B&W

This weeks theme is taking photos with a view to converting them to black & white images - you have to take the photo with different contrasts in so that you can make them 'pop' when you convert them :) this is done (for me anyway) using photoshop cs2 and layers which I have just discovered how to do by using a cdrom that came free with Digital Camera Magazine for October - well timed I would say :) I have not had time yet to go out and take photos with this view in mind so I have had a 'go' with the ones I took last week at the Vintage Car Rally so here are a couple that I have converted :)

and I have to say that it's not as easy as you think as you have to do layers and erase the bits of layers you don't want altered but I enjoyed it once I realised what I was doing :)

Reflect Your Theme

Well this module is really interesting and calls for reflection... I have sat and thought about what reflection means and in my thinking it can mean a couple of things - reflecting on the past/future, reflections in a mirror/glass/puddle etc and also taking time to reflect on what is happening now. Firstly I have a couple of photos, which I took over the weekend with reflections in them. They were taken at the Boat Museum car park in Ellesmere Port where there was a vintage car rally - what spectacular cars there were - just lined up for photographing :) I was using only one lens at the time and that was my Sigma 105mm DG Macro so all my photos are close up. I do still need to do focal length part of the module so watch this space :)

The exif data for the wheel is as follows:-

Aperture Priority

ISO 100

Exp - 1/100 sec

f/5

focal length - 105mm

and for the wing mirror

Manual

ISO 100

Exp 1/400 sec

f/2.8

Focal length 105mm

and I must upload my most favourite of the day wich does not have any reflection to speak of but I just love the way it turned out for me :)

This was taken kneeling on stoney ground - you know the sort - white gravel car park ground.... but it was worth it to me - the exif data for this is as follows:

Aperture priority

ISO 100

exp 1/500

F/2.8

focal length 105 mm

GOOD MORNING

At this moment it is sunny outside - which is quite good if it holds as there is a vintage car rally at the Ellesmere Port Boat Museum today and I would like to see what photos I can get from there :) That aside I have been extremely busy this week with my Dad being in hospital again so photography has taken second place and not managed too much :( Did manage to get to Woodside Ferry in Birkenhead though to try and get some decent pictures of the QE2 which was doing a final tour of the UK before being sold off to Dubai as a floating restaurant :( sad that it is.

I managed quite a few shots and at the end of the evening I realised that I had left my camer ISO on high..... so my photos are awful. This post is a reminder to people on how NOT to take photos. Please check your ISO and any other setting for that matter on your camera - especially if it is an event that you may not get a chance to do again. The shots I have take are really grainy and not good quality at all but I have the record of the event. Here are a few to show you what I mean.

As you can see the grain on the photos is way to much. The B&W one of the QE2 I thought wasn't too bad as B&W lends itself to the grainy effect but none of them are of good quality unfortunately - one lesson definitely learned by me I think.

Early attempt at exposure

these pics are of the same flower - the one on the left is SOOC and the one on the right has been slightly sharpened and a little amount of curves added. I checked the histogram when taking the photo and it was a little bit peaky but not too sure yet as to how much peaky or not so peaky the photos should be - I need to read up a bit more on this aspect of the photography, which I intend to do, what I need to do is find a book that I can get different hints from and also will use the internet - some links have already been added to the forum for the tec workshop so I will be accessing them now - especially as I can now read for a while without getting the headache.

Just a quickie

sorry to anyone who views this blog - have not been too well this week so have kept off the computer - I promise to get the photos from my experiments up as soon as possible :)

hugs xx

Day 2 of the Tec Workshop :)

Good Evening everyone :) hope you are all well today :) This morning I decided I would have a cuppa and read my manual again - I have looked at it several times over the 7 months I have had the camera, some of it made sense but then some of it didn't and I am determined to learn it all - to see how I need to get the metering right in camera so I don't have to do it in PS and also the right aperture and shutter speeds etc. This is going to take a long time as I know I pick things up fairly quickly but unfortunately full time work gets in the way. But I have decided that I am going to take my camera with me wherever I go. Tomorrow I am off to Chester with Gill my bestest friend and we are meeting Richard from Nottingham and possibly others if they can make it other than that it will be the three of us stalking chester and then possibly Frodsham Hill but I will definitely be using the meter on the camera and hopefully my pics will come out as they should without PS. The following have only been slightly tweaked in PS.

