cameratastic

23/265 by timcaynes

as part of the 365/366/52 projects I'm currently doing on flickr I'm understanding the benefits of having a huge mirror in the hall. I mean, I've got a tripod and a wireless remote shutter release for my sony alpha so I don't have to do the 10 second dash anymore which I used to do all the time when I just had my little sony but even with the remote there's times when you really want to see what you're doing when you're doing it and you're part of it when you're in it. the A300 has live view which is great for composition, especially for self portraits, but even though it flips up and down all the way it doesn't actually flip around corners so you can never actually see yourself when you're composing unless you can see the live view screen in a mirror, or you're in a mirror and you're looking at the live view or your eyes go round corners.

which is how this picture came about. I was originally inspired to do a photo that included as much live image capture technology as possible by another flickr user who I sadly can't find anymore but they had managed 2 cameras and an iphone all showing the subject and I thought it was a rather nice idea and lord knows you're always looking for inspiration doing self portraits and as I'd recently done a spiffy self portrait in the large hall mirror that turned out pretty well I knew I could make something like it work. I've got an ercol sideboard full of cameras that I inherited from my dad last year and various bits of polaroid, cine, super 8 and brownie stuff so there was plenty of hardware but I really needed to have live view video-type monitors going on to have everything showing everything else in a cleverly ironic post-modern self-referential self-deprecating smug blank art student trend-follower meme-victim kind of way. the only things that would enable that were the sony alpha, my little sony, and my nokia n80 which I didn't need to give the make and model number of I could have just said mobile phone so I took them all down to the hall mirror, got the alpha on the tripod, stood back, stopped for a minute and then decided this was all rather stupid and I should really get back to writing a user interaction specification for a download widget. and get a coffee. and a bourbon. or three.

when I got back to it I knew straight away that I only have 2 hands and so I would need somehow to arrange everything in a way that it appeared in the photo without me having to hold everything or it crashing to death by laminate floor. as it happens I have a gorillapod for my little sony so I used that to strap it to the sony on the tripod. so that was working ok - look! there's me in the screen on my little camera in the mirror on the screen of my big camera! excellent! etc. next thing to do was also get my phone into the composition but I didn't have anyway of strapping it to anything without disturbing the already precarious 2-camera tripod gorillapod art installation thing, so I tried a few test shots just holding the phone and using the secondary camera yes my phone has 2 cameras that must be useful for somebody but the results weren't that great because taking photos of bright lcd screens is always a bit rubbish and the screen on my phone is pretty brash. mobile phone is out. boo. I've only got 2 cameras in the photo. I demand more cameras!

did I say polaroid? a polaroid has live view, right? I mean, you press the button and you can instantly view the results after shaking it like a polaroid picture of course. go get that from the ercol. tried the composition you see here and I thought it looked pretty good and I tried a few more tests with desk lamps strewn around the place to get some highlight going on the shiny hardware (I like how the lens turned out) and I was ready to take the final shot. I just needed to decide whether it was worth taking a couple of polaroids as part of the final shot to get the full-on live view action going. of course it was. I mean, it's an expensive throwaway, but I don't use the polaroid enough - its a 636 - and so you might as well just take photos for the hell of it, sorry, the art of it.

I did have a few shots where the photo is popping out of the polaroid on the small screen in the mirror on the large screen but there was a bit of blur going on and they weren't quite right. I also left the photo hanging out of the polaroid for a while so it developed and you could see the polaroid photo in my little sony on the sony alpha, but it didn't look quite as good as I would have liked. eventually I got the shot you see here. of course, eventually I got about 327 shots and didn't know this was the one I would actually use until I'd gone through the whole upload and review process and even then there were about 5 I could have used.

so I'm done then. well, apart from post-processing the life out of it, natually. spending the time on the composition and capture is only really half the story. like boristheblade says, taking the photo is part of the creative process but certainly not all of it, its more 'a stepping stone to some final product that appeals to me'. I'm not going into all the post-processing details, as it's very similar to what I did here but if you really want to see exactly what I did in photoshop, its in the saved history in the EXIF data on the photo on flickr, which I notice they don't strip out like they used to. You'd have to be insane, but you could.

