue I wanted, all I got was horrific posterisation (banding) in the sky - even editing at 16 bits. Eventually I decided on a masked multiply layer rather than pushing the individual colour values and this had the desired effect without any banding artifacts. Another lesson learned.

Eyre River, near Oxford, looking towards the Alps. Two frame stitched panorama, 50mm, 1/160, f11.

Two years later ...

It's amazing the difference two years experience can make. I took this image in 2009 but it has languished on  the hard drive for two years because I couldn't get it looking right. The main problem was noise. there were huge areas of noise in the mid-ground trees and even to reduce the noise to that level, there was excessive smearing of the distant details. In short it looked a mess.

Since then I have acquired better tools (Topaz) and a better understanding of how to use them. Installing Lightroom 3 this week, the original image resurfaced and so I took another shot at it using the new tools and a more refined workflow:

Now it looks the way I originally wanted it to; no visible noise and nice sharp detail all the way from the foreground rock to the mountains - 14mm, 1/350, f16, IS0800 (hence the noise problem).

Symbol of privatisation

Track maintenance gear sitting unused at Springfield, since the railways were privatised way back when. Then, when the private owners can't screw another buck out of the project, our kind government buy it back at some inflated price to restore it to working order. Of course by then the gear is all rusted and useless ...

Container City

Yesterday we went to 'Container City' the new and emerging heart of wounded Christchurch. Visited the Apple Store, Johnson's the Grocer and Scorpio Books - all buzzing with lunchtime activity. It's so good to see the Central City begin to show signs of life again. Who knew that containers could look so good?

 More pictures at: https://picasaweb.google.com/102496606900301125582/ContainerCity#

Glentui Bush

Took a walk in Glentui Bush on Monday with the intention of refining my processes for High Dynamic Range photography in general and panoramic HDR in particular. This was the second trip as I totally messed up the process on Sunday and came back with only half decent material. The second time was much better and the process seems pretty solid now (if a little time consuming).

This shot is the compilation of a 3 frame x 6 exposure sequence (18 images) taken at ISO 100, f8 and speeds between 1/500 and 1/15 second. Each exposure sequence was combined in Photomatix Pro and the three images stitched in AutopanoPro. Further processing was done in Photoshop using Topaz filters.

More pictures from this outing can be seen at: https://picasaweb.google.com/102496606900301125582/SpringGlentuiBush

The wonder that is us.

"From conception to birth" - a 'must watch' TED video for every mum and dad or mum and dad to be. Beautifully presented ...

Come to sunny Oxford (NZ) ...

... where the justice is slow and lingering. Rumour has it he was put here several years ago by the good citizens of Oxford, who hadn't the heart to run him out of town.

For those law-breakers of an outdoor disposition, the stocks are just outside the jail. Welcome to Oxford :-)

Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity | Video on TED.com

After a long day assembling furniture, this TED video brought a smile to my face. "IMPROV Everywhere" do odd things to make people laugh - sounds like a worthy occupation to me.

Don't play on the tracks!

I wasn't; I was walking along the maintenance walkway at the side of the track. Halfway to the centre of the bridge and back again. I had just stepped off the walkway when the freight train came along allowing me to get this picture:

The scary thing was how much of the walkway the freight train took up - I had thought I would be safe against the hand rail but, no way. Another photographic near miss :-(