Back in the summer, after having spent some time on Harris and Lewis, I took my tent and went off to explore Barra, Vatersay and the Uists. After having spent a couple of days on Barra I headed off to get the ferry across to Eriskay and to head up into the Uists. The ferry terminal is sort of out in the middle of nowhere, well as much as it can be on Barra, with only a single building that acts as a cafe/waiting room. So this is the last place that one would expect to find a work of public art, not to mention a quite exquisite one. But, that is precisely what is to be found there; two otters and a salmon:-
Truly exquisite - click for a larger version
The one thing that does not come across from the photo is the scale, as there is nothing to act as a comparison; but it stands at least six feet tall. I just love the way that they appear to have just leapt over the rocks in pursuit of their quarry…
I found a fabulous photo today posted by one of my Facebook friend on one of his blogs. I am sure that he would not mind me nicking it to demonstrate just how simple it is to really enhance a photo, and give it a bit of punch. For some time now I have been using FastStone Image Viewer to organise my photos, but have recently discovered that it is also a great tool for quickly giving the photos I blog a bit of a lift without having to resort to Photoshop’s time consuming techniques. It also has the added advantage of being FREE!
The original photo:-
My only criticism is that it looks a little soft for my taste...
Now, don’t get me wrong here, this is a fabulous photograph; but for my taste it just has a haze to it which takes the edge off it. So, I had a little mess around with it; first off I just darkened it up a little, gave it some contrast and saturated the colours somewhat:-
Screenshot 1
Which as you can see can all be achieved from the same screen, no messing about doing one thing at a time here, it is all in the same place.
Next I decided to sharpen it just a touch, well maybe a little more than a touch:-
Screenshot 2
Voila, the trasnformation is complete, and this took me less than five minutes, and that includes saving the image and sourcing the links for this post…
The end result:-
Well, I like it...
Personally I think that has a slight edge on the original version, but that is just my preference, and many others may disagree with me. I know this spot pretty well, and this reminds more of how it looked that last time I was there.
Arguably the greatest photographer of the twentieth century, Irving Penn, died yesterday (7th October 2009) at the age of 92. There is nothing more that I can say about this great man, so I will let some of his images speak for themselves:-
Photo 1 - I know not who
Photo 2 - Truman Capote
Photo 3 - Kate Moss
OK, let’s have a little fun. How about this for a challenge? I give you all a photograph, and you write a poem about it. You can email me the resulting work from the contact spot in the sidebar, and the five which I judge to best reflect the photo will appear here.
So here’s the photo:-
A cormorant found on The Shore in Edinburgh
OK, those who read yesterday’s post will know that I was not entirely happy with the results of my attempt to photograph seed heads against the sky. So, camera in hand, I headed back to the same spot this morning, and whilst the sky was not as clear as yesterday it was a much more interesting backdrop for the subject. Again in the first photo the flash fired, I know not why as there was plenty of light, because I stupidly forgot to supress it:-
Photo 1
Although unintentional I do like the starkness of the white stem against the sky. But it was not what I was seeking, so suppress the flash and try again:-
Photo 2
Better, much more contrast, and at least I have found a decent angle to rid the image off the background rubbish from yesterday’s attempts, so it seems a litle progress is being made. Pretty rubbish compostion though; back to the drawing board once more. A little observation plus a little thought came up with this:-
Photo 3
Hmmm, sort of back to the cropped version of yesterday, still not at all happy with the results so far. Maybe I am just not thinking straight here – ’straight’, that’s the problem! Finally I decide to play around with the orientation of the camera instead; I mean there is no rule that says the camera should be kept in either the portrait or landscape orientation, and if there is then it is just ripe for breaking. After several duff attempts (no, you don’t get to see them) I came up with the idea that was originally in my mind:-
Photo 4
Now that I am happy with, nice and contrasty, no background and best of all a good composition, at least I think so.
