petemillis

Micki....I'm SOOOOOOOO pleased you managed to drop by...and also SOOOOOOO pleased that you have lots of photography work going on....and SOOOOOO happy at your 19 years of marriage. Makes my 12 so far seem such a short amount of time - and it's just flying by.

 

Ha, well...I don't have any spare time on my hands either - well I should be finishing my PhD revisions but I'm suffering from SERIOUS writer's block. I sit at PC with papers on one side of me, my thesis on the monitor, and I just get a sick feeling in my stomach. I really can't write - unless I'm writing about something that I'm enjoying! So I turn to PN, and to cameras, and it all feels good again - but it still doesn't get my writing done!

 

But time for taking photos....seriously limited. This picture I took just because my boy was sitting at the table near me and I wanted to post up a picture on a thread concerning cheap M42 mount lenses and to show how good they can be. This is shot one, out of one, that took me just a couple of seconds to take. The lighting was just the crappy low energy bulb with an IKEA lamp shade, just above and in front of him. Sometimes I feel I've just got lucky (but then something inside me wants to believe that I've also got some sort of natural artistic talent - LOL!).

 

Thanks again Micki. I'll be keeping an eye on what you're uploading...and best wishes to you and yours. Congratulations again.

 

Pete

food for thought (maybe....)

David, I'm really pushed for time and getting nowhere with my PhD revisions (that should have been all done and dusted 2 days ago!) - so this is a quicky. I'm sharing thoughts of several people who have posted here. I'm not overly keen on lots of post production that turns an image from a photograph to a drawing....BUT I think you have done good considering the smal size of the crop you started with. The subject is clearly a child singing - although I see the child beginning to appear like something made from modeling clay. I don't know why - that's just how it hits me. And I first viewed this picture when you first put it up and I had the same thoughts then!

 

I think that posting up the original has helped as it showed what you had to start with. But I also agree with Fred that perhaps you could get something else as well by using a slightly wider crop. This is only my thoughts - but a slightly wider crop will locate the child and tell more about what is going on. And when I was fiddling around looking at various crop options, it seemed possible to place the child in a strong position in the frame, so it's still obvious who the subject is, and I noticed that the amount of blur that was on the other children was greater - which really accentuates who the subject of the photo is. Here's what I ended up with - see below.....

Gordon, here I see beauty in simplicity (bit like my wife). Those last bits of life indicating to a foraging hungry animal that there's food below. Fantastic shot - now where's me skis! I'm jealous of -22 and snow...

Pete

A foggy winter's morning seismograph :)

What I like about this is that the lower lines give the illusion of being reflections of the upper lines - and the join between the two being the bank at the edge of a mist covered lake. Interesting shot Gordon. What were you looking at when you took it?

Good stuff.

Pete

Many thanks Pnina for your input on this. With the image where you gave the sepia a bit more punch I find it a bit too dark on my monitor that I have just calibrated. If I turn the brightness up to where I had it before then it does display well. I like your slightly more saturated sepia, but wonder if it might be a bit dark in print. I'll print one off and see.

 

I have some writing to do at the moment but will pop over to see what you have been up to shortly.

 

Thanks again.

 

Pete

Thanks David. I noticed one bit of a booboo with this one that I'm disappointed with - I have the left hand lamp sharper than the right hand lamp...still practicing, and it's hard to focus in the dark. I had to focus first on one lamp, then on the other, and then move the focus ring to a point half way between the two and hope!

Does it matter if sharp focus is only on one eye?

M. Jennejohn, you mentioned about colours being dull and the picture being unsharp when you got your prints back. Well, it looks the same on my monitor too - a bit dull and soft. I've just used the picker in Canon DPP to select a point I would expect to be white - such as the light in the bubbles on top of the water (remember the water will affect the colours). And the colours seem more vibrant. Also sharpened slightly. Are you sure you used "save and convert" in DPP when saving the image?

Gord, I'm late on this one (been really busy with the 4 kids off school, and STILL the PhD...) but this shot is great. The zoom effect has worked wonders. I'm kind of seeing 1980s pop video... for some reason, which is a good thing :) I like the way there's just a little bit of detail on the roof so you can see the lights are actually fixed to something and not just floating in free space. Great!

