Window pain

Three years on from the start of the earthquakes, and this damaged yet unrepaired building seems to reflect our city:

Digital opalotype

The opalotype was an early photographic technique where images were made on a 'milky' or 'opal' glass plate. Very often, after development, the plates were hand painted to make a photograph which had a quality similar to that of a water colour painting. I started experimenting with a digital form of opalotype in 2011 and have refined the process using a variety of tools including Lightroom, Photoshop (or substitute) and Topaz filters. This 'street' shot from Sunday's Farmers Market is an example of what the process can produce.

The steps involved are not difficult but can be time consuming:

1. Develop your image in Lightroom to create a good quality, natural, colour image
2. Take the image into PhotoShop or equivalent (layer 1)
3. Create a duplicate layer and make it into a black and white image (layer 2). I usually use Topaz Black and White Effects.
4. Duplicate layer 1 again and move it to the top of the stack (layer 3)
5. Take layer 3 and reduce it to splashes of colour only (no outlines). I do this in Topaz Simplify, using a variation of the Buz Sim preset.
6. Change the blending mode of layer 3 to 'color' and reduce the opacity to taste (30%is a good stating point)
7. Duplicate layer 1 again and move it to the top of the stack (layer 4)
8. Take layer 4 and reduce it to outlines on a white background (no colour). I also do this in Topaz Simplify using the same Buz Sim preset, but set to generate black outlines only.
9. Remove unwanted outlines (usually in the background and sky) by painting them out with white on layer 4 (try to outline only the main subjects)
10. Change the blending mode of layer 4 to 'Linear Burn" and reduce the opacity to taste (30%-50% is usually good). Then examine it critically and paint out any outlines which don't look natural (the edges of shadows are an example)
11. Flatten the image and return it to Lightroom
12. In Lightroom make any final adjustments to colour and tone and then create a radial gradient (LR5) to fill the image (Ctrl+double click) then lighten and reduce contrast, saturation, clarity and sharpness at the outer edge of the gradient.
13. Finally create a narrow white border around the image with feathered edges - this should blend with the lightening you did in step 12 to produce the milky white edges and corners of the final image.

And that, is that. It's not a recipe, as such, because every picture is different but, following this approach and using your own judgement, will give you some very interesting results that look as though they fall somewhere between a photograph and a water colour painting. As you practice on different pictures you will soon get to know what works and what doesn't and adjust settings as appropriate. Good luck and have fun with digital opalotypes.

Nikon D600 - a year on

Well, perhaps a few days short of a year, but it was this month a year ago that I acquired the D600. I remember, on one of the first outings being blown away by the dynamic range of this camera: with my old D80 I had become quite used to blending three bracketed shots to capture a high dynamic range scene. In the last year, I cannot remember ever having to blend shots with the D600 - I shot bracketed many times (an old habit) but never used more than one shot in final production. Today's shot of the Oxford Farmers Market is a case in point - one exposure (actually a four-shot stitched panorama) and everything from the distant clouds to the shadows under the market stools is well exposed (shot RAW and developed in Lightroom).

So, a year on and I'm still loving the D600 - can't blame the tools any more :-)

Artisan State

Today I received my first book order from Artisan State (http://www.artisanstate.com/little-black-book.html). Including shipping the book cost NZ$17.50. For that I got a 7"x5", 20 page book with thick board pages printed on a satin finished paper. The quality is phenomenal and far exceeds a similar priced offering from Blurb. Well worth checking them out if you want to get some photos printed. Or, in my case, some fractal images.

PS Touch

The Galaxy Note came pre-loaded with Adobe's PhotoShop Touch. Adobe has done a fantastic job of shoe-horning what is effectively PhotoShop Elements into a tablet format. Of course, it's not PhotoShop Elements but, feature for feature, it's pretty close, so there is a lot that a user can do with it on the tablet, even down to compositing.

But, and its a big BUT, compared with a laptop or desktop, editing pictures with PhotoShop Touch is like trying to thread a needle while wearing boxing gloves - possible but not recommended. Unless, that is, you also take the pictures with the tablet and need to edit them before uploading to your favourite social media site. In that situation PhotoShop Touch does make some sense, but wether it makes sense for someone who uses a 'real' camera, is another matter entirely.

Still, and despite my reservations, PhotoShop Touch is a masterpiece of ingenuity, like getting a ship into a bottle, and I shall keep it around - just in case.

The ultimate tablet?

We have become a family of tablet users.The girls each have iPads, while I am on my fourth Android tablet and my second Samsung. This last gem and the subject of this post, is the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1.

