eye of the beholder

how far do I go to get a photo the way I like it? the answer is miles. I was a designer first and a photographer second and so I have the designer habit of fiddling mercilessly until I think its as perfect as I can get it and then deciding I didn't mean to do it that way and then then having some kind of identity crisis about brand and perception and deciding that I've just visually misrepresented myself with the overuse of a high pass filter and I'll store the photo in a cardboard box until I decide its too late to post it. I mean, that doesn't happen every time, but it often does.

having said that, I know that there are many times where I'll see potential in a photo of mine which didn't really amount to much because I'm not particularly good at using my camera and then set to work on it. in 90% of cases, my aim is to frighten the life out of a perfectly reasonable exposure with the threat of filters, masks and crops until it submits everything it knows. after that, I'll spend a good few hours getting it to calm down and try to look presentable in the hope that when it gets posted to flickr, I'll get nice comments somewhere between 'nice capture!' and 'awesome!' by way of 'er, what did you do there?'.

a perfectly good example of that process is a photo I recently snapped (and I mean snapped, as in, almost didn't look at the camera while I waved it in the direction of the subject and hoped I'd not got some mad manual setting going on from when I was trying to take a picture of a dog under a blanket in the dark) of the london eye. after I'd got it home it was one of those RAW files that was just taking up too much space but there was something about it. compositionally, I quite liked it and it had clouds and some metalwork in it so there's alway potential there. it was a pretty lifeless photo though as the light was rubbish that day and there was hardly any contrast but that's not going to stop me having a go so rather than finishing off a flow digram for a organisational wiki that I was supposed to be doing I spent about an hour fiddling about in photoshop. the befores and after (we love before and afters) are below:

before View larger

after View larger

whether you think they are tweaks too far or if you prefer the results or if you wish I hadn't told you that I'd actually mucked about with it or if you even prefer the original then that's up to you do decide and you can let me know if you feel compelled although if you are actually reading this then you're probably me.

working backwards for christmas

wing 1 by timcaynes

if I'm ever asked how I did something, I can never remember. I mean, specifically to techniques used in photo processing, not like how did I end up with a face like that, etc.

I do have a little set of preferences that I've built up over the last 10 years or so which are just photoshop basics, like masking, blending and tweaking shadows and highlights, which I tend to use to some degree or other in everything I do. but not usually the same way twice. the post-processing environment is such a huge beast that if I ever understood or had even fiddled with all of it I would probably implode or something. no, I usually do a couple of simple things and move on.

having said that, of course, I can spend about 7 hours blending 2 layers in a way that I didn't do it yesterday. it depends entirely in the photo I'm working with and my short-term memory being a bit vague and whether I actually wrote down what I did last time. which I didn't.

so when I do get a specific request of 'how did you do that', it's a question of how long ago I did it, and whether I can work it out by going backwards. to make it a little bit easier, I never flatten photoshop files, which means, of course, that I've got about 27 high dynamic range renditions of cathedral ceilings at about 1gb a piece that are really useful as reference items, but really terrible as disk space savers. but, if I do go back to an old photoshop file and look into the layers, I can often work out what I did. meaning, I can work out what I did, like I multiplied layer 3 with layer 2 at 67% opacity and I did something to it that involved a bit if exposure correction and a layer mask but oh dear it looks like I also did some kind of calculation with produced an alpha channel with a pasted into the mix to see what would happen and I've forgotten quite what that was. you see, I can work it out up to a point, but...

but back to a request. I've been asked if I can't dissect the shot of a wing I took a while back when landing at Denver airport, which I threw into the post-processing mangle at some point after I got back to the UK and then uploaded to flickr. I think I might be able to work some of it out. the rest I'll just make up. but we'll see what comes out...

and to the skies

Having got my hands on my little Sony, I proceeded to take to the skies, both literally and metaphorically and probably also hypothetically and hyperbolically. one of the simple pleasures I was instantly afforded after adding 2 AA batteries and boarding a plane was the ability to settle into my window seat and stick my camera through the window at anything that moved, which was everything, once we got going.

I'm not particularly a creature of habit unless you count being hunched over a flat-panel screen for hours on end watching pixels change their luminosity as a result of reducing opacity by 1% increments but that first flight with a digital camera was the start of a compulsive pattern of behaviour that demands a certain set of criteria be fulfilled before a flight is considered successful from a photo-opportunity point of view, if that's not a tautology in of itself. I simply can't book a seat without:

- it being a window seat

- it being in front of the wing

- my knowing the direction of the sun at the time of travel

in addition, when I'm sat in that seat I have to have the correct environment which needs to include

- a clean window

- which is in line with the seat

- and a shirt without stripes.