Gord, thanks very much for looking in on this and giving your thoughts. I'm playing with this image still, and I think the blocked shadows are my fault. I think I close the left marker in on the histogram too hard in order to give it a bit more contrast, and seem to have cocked it up! I'll post a version up tomorrow on which I haven't touched the histogram markers - the rocks on the left look a lot better.

 

Thanks again.

here's my sepia one...much happier with this...

Thank you very much both of you - your comments are most helpful. I fully agree with you about the blue cast, and it's better losing this. Alberta, your improvement looks much better. And S.Phibbs, the BW looks excellent too. The blue cast came about because of the time of day I was shooting - really late evening and bordering on darkness. I didn't pay enough attention to the colour temperature in post processing so this is something I'll definitely have a fiddle around with.

 

S.Phibbs, I'll did have an experiment with different exposure times, and 2 to 3 seconds seemed to work very well, but my dog wasn't playing ball!

 

I'm having a play with this in a gentle sepia tone as well - it seems to work well with just the right sort of warmth. I'll post one up below shortly.

 

Many thanks again to you both.

 

Pete

 

I haven't done any of those long exposures of moving water, so this

is a first for me. What I have tried to do is use a long exposure to

blur the water, but wanted my dog in the photo too. Of course,

getting a dog to stand still for 4 seconds while chasing the waves

is pretty hard. My other dog has just become a "ghost" to the right

of this one. I decided to use lens tilt as well just to create a

plane of sharp focus across the pebbles leading to dog. I know the

saying - make the subject fill the frame - but for me, the subject

was more than just the dog 0- it was the whole feeling of nightfall

approaching, wet in the air, the pebbles, the waves and my dogs. So

I thought by accentuating the dog a bit he might be more noticeable

than otherwise. Whether this has worked or not is what I'm

interested to hear from others. My kids like it, my wifes likes it.

I have ideas in mind of how I could do better next time, but would

welcome some additional input.

 

Many thanks - and happy new year to you all.

Pnina, thank you for your comments on my gloomy image - I'm glad the glommy feeling has come across! It's strange, but with only a few days left to finish my PhD revisions, I actually feel pretty gloomy and like a prisoner being held up in it. My New Year's resolution is to get it done so I can forget about it! Hopefully 2008 will see some less gloomy pictures from me :))

 

Thanks again Pnina - best wishes.

 

Pete

Gord, thanks very much for taking the time to add to the comments. It is odd the way some parts of me appear more transparent than other parts. All I can think is that perhaps I wasn't staying perfect still. The light areas (hands and head) look less transparent - I suppose it's to do with the light areas having greater influence on the sensor. Strange!

 

Ahh Micki...this reminds me of all the time I have spent playing Monopoly with the family over the Christmas break! It's a nice picture. And there is a huge difference between this and an unthoughtthrough (made up word) family album snap....and that's in the composition. Here you have composed the image in a way that clearly shows two people - the glass in hand of Mr works well. Ms looking round. And so on. The unthoughtthrough snap would have Mr in the background chopped off as the chin, with the camera held horizontally and other people's headless bodies in it!

 

Nice one.

Brian, Nik, Fred - thank you very much for the words of encouragement - I'm enjoying this journey of discovery, and it's really helpful knowing that some of these images work for other people and not just for me.

 

Fred, your detailed input is much appreciated as ever. I may be able to make me more blurry than the bench - it depends on how I can alter the plane of focus. One option I guess would be for me to move about a bit during the exposure - so then I would have the bench behind me sharp, but me motion blurred. For this image I deliberately sat as still as I could for the 20 seconds or so that I was on the bench.

 

The lights in the background were a fortunate accident - a taxi had just picked some people up from Stanmer House and drove around the back of the church just a couple of seconds after I had plonked my butt on the bench! The picture next to this one in my portfolio is of me lying down on the bench - this time no lights in the background, but it still works well I think.

 

I learned something yesterday - well a couple of things in fact - about shooting in almost pitch darkness. The best shots are those where I pushed the histogram to the right (as is so often discussed here). And there were a couple of ways to do this. One was using a very long exposure time (30 seconds as in these shots) at f3.5, ISO 200. And the other was by using a shorter exposure time at ISO800. The short exposure time didn't give me enough time to get in front of the camera and do my ghosty bit. Also there was more noise in the image even with the histogram to the right. The long exposure time of 30 seconds at ISO200 gave me time to do what I wanted to do, and also resulted in an image free from noise. But, it left me with the problem of hot photosites to deal with - so in these images I had to spend a minute or two in post processing removing individual bright spots! I think this effort was well worth it though for the lack of noise it produced. And considering the only illumination - really weak - was from the lights on Stanmer House about 75m away away - it worked out good.