strike it lucky

beaulieu-sur-dordogne 3 by timcaynes

sometimes you do just strike it lucky. mostly on vacation I'm hawking around my little sony trying not to spend too much time composing perfectly or getting some marvellous depth of field while the rest of the family are walking round the next corner already tutting to themselves and telling me to just take it in rather than seeing everything through a lens. in actual fact, it's almost impossible to compose perfectly or get any depth of field action with the little sony, especially on a nice sunny day when you can't actually see anything on the LCD anyway and you're largely guessing what might come out. for some inexplicable reason also, whatever the aperture the camera decides I should use (in semi-auto mode), the depth of field on landscapes always seems to be pretty much infinite. really, the little cameras are marvels. I've yet to recreate what they do with an SLR.

so when something does come out that's really quite good, I take my hat off to the camera for doing all the work for me. mostly I might spend hours correcting stuff I don't like or stylising in photoshop so that when I post it to flickr it doesn't bear much comparison to what came off the memory stick, but occaionally I might just crop some annoying intrusion out, lift the colours, and that's it. and that's what happened with this shot of the chapel reflected on the river at beaulieu-sur-dordogne a couple of years ago. I took a little while to position myself precariously over the water in a comedy tourist style, of course, but other than that, it was just a hopeful snap. I didn't even notice the clarity of the reflection at the time. it was only when I reviewed the hundreds of snaps a couple of weeks later that this one jumped out.

coincidentally, this is well inside the top ten of my all-time most interesting photos on flickr, but it's not really about how nice or eye-catching it is. the main reason that it gets consistently high viewing figures is that it gets a huge number of referrals from google - over twice as many as from flickr directly. that's all down to the rather dull title and tag scheme that I've used since I started using flickr over 4 years ago. I pretty much just tell it like it is with the titles, like 'beaulieu-sur-dordorge 3', which, unsurprisingly, is the third in a series which includes 'beaulieu-sur-dordogne 1' and 'beaulieu-sur-dordogne 2', but I also always include the place name in the photo tags, including town, region and country, and mostly always geotag everything. it's that no-nonsense, repetitive labelling that seems to appeal to google, and so even though I could title this photo something like 'refection on the water' or 'my holiday in france was rather nice thanks' or 'stillness is the sanctuary I seek from the trauma of existence' or 'not a kitten' or something I'll probably stick to my rather dull convention. because I rather like the traffic. shameless.

post processing low light

following comments on a flickr photo of mine and a rather random commitment to actually explain myself I'm going to do a quick run-through of a specific post processing job. it was a quick one, based on a snap of sorts, but I expect the process of explaining myself will take far longer than to do it in the first place which is to be expected if I ramble incoherently through each sentence before even referring to photoshop or a filter.

the photo is one of a series I'm doing for the 365 days project and also happens to get posted to the project 366-1 project and will probably end up in a number of flickr groups before I'm done. but enough about the groups and projects for now, and on with what I can remember about what I did which it often not what I did last time so not always actually easy to remember except I did this one today so I might manage.

the photo in question is on flickr here if you want to take a look at the large sizes and the comments but you probably came from there to get here so you probably have seen those already.

so here is what comes off the sensor of my sony alpha 300 and gets imported to adobe photoshop CS3 via adobe camera raw:

I'd already set the white balance to tungsten (I think) and didn't make any alterations during the RAW conversion, so this is pretty much the pixels what I did capture.

first things first as always with any post processing even though I'll save it as a different file is to create a duplicate layer of the background with which to start working. if you're not doing that then you never used photoshop before layers. once you've got your duplicate you can start getting creative with your pixel data. mosy recently, I've been using topaz products to do a bunch of adjustments that would have previously taken me hours to do with individual adjustment layers and filters and calulations and even though I told myself a while ago I'd only ever use photoshop native fucntionality to do post processing I realized recently that I would be an arse if I stuck to that when other people make products that do it much quicker for the same effect. after all, I use photoshop, not a darkroom and rolls of film. the enormous benefit of using topaz adjust is it's rather splendid exposure and detail algorithms which do things I don't understand, but get me where I want to go. so I often just go straight there, and I did in this case. I can't remember what the settings were (although I could look them up in the photoshop history) but it was probably a preset just short of psychedelic with a few manual tweaks to bring things back down to earth. 30 seconds later, I get a great looking layer. but its covered in noise, which is the by-product of all that fiddling with exposures and detail. but fear not. I do that on purpose. it's like making a wall rough before you paint it so that the paint grips and gives you a shiny sheeny surface. can you tell where I'm going next?