Normally I can get the booking right using a combination of online booking, priority check-in, google earth and a compass or sexton or something, but the environment is usually less predictable. I'll normally spend the 30 minutes before taxiing with a wet wipe and a packet of tissues and the arm of a fleece to get the window clean, regardless of what the person sat next to me is thinking, which is normally 'can I move?'. if the window is slightly right-of-centre, I know I'm going to get a neck-ache, but maybe some nice shots of the wing. If it's slightly left-of-centre, I'll probably get a backache and a line down my face where it's been pressed against the seat in front of me when the seat in front of me has been hyper-reclined into my lap. If it's centrally aligned, bingo. The shirt without stripes thing I always forget, so I just spend the entire flight wrapped in a British Airways blanket which gives me a rash.

When you get it all right, then armed with a inconspicuous little point-and-shoot, you don't really attract much attention, other than the blanket thing, oh, and the pathological window cleaning thing, so you're free to capture until your memory stick throws a wobbler. the best times are take off, climbing, banking, and landing, but the actual flying bit in the middle is also good, so 13 hours later, I'll land in San Francisco or Denver or somewhere, with a head permanently fixed at 90 degrees and a shoulder colder than is reasonably possible. But I'll have 150 images of wings, mountains, clouds, airports, runways and iced-up windows, which will take me 200 hours to sort through and post-process of which I'll take 1 and post it to flickr where nobody will notice except me. And it'll be worth it.

my little Sony

after a considerable time monkeying around with manual SLRs, 35mm, APS, polaroids and other format film cameras I did what I usually do when I'm investing in new technology and spent about a year thinking about it, after which I spent about a year researching and reviewing it, by which time every decision I had made was obsolete, and so ended up in Dixons in Heathrow Airport on my way to California to make up globalization strategies and decided that right here, right now, is where I should fork out for a digital camera.

And fork out I did. I already knew that I would end up buying a Sony, following a long history with using their products without a hitch, and so I'd narrowed my choice down to about, well, 1 camera. It was the very spanky Sony Cybershot DSC-W1 which ticked all the right boxes for me, even though I didn't know what all the boxes meant yet. As I approached the counter without my glasses on, I had no idea whether they had one and as I tripped over a wheelie suitcase belonging to a well-dressed Belgian I was losing the urge to part with wads of cash, but on closer inspection, dodging the attention of the staff, I saw it on the shelf, trying to peer out from between the Casios and Fujis and Canons.

"I want the Sony W1. Can I have one please?". "Are you sure sir?". "What do you mean, am I sure? I've spent a year being sure about it and now I just want to buy the damn thing". "We've got the new Finepix". "What?". "The Finepix sir. And the new Ixus". "Sony. W1. I want the Sony W1". "Are you sure sir?". "YES I'M SURE. GIVE IT". "Ok sir, that's two hundred and forty-nine pounds please".

"What?"

Now then of course, 4 years later I can now buy my Sony Alpha 300 for about that much money, but at the time, it was worth it and for the next 3 and a half years it was the only camera I ever needed. My little Sony. And I still use it in a number of circumstances where a DSLR just isn't right. Like when you want to stick a camera in people's faces and run away quickly. Or you might be on the beach. Or you cant be bothered to carry a bag full of kit around. It was the best 249 quid I'd ever spent and it got me on the path to digital photography. No, hang on. I had a Sharp GX10 phone before the camera. I suppose that was my first digital camera, but if that poxy piece of hand-hardware qualifies as digital camera equipment then I'm a middle-aged fat balding old misery.

oh.

not even a banner graphic

Its photo, as in photos, and opacity, like the opacity of layers in photoshop. You see what I did there. I put them together to suggest a kind of theme for what this blog is about. I see you're not convinced. An actual fact, photopacity.com was available and I'd run out of ideas for 2 word combinations that suggested a theme of photography, photoshop and disk space. Or something like that.

I'll start by saying that I've never used the sponge or the thing that looks like a pin. Is that dodge? Or burn? I mean, I've dodged and burned I think, I've just not done it using those tools. Since I first started using photoshop at version 2, which was a glorious port to the Solaris operating system running on what was probably a Sun Sparcstation 1+ or something, I've been making it up as I go along. Before layers, you learned pretty quickly that if you didn't save backup copies of each file every 10 minutes, you might as well just bang your head against a wall at the beginning, to save time later. With layers and layer masks you soon learned that, after peeling your eyes of the screen following a 4-hour hand-trace of a goldfish with a 13 pixel soft brush, all your hand-traced masks are rubbish. By the time I get to grips with CS4, I'll have learned about 30% of what CS3 can do. Which is 50% of what CS1 could do. And about 300% of what photoshop 2 could do. I think that means I'm using about 10% of photoshop functionality, but, as will hopefully become clear as I blart these incomprehensible gobbets of technobile, I think that's all I need.

As for digital photography, I can safely say I have almost completely no idea what I'm doing, but I know how to point a camera in the right direction. I sometime take the lens cap off etc...