Candlelight

Cold and the short winter days have driven me inside where I can work comfortably close to the wood burner. Annette had some floral visitors, so I grabbed some low cost lighting (candles) and started to experiment:

Candles are a very weak light source so they have to be positioned close and the light drops off rapidly. It's this shallow 'depth of light' coupled with the warmth that gives candlelight its characteristic 'look'. The necessary long exposures (about 30 seconds) also tend to provide well saturated colours. 

I'm quite pleased with these first experiments and suspect the candles may come out a few more times during the winter.

It's all about INTENT

An inspirational TED talk by John Hockenberry:

Life on a snowball

After yesterday's large dump of snow, we awoke to a fine morning with the moon handing over lighting duty to the sun.

Venturing outside we found ourselves living on a giant snowball:

In a world that looked almost infra-red (at least to the camera):

I do love how snow makes even the familiar and mundane things look strangely alien.

Of course, few people seem to be working around here today as the roads are barely passable; that seems to have made the majority of people smile though there are a few 'grumpy's' around. Me, I'm a smilin'.

First snow of winter ...

Am I going out with the camera in this? No I am not! Shot through the kitchen window :-)

Guzzi and the cat

Guzzis have always made me smile, ever since one went flying past my office window. (The clutch cable broke, the front came up and dumped the rider before doing a riderless wheelie past the window :-) Anyway, I found this Guzzi on my morning walk today ...

... and a cat; watching me, watching you:

Don't delete - ever

Digital photographs are easy to accumulate in vast numbers. Some photographers recommend deleting anything that isn't perfect - as soon as possible, preferably before it leaves the camera. I don't subscribe to that philosophy and keep everything I shoot unless its absolutely awful.

I have a folder structure that allows good stuff to 'bubble' to the surface while all the raw material (usually RAW material) sits in a series of basement folders called 'Originals'. When I need to try out some new software or attempt a new processing approach I dig into my 'Originals' folders to find something to practice on. Case in point is the picture below - what I wanted to try didn't work out but, in the process, I discovered the original reason I took the shot - the light - buried beneath a rather dull and uninteresting set of RAW files.

"Evening light - Canterbury High Country" - camera Nikon D80, 28mm, ISO100, 1/15sec, f11 (9 frames)

So, tonight I feel vindicated and confirmed in my old hoarder ways :-)

Are you in the haystack?

Yesterday I read a plaintive G+ post by +Vivienne Gucwa, lamenting how difficult it was to monetize her photography on line. Her words resonated with me and got me thinking about my own on-line experience and the conclusion I had come to, that the internet was not the best place for a photographer to sell work. (It might be one way for a photographer to sell themselves, but that is a different thing.)

It’s basically very simple – photographers make pictures and pictures are brought by customers. Where are the customers; are they on-line looking for work to buy? Generally, no they are not. Customers are out buying pictures in shops and galleries (I’m not talking about commercial buyers of stock photos here). My own experience is that potential customers may well want to look through your portfolio on line but, unless they have had some prior physical contact with your work they are unlikely to buy there. Pictures are real tangible things, physical size matters (small or large), presentation matters, how it looks in your hand or hung on a wall matters – these things are hard to judge on a computer screen. Some of my best selling pieces, don’t even look like my best work when displayed on a computer. Lastly, even I wouldn’t buy a picture on line without seeing it physically, so why would I expect anyone else to?

I am not a Luddite. My own internet presence includes a personal website, a blog and profiles at redbubble, 500px, Facebook and G+. I invite people to look at my work online but I don't try to sell to them there. My personal portfolio site has this on the front page, “This site is for looking; not buying. Should you have an overwhelming desire to purchase an image, please visit my portfolio at ...”

Nearly all my work is sold through a small rural gallery. Maybe I will expand my outlets further down the track but I have been selling cards and framed pictures every month this year from a location that has less than 500 physical visitors per week and displays work by a large number of artists. In the same period I have had one internet sale - because one of my existing ‘fans’ had seen a picture they liked on my Facebook page.