This is a self portrait continuing on from my experiments with slow

shutter speed and tilt lens. I put camera (Canon 10D) on tripod.

Camera fitted with Mir 26b 3.5/45 medium format lens and Arax tilt

adapter. Shutter speed 30 seconds, f3.5, ISO200. I tripped shutter

and wandered over to bench and sat there. No self timer - the

shutter was open as I walked over.

 

Any input/comments - good or bad - would be much appreciated as

always.

 

Thanks

 

Pete

Rachel, I shouldn't even be here really today....but wanted to thank you for your comment on this picture. I agree, it is quite hard on the ol' eyeballs and I think I'll have another fiddle with it, perhaps to desaturate it a little bit and to soften it to see what happens.

 

Many thanks again. I'm off now before I get my arse kicked :)

Alberta, I am more than happy to listen to your suggestions :) You tell your husband he should always listen to you (I'm sure he does really - I always listen to my wife's suggestions, but don't always let her know it :)) )

 

Pnina, Gordon, Fred - thank you both for letting me know that I'm heading in a worthwhile direction with this. I'm getting a pretty high success rate the more I work with this technique, and am binning fewer and fewer images. I only took 6 pictures of buses passing in front of the Pavilion, and am keeping all of them as I see something different in each.

 

Fred, you're right about me working firstly on the technique, and that subject and composition was initially secondary to that. And now I know that it (the technique) can achieve what I want it to then the story telling is ready to follow. There are several places in and around Brighton when I am going to be photographing in a similar manner, with more emphasis on the content. I'm thinking buses, cycles and pedestrians....What attracted me to the buses first though, were the big windows!

 

Thanks again all of you - your thoughts are worth so much.

 

Best wishes.

Rachel and Fred, many thanks for sharing thoughts on this - I'm also of the opinion now that the sepia toned BW works much better than the colour. A couple of things that I think don't work with the colour are the wishy-washy blue of the cloth, and also a blue reflection on the flute from the nearby TV!

Many thanks again.

Carola, I came to you portfolio after seeing your comment on one of gordon Bowbrick's pictures - and am so pleased I made the journey. You have lots of beautiful images here, and this one brings back the memories of bleakness in the low light in northern Finland when I went to see Santa a couple of years ago. Lovely work. Pete

This is a photograph of a stable block at a local farm. It was taken

in almost complete darkness apart from some distant streetlamps and

a small moon. A long exposure of 4 seconds was used, with the camera

hand held, and an aperture of f3.5, at ISO 1600. To make sure the

DOF wasn't too small, lens tilt (or swing) was used to obtain a

plane of "sharper" focus along the stable block. I say "sharper"

focus as there is still considerable blur through the handholding of

the camera during the 4 second exposure. Lens used was Kaleinar 3b

2.8/150 medium format lens attached to Canon 10D via Arax tilt

adapter.

 

The ONLY post processing has been to levels (to improve shadow

darkness), a small bit of noise reduction, slight sharpen, and

removal of a couple of dead pixel speckles - all in Canon DPP. Apart

from this minimal post processing, the entire painting has been done

in camera.

 

Any thoughts on execution would be much appreciated. I wonder if

perhaps there is too little detail - I can see the stables and the

gate well myself, but I know what's there. Are these details

discernable to you? How about the bright light at top of frame from

distant streetlamp? Bit too bright maybe? I've checked and the

highlight isn't blown, but I wonder if it's a distraction? I would

appreciate any feedback at all on this.

 

Many thanks.

 

Pete

Kim, I like this portrait a lot - it's funny, and the softness of it works really well. I have a couple of thoughts that might give help....

 

You can give the image quite a bit more impact by making the shadows darker. This is simple to do in Canon DPP or PS just by dragging the left hand marker of the histogram to the right so it clips the left hand side of the histogram a bit more. Also (and I'm certain this isn't just my monitor) but I think the saturation of the sepia tone is a little too high making it a bit too orange. Just knocking the saturation down a touch makes the colours a bit more natural looking. Others' views may differ - including yours - so no worries if you don't like what I've done ;