the second topaz product I'm using lately also does something that you can do a number of other ways, but I happen to like a particular setting that gets things just how I like them. topaz denoise does what it says on the tin. it denoises images. but it does it in clever ways that doesn't mean it just blurs everything. frankly, I don't know what it does, but it does it better than I've ever managed to do it by hand. and here's the equation for the day: denoise = sheen. just like when you polish a fireplace. you get rid of the dust, bring out the features and everything turns shiny:

I mean, its not totally overdone, but you can see how the exposure end detailing makes a dramatic difference, notably to the shadows and highlights and the textures like the shirt and the wall. the shiny edges get that excellent sharpness to them and the overall look is that lovely borderline between hyper-real and just, well, real. at least it is to me, and that what matters, right? you like it too? there's a bonus.

but we're not finished. I'll happily repeat any process x+99 times to see what subtle differences a 1% slide to left makes. in fact, in this case, I was thinking I might just use the shadow/highlight adjustment in photohop to make everything a bit brighter, you know, give a bit more clarity. so with shadow 38%/50%/100, highlight 46%/50%/100 and contrast 35 I ended up with this:

which kind of pushed the boat out a bit too far. once I start getting the burning sensations on the edges of contrasting areas and my jeans are bleached out I've proably gone too far. worse still, start getting halos and you might as well just go and lie down for a while. there's no going back from halos. I actually ditched this layer altogether, meaning, of course, I didn't actually delete the layer, but I just turned it off. never delete layers unless you have to. you just never know.

a small excursion then, and we're back on track. the side effect of denoising to get that lovely sheen is that actually you do lose a lot of detail and start to approach cartoon before you know it. as you've deliberately hosed the detail on this layer, you can't really get any back, so you'll have to go back to the source to pull the detail from there somehow. meaning create another layer from the original background. naturally. there's a number of ways unsurprisingly of recreating the detail you've lost but still retaining the effect of the processing you've already done. the sharpening tools in photoshop are really rather good, but you can spend hours tweaking every last option to get where you want. the method I use is a simple high pass cheat that is quite brutal in its simplicity, but also very quick which means you can use it when you're short of time or will which is most times. I take the new duplicate of the original background layer and stack it on top of the processed layer then filter->high pass to about 2.5 pixels for the resolution of images I'm working with which seems to be about right and then set blend mode to linear light and opacity to about 50%. you can tweak those settings endlessly of course but that generally works for me and its generally the same for all my images to the point where its become a bit of a habit I need to be aware of.

so with the overdone layer turned off and the new high pass layer on top of the layer stack I get this:

you might not actually see any difference between this and the second image in the flow but there are sharpened edges to look out for. the effect depends on the scale you're looking at. a side effect of the high pass method is that is has a habit of sharpening the noise in the original image that you just so cleverly processed away, so especially on flat surfaces I often need to mask out the high pass layer with a great big brush full of black paint.

at this point I'm done with filtering so I'm nearly there. but wait. lurking in the shadows are the dreaded adjustment layers. called adjustment layers because they adjust your head when you start looking into the infinite possibilites for tweaking things that really didn't need tweaking but you tweaked them anyway and now you're dribbling into a teacup in the corner of the room mumbling something about channel mixers and luminosity. but it's not that bad. I've used most of them. and now I only use about 5 of them. you just get to a point where they give you what you want. and you don't undertand the rest.

in this case I went straight for the hue/saturation. I don't know why. I just thought I'd try it. in the layer panel just select the adjustment layer icon and then choose hue/saturation... the ... on these menu items don't mean that there's a dialog box about to open it means there's a pandora's box about to open - but once you've tried it there's really no fighting it. another of the by-products of the post processing with topaz and other filters is that the results are often a little more colour saturated then when you started. this is by design, but I just can't be bothered to look at the 'color' tab in the filter to change it at the time. I prefer to have control over the colours and tonal qualities separately as they might change from one day to the next based on a style or mood I'm representing today and if I bake it into the filtering process it'll probably be too difficult to separate. I think. the more things I tinker with at the filtering stage, the longer the filtering takes and the smaller more subtle tweaks are probably best left until after the heavy lifting has been done.