I was out and about in and aorund Leith this morning with camera in hand. I actually came back with, at least I think they are, some very good photos; two of which leave me a little undecided as to which is best. I sort of lean towards one, then look at the other again and once more the indecision kicks in. This is the original photo, which I don’t have a problem with:-
First photo of seed heads
Now in, and of, itself this is a quite good photo, nothing spectacular; as I can see its limitations, one being that I simply could not get a low enough angle to obtain only the heads and stems against the sky. However, I immediately saw the possibility of the subject as a B & W image, and switched over (just a couple of clicks on my camera) and took the next, in which, for some inexplicable reason, the flash fired:-
Second photo of seed heads
I also switched the orientation of the camera as I was not at all sure that the original ‘portrait’ format worked at all well. It wasn’t until I uploaded this that I realised how the flash had made the stems a very stark contrast to the sky. I didn’t check it purely because I noticed the flash and wanted to retake it, without the flash:-
Third photo of seed heads
My first reaction was that this was by far the better shot, but then there was still that nagging doubt when I looked back at the other shot, and those white stems against the sky. I am still very undecided between them, but at the end of the day have settled for this one, along with a little judicious cropping to give me the image I had in mind:-
The final image
I would have preferred to have a full size shot of these seed heads, but, as I said previously, I just could not get a low enough angle to completely eliminate the background; so I had to resort to a crop, not ideal, but still a pretty good image.
I seem to be turning my creative talents more and more towards photography in recent months. I suppose part of it is because I am now using Photoshop, which makes it much easier to bring my photos back to what I actually remember seeing when they were taken; the camera never really records what one remembers seeing at the time.
On a trip out to the Hebrides, back in July, we were camping by a beach on Lewis and I spotted this wonderful sky at about 7 or 8 in the morning:-
The original photograph
Now in and of itself this is not that bad a photograph, but on looking at it I remembered the sky as being much less monochrome than it appears here. My memory of this scene was that the sky was much more vibrant, with much more contrast and some quite strong yellows on the horizon; of course it is always possible that my memory plays tricks on me, but I think not.
So, I opened it up and began to mess around with it a little to see what I could do to recover what I remembered. First I lightened it up just a touch, then gave it quite a bit of contrast to make the clouds stand out; already it was beginning to look a great deal better. Although it was not quite there yet, but adding some vibrance and saturation soon sorted out the missing elements. All of this followed by some noise reduction and sharpening left me with a much more interesting version of the original:-
A real Hebridean sky...
Now this, I think, is a much more satisfying image than the original, it has much more punch, more depth, and is just a touch more colourful…
Well nothing to really reveal, just thought I would pluck the religious strings a little there. This post is really more about being artistic without even the aid of a brush and paint, but with the aid of a camera and Photoshop; it really sort of follows on from a previous post. As I said there I have been playing around with Photoshop for some time now, and really like what can be done with it.
In addition to playing around with Photoshop my camera recently got upgraded, yes again, from my old Canon G9 to its big brother the Canon G10, a far superior beast. Yes, I know, it is not a digital SLR, but at 14.7 megapixels it far outstrips any of the entry level DSLR’s and at less cost; it is also far less bulky, easier to use, and best of all gives me the same control over what I do with it that a DSLR would.
Back in July BondWoman and myself went off for a few days break, we took the tent and headed west (surprise, surprise) and out to Harris and Lewis; I have since been back to the Outer Hebrides for another photographic trip, and I can highly recommend a visit there. I digress, the point is that I came back from the first trip with some five hundred, yes five hundred, photographs; naturally there are some duds in there, but not that many as I tend to delete the very obvious failures as I go along. One such photo was an attempt to photograph the hills of North Harris through the marram grass of the Luskentyre sand dunes.
However, on return and looking through the uploaded photos I spotted two photos which I thought could be, in some way combined to achieve the desired effect of the now long deleted dud photo mentioned above, these are they:-
The North Harris hills from Luskentyre
Looking through the marram grass
OK, so now I have two photos, an idea and no way of knowing what to do with either to achieve the desired effect; so I reach for my bible, the Adobe photoshop cs4 book for digital photographers, in the hope that it might give me a hint as to a starting point. Indeed, after an hour or so of reading up on various techniques I began to see just how what I had in mind could be achieved, even to removing that awful blade of grass that runs horizontally through the marram grass image.