A lot has been written about the Note, so I won't repeat all that others have said, but simply focus on what makes this tablet such a stand-out. At the end of the day, it comes down to the incorporation of a Wacom tablet and pen - what Samsung call the 'S Pen'. Coupled with the Note's large screen the pen brings a huge increase in precision over the usual capacitive screen and pudgy finger, though you can still go the pudgy route if you wish.

Some have said that the pen is suitable for artists but of little practical use to the normal user. But this ignores the best input method yet available on a tablet - hand writing recognition. This complete post was written on the Note using hand writing. Samsung have really worked wonders with the hand writing recognition; after a little tuition it works almost flawlessly through a text input area which replaces the more usual on-screen keyboard.

An early criticism of the first Notes was that the split Screen function only allowed the pairing of a limited subset of applications. With the Jelly Bean release, that has been addressed and over twenty applications can now be paired for multitasking.

In summary, the latest Note 10.1 has, in my opinion, become the premier work-horse of the current tablet world - although that accolade does come at a higher price than most tablets.

Ka 942 crossing the Kowai River

I set out today to get a picture of a steam train set against the snow-covered Southern Alps. Unfortunately the weather has been so good the last few days that pretty much all of the snow has melted. There will be a couple more opportunities next month should the weather turn bad again. Today, however, I had to settle for a picture of the train crossing the Kowai River bridge pulled by Ka 942.

Ka 942, a 4-8-4, was built in 1940 as a coal burner but was converted to oil in 1948. It can carry 5,000 gallons of water and 1,600 gallons of fuel oil.

Lightroom 5

I'm loving Lightroom 5. Each new release adds new features that increase Lightroom's ability as a stand alone product. This time around we got a properly functional healing brush which, for smaller items, saves a trip to a separate editor. But perhaps the best addition is the new radial filter. The radial filter adds all the controls of the gradient filer but in a circular or elliptical shape - this is so flexible and substitutes for the sluggardly Adjustment Brush in many situations.

The Adjustment Brush aside, there have been all round performance improvements in LR5 which are very welcome. The Adjustment Brush however, is still capable of bringing a quad core processor to its knees. Here's a tip - if you have to make extensive use of the adjustment brush then, once you have finished, export the picture to a TIF file and reimport it to Lightroom, then you can carry on working on the TIF file without all the brush history steps bogging the system down.

This picture uses the new Radial filter to darken everything except the flower and underside of the stem. All processing done in Lightroom 5:

No more clouds

For the last month I have been investigating cloud backup solutions. For a few years I have used Carbonite to create an off-site backup of critical business files. But what about my image files, where was their off-site protection? So I went looking for a solution.

Carbonite was not a contender; I was already paying US$60 a year for unlimited data, but that plan wouldn't backup data on an external hard drive (where my image library sits). To get that facility would cost US$100 a year and was still limited to one machine; what about my laptop? I looked for other cloud solutions some of which appeared to be free (but weren't if you wanted the best speed and service - go read the reviews) and others like Carbonite which were more robust but costly. But, in addition to cost, there was the issue of speed; to upload 1TB of data over DSL was going to take many days. Though, admittedly, once it was there, updates would be much quicker.

Finally I abandoned the idea of cloud storage and decided on a local solution, purchasing two 2TB Seagate external drives at a total cost of US$200. Each drive has more than enough capacity to backup both my workstation and laptop data and still be under 50% capacity. So now I backup daily to disk1 and then at the end of the week disk2 replaces disk1 and disk1 is taken off-site for storage. Next week disk1 and disc2 swap places again. So I always have a local backup that is no more than 1 day old and an off-site backup that is no more than a week old. The two drives are warranted for 3 years so, assuming that is all they will last for, I have saved US$400 over the comparable Carbonite costs for two PCs for three years.

With the costs of storage continuing to fall, cloud storage vendors are going to need to sharpen their act a lot more if they want to remain competitive. And that includes those who claim that their service is 'free'.

It's that fractal time of year

It's that time of year when out-door photography sometimes has to take a back seat. With all the rain, snow and bitterly cold temperatures, staying indoors close to the fire seems like the sensible thing to do. Creating fractal images is, to my way of thinking, a nice compliment to photography; the technical skills for creating the pictures are totally different, but the compositional components are very similar - use of light and dark tones, framing, leading lines and so forth. Creating a fractal image also shares some of the same software tools as used in photography - Lightroom, Photoshop,Topaz; so there are lots of synergies.

I've called this one, "In the beginning" and it's designed to be a 600mm x 300mm printed image with lots of fine detail (which, unfortunately, won't show up at web size).