Gill and I have been to our wirral crop today and we decided to take our cameras to practice the exposure bit of our course :) well we were settled in happily scrapping when one of the girls called us to the door and there in the bushes was a gorgeous cheeky robin. This robin we thought would fly away but we managed to take some and all the time we were thinking quick lets just get another one so technique went out of the window, although I did have it on Aperture setting rather than auto :) I managed to get quite a few of him, some were blurred and were ditched and others were okay - especially for scrapbooking and then there were a couple that are probably worth putting on here so here I go and hope you like looking - oh and composition was not easy as he kept flitting from a branch in a hedgerow to a compost heap - hence the plastic that he is sitting :( couldn't really do much about that we were just grateful that he just sat there singing to us whilst we clicked away :) The last photo of the four is Gill just about 10 inches away from the cheeky chappy trying to coax him on to her finger - that's how close he let us get before he decided to fly off :)

Hopefully I can use these photos to improve from - I just have to find another willing robin to sit and let me play with the settings on the camera as well ;)

Day One of the Tec Course

I have never taken a technical course in anything - I was born before technology and have bumbled my way through teaching myself how to use mobile phones, computers, internet, microwaves etc and now my camera - now this is slightly different in that it has lots of buttons on and you can choose the easy way out and just point and shoot but what is the point of buying one with all the different options if you are just going to use Auto - so I have decided that I would like to learn more about the camera and what button/setting to use for the different types of photos I would like to take. So now I have decided that my theme for this visual diary will be Macro. I love the way that macro shots show up so much detail in such a small piece of subject. I have been looking on the internet for photos that have inspired or do inspire me and I decided to use p.base.com as this is full of photos of the sort that I would like to achieve. Below are 3 that I have taken from other photographers whose names will be by the photo as the photos are taken by them and are what they see at the time and what I would like to see :)

The photographer is Ric Yates 2005 - p.base. This is a Gerbera a flower which I think definitely lends itself to being photographed from any angle. I love the textures that you can see and almost feel from the closeness of the photograph. I in my wildest dreams don't think that I would ever be able to get such a sharp picture as this but I will go on trying until I can take one half as good :)

The photographer for this one and the next one is Polyvios Stalianou 2004 P.Base.com and again this is so different. You can almost smell the burned match the texture of the smake as it rises and the small flame still left at the base of the match this is macro photography at its best as far as I can see. I would love to come up with the ideas as well as the ability to take such a photo - I can stand in my kitchen just trying to get inspiration for a photograph but sometimes all I see is a blank canvas and no ideas - I am hoping again that this course will enable me to think before taking the photos - set the photo up to get the image I want at the end and hopefully achieve this 'in camera' rather than have to play in PS to amend my errors.


Two eggs - how can you make a photograph of two eggs look interesting - well Polyvios has done just that as far as I am concerned. He has the lighting perfect to get the shadows in the right place - the eggs look so natural just sat there on the surface. You can see the texture on the shell in that if you were to take the photo even closer you would not be sure whether it was skin that you were looking at with goosebumps on. I hope that one day someone will be inspired by my photographs just like I have been by looking through P.Base.com today.
I have learned that you can make a photograph out of anything you have around you by taking care in getting the settings right, the lighting and the composure. All I need to do now is learn how to get the settings right on the camera, experiment with lighting and composure and hope that some of this rubs off on me :)
If you have got this far I would like to thank you for taking the time to read this 'Day One' of my Visual Diary of my Tec Course in photography. Hopefully there will be a lot more to add to this over the next 4 weeks :)

hugs xx

Why I have started this second Blog

This blog is for my visual diary in relation to the Tec Workshop I am doing with Cheryl Johnson from www.feelgoodphotos.co.uk . We are to do a visual diary as to what inspires us and why with samples of photos etc together with our take on our inspiration, which I will do as the 4 weeks progress. At the moment I am just uploading some pictures that I have taken that I quite like and will turn into a slide show to put on here as a start. I will also be looking around for what inspires me and why and I will upload the results on here also :) Please bear with me though as I also have to work full time and can not always get access to my blog to update but I will try my best :) I am hoping to us Macro as my theme as I love the close up affects that you get - the detail in things like petals and leaves :)

see you soon :)
hugs xx