So, now I have two photos, an idea and the techniques, time to fire up Photoshop and spend some quality time manipulating the images. The great thing about Photoshop is that one can save the results and come back to them later, picking up where one left off. In this case the ‘quality time’ was spread over a couple of days, some four or five hours in total; so, I could have done it all in one day, but I get bored easily, OK! Anyway, the upshot is that I ended up with an image that I was reasonably happy with, and which fulfilled the original idea that I had on Harris, shooting the North Harris hills through the Luskentyre marram grass; here is the result:-
North Harris hills through the Luskentyre marram grass.
Just two photos, an idea, a few basic Photoshop techniques (being a bear of very little brain they need to be) resulted in, even though I say it myself, a pretty damned good final image.
It has been brought to my attention that certain material here has been heavily copied by some students who, it seems, cannot be bothered to think for themsleves. Therefore I have taken the action of deleting those posts which I have, reliably, been informed are being used most to CHEAT. This is not an action that I take lightly, but I also DO NOT approve of cheating; if a student can’t be bothered to think for him\herself then that student should not be at University in the first place.
I would also like to take the opportunity to state in very clear terms that nothing that is posted on this blog can be used by anyone else without my express permission, and that includes both text and images - SO DON’T TAKE WITHOUT ASKING FIRST!
I have recently started playing around with Photoshop, well for a few months now actually, as I was told that it is a far superior piece software for the serious photographer. I have always been quite happy with Paintshop Pro, and it has always done the things that I have wanted to do, albeit in a little convoluted manner at times. The trouble is that there are things that I didn’t know I wanted to do, well, that was until I started scratching the surface of Photoshop. For example, take these three photographs:-
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
All very nice, but they do not convey the sense of place; they need stitching together to present the bigger picture, and to give us this:-
The stitched together version
Yes, well, what can I say, other than pretty crap really; no wonder it has not seen the light of day, ’til now. Admitted it does now give us something of the sense of place; Btw, this is an abandoned settlement, Bruach Mhor, on the slopes of Beinn na Drise on Mull. But it is so overexposed (I forgot to switch away from the Auto White Balance on my camera) that there is no sky detail, nor any chance of rescuing it. Well, that was until I had an idea last night when I was looking through this particular set of photos, and found this one:-
Calgary Bay - Mull
Yes, I know, you are now thinking that I have gone quite mad, as these photos bear no relation to one another at all. Well that is perfectly true, unless you have a twisted mind like mine, which saw the possibility of taking the sky from the Calgary Bay photo and stuffing it into the photo of Bruach Mhor. Now this is something that would have taken me a week (well maybe a little touch of exaggeration there) to do with Paintshop Pro, even the X2 version, and consequently would not even have been worth the effort. But I consulted Photoshop CS4 for digital photographers, an excellent resource, and found that it was not that difficult a task after all.
Actually I found it an amazingly simple task, at least once I understood what needed doing. So, off I set, making copies of both images (just in case I did something stupid) before starting the process of deleting what was not wanted in both pictures; the sky in the Bruach Mhor one, and everything but the sky in the Calgary Bay one. From there on in it was just a matter of layering one bit behind the other, sky behind landscape, and getting photoshop to blend the layers together. This still left me with an overexposed landscape to deal with, but a little judicious burning (darkening specific areas of the image) soon sorted that out. All in all it took me something like two and a half hours to complete this task, with several mistakes included in that time, and to produce the final (although I can see another iteration) version:-
A moody Bruach Mhor
Now, this gives me more of the sense of the place we visited whilst heading up Beinn na Drise; that sense of desolation, of being somewhere else in time that I felt whilst taking the photos. I am still not totally happy with it, and I can see that it could benefit from a little more time and thought, but even so I think it is a pretty damned good attempt at rescuing a crap image.