Here's another strange thing; my pictures can be brought on-line as greeting cards for about $2.50 each. I have sold absolutely none through this method. Instead, I buy them myself on-line and sell them through the gallery at $7.00 each. On average I have 2-3 card sales a week; not enough to pay the bills, but it's money for little effort - I just have to keep the shelves stocked - and I am learning what people like and what they don't.

The takeaway for me is that the internet is a great place to showcase what you can do and it’s the best way to get your portfolio ‘out there’ and available to any eyeballs that may want to see it. It’s a great place to share and discuss your work with other photographers; it’s also a great place to spend the time you should be using to make pictures! BUT it’s not a great place to meet real customers and sell your pictures – for that, the old fashioned ways are significantly more successful. As I heard a photographer say once, "Ah, redbubble (or any other large art web site) another haystack to hide your needle in."

Focus stacking

This last week I have been learning playing around with 'focus stacking'. One of the difficulties when taking closeup or macro photos is the incredibly shallow depth of field; sometimes you may only have a millimetre of the subject in focus at a time -front, sharp; rear blurry. The answer is to take a number of photos focussed on different parts of the subject and then merge them altogether to get one sharp photo.

This is easier said than done. Unlike merging photos for exposure, every time you refocus the shape of the subject changes slightly, so each picture needs to be aligned not only for x and y coordinates but also for depth by adjusting magnification. All tricky stuff for software but the free program "Combine ZP" available from: http://www.hadleyweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/CZP/News.htm does the job admirably (though it does take some learning). Here is a dandelion composited from 5 differently focused frames in 'CombineZP':

and this is a 100% crop from right of centre out towards the right edge. Note the very fine detail that 'CombineZP' has been able to maintain:

Although the differently focussed frames can be achieved by adjusting focus on the lens, it is much easier with subjects this size to use a focusing rail which allows sub-mm adjustments. All five frames were shot at ISO 100, with a 70-300 Tamron lens at 185mm and f11 for 0.7 seconds.

Photoshop - $25 - almost

I have been a user of Photoshop Elements since v8 and Photoshop Lightroom since v3; together they make an awesome library, development and post processing combo for photographers. Despite having flirted with CS6 during the beta stage, I always baulked at the exorbitant price premium that Photoshop commanded (see "Photoshop CS6 Beta - first thoughts" and "Photoshop CS6 - second thoughts"). But now I have nearly all the functionality of Photoshop for a mere NZ$25 thanks to two small programs - "TPG Elemental" and "Elements+".

TPG Elemental is a Lightroom plugin which links Lightroom to Elements in a very similar way to Lightroom's  built in linking with the full Photoshop CSx application. It allows the user to send images from Lightrrom to Elements for editing, stacking or merging and a number of other functions. It is simple and works as advertised. It is 'donation ware' so send the author whatever you think is appropriate and he will send you a license key to unlock the full functionality of TPG Elemental.

Elements+ is a Photoshop Elements plugin. Photoshop Elements is a stripped down version of the full Photoshop product, only it seems that most of the full product's functionality is still lurking under the hood of Elements. Adobe blocked access through the Elements interface but did not remove the functionality. Elements+ provides it's own interface to the hidden functionality so now, for example, I have access to the color channel functions, can align layers, merge and blend layers and access dozens of other functions previously reserved for the users of the full Photoshop. Elements+ cost NZ$15.

Now, this combination is not perfect and some may find the interface to Elements+ 'odd' - I know I did at first. Not everything in Photoshop is there either but, if Elements on its own is 80% of Photoshop, then these two little apps take that percentage up to about 95% - now that IS worth NZ$25! Which makes paying another NZ$930 for the last 5% even less likely than it used to be.

Ben Heine

I came across Ben Heine's work through a Facebook post and a visit to his 500px page. His "Pencil vs Camera" series are really interesting:
 
But Ben works in quite a few different styles each of which he seems to have mastered in a amazing way. These are a couple of his "Digital Circlism" portraits:

and here is a video of the making of "Elvis":