for the 365 project I started off on a rather dour desatuared and slightly green trip. by the time I got to this image I was still up for the desaturated look, which I've always used, but was thinking of less green, maybe. in the hue/saturation layer I took the saturation down to -33 which was well past compensation for the filtering and headed into noir territory. but I stuck with it and here's how it looked:

its getting close to how I want it now. and just for reference, I'm about 10 minutes into the whole post processing job which will last about 12.

I just want to meddle with the colour balance slightly to create some drama around the shadows and highlights. if I'm honest, by this stage I'm mostly guessing at what I want and after over 10 years of using photoshop I'm still guessing how photoshop might get me what I want and so the next thing I do is guess which sliders on the colour balance adjustment layer dialog to move in which direction and I start to twitch slighly. I know, because I just looked, that the actual colour balance settings are:

Shadow Levels: 5, 4, 15
Midtone Levels: -2, 29, -29
Highlight Levels: 31, -6, 56
With Preserve Luminosity

but I've never done that before and I'll probably never do it again. but it did what I wanted. I just don't think I knew what that was until I did it. the result is this:

I'm so close now that I'm almost uploading to flickr but there's always a little couple of extras you can do in the last 30 seconds. for this image it's the ubiquitous levels adjustment layer which you have to have by law. I suspect many people do this first and do this only because it has such an effect on the overall tonal quality of an image that it's hard to beat it. I only tend to leave it until the end because I know it's going to behave and do what I want it to do without any fuss. it's dependable. like a trusty spanner. or a dog. a quick 6/1.0/208 later and I've pushed the white input quite a way to get some specular luminous action going on and a slighly deeper black in the shadow areas:

levels adjustments always make things come alive a little. so I'm done now, surely. no. I have a love/hate ying/yang laurel/hardy kind of thing going on with a couple of adjustments that I'm just not completely sure about. channel mixer and gradient map. one day they're my friend, the next day they've stolen my biscuits and posted a video of the back of my head on youtube. but I keep coming back and trying them. today I tried channel mixer and as luck would have it, infrared in luminosity blend mode and 28% opacity was a little cherry on top of the post processing pie:

and that is it. I took a snap of the photoshop file with the layers panel so you can see the order of the layer stack as I'm sure I didn't give an entirely accurate rendition of events:

As predicted, it took about 12 minutes to do the processing and about 2 hours to write about it but I hope you got something from it. next time I'll show you how I drew a clipping path around myself and went invisible in the paper shop.

the end of JPG

bad news for those who like their photo magazines to be creative, undiluted and excellent. JPG magazine has bitten the dust and will no longer be publishing or soliciting submissions for its photo themes. I didn't get every issue of JPG or submit very much via its web site, but on the occasions when I got the magazine (usually at borders in preparation for a long flight) I was always inspired, or at the very least, engaged. I don't have a handy list of favourites or archives from the magazine to share, but thankfully, photojojo have put together a nice farewell item on their newsletter. maybe grab the pdf archive while you can. you won't regret it. mind you, the thing about JPG was that it looked so nice having those great photos in print.

serendipitous resolve

I had already totally committed to doing at least half of the things from the photo resolutions over at the photojojo blog but now I've got at least 8 more that I planned to do. photojojo is a splendid place to get creative ideas just when you thought you'd lost the urge. I mean. there's loads of places out there to get creative ideas, but they don't all make you go 'oh, yeah, I fancy that', like photojojo does.

I had already started to get organised thing this morning. obviously I got distracted before I'd even opened adobe bridge, but it's only 9:48, so there's still hope. today's goal is RAW filtering. I know I only need less than half the RAW files I have filling up my disk but oh my it's going to be a long day deciding which ones to keep and which slightly blurred and out of focus ones that really should be thrown away but express some kind of idea or just have something I can't put my finger on I should really delete. that's probably 90% of them...