December

Yeah, ok, so I've been crap at posting. I've been taking lots of pics, but most are pretty average and not been worth talking about.. Shot this looking across to Fife, where the sun was hitting the snowy hills. A bit of a tweak in Photoshop, and then cropped it to create a landscape.

Australian Beach

Just back from a three week trip to Australia, with about 900 pics to wade through.

Shot this on an empty beach at Queenscliff, south of Melbourne. I loved the patterns the sea had made in the rocks, which left rock pools when the tide was out. Tweaked it bit in Photoshop to bring out the colours.

Fireworks

Fireworks make great photographs. Except I seem to struggle.

The text-book says use a long exposure, as that gets you the "trails". For the second year running, I've tried this and got an absolute mess. It didn't help that there was a pretty strong wind, which was shaking the camera.

Then, to top it all, the batteries packed up. My own fault for waiting until they die before charging them. This is the best of a very bad bunch.

Blending

So I'm crap with photoshop, but I'm learning. I know enough to shoot in raw, so I can sort out the white balance and exposure later. Every now and then, though, I manage to do what I want.

Shooting from Bonaly Park across the city, I had a huge range in brightness to contend with. I exposed for the clouds, and hoped for the best. When I got home, I took a second jpg from the raw file, and boosted the exposure. Created a gradient layer, and blended the two pics.

Ok, I really should have gone for a much smaller aperture (F5.6 on this) and a slower shutter speed (1/500th), but compared with the picture I actually took, this is quite a result.

Underbelly Bar

Had a few hours to kill in town, during the festival. In theory, this should give plenty of opportunities for photographs, but to be honest the light was pretty poor on the High St (that's the Royal Mile to tourists). So I wandered down to the Underbelly to see if that was any better. It wasn't, so I bought a pint, picked up a couple of festival magazines and sat on the steps.

When I looked back up, I noticed a blond girl wandering around clearly looking for somene she'd arragned to meet*. She was wearing bright red lipstick, which really stood out from her pale skin. I took a couple of pictures, wondering how much that would be visible in the general scene.

Got home, and the pics were a bit disappointing - this was the best of a bad bunch. Photoshop allowed me to make something worthwhile out of it, adding a motion blur to the rest of the picture and keeping her "sharp". I think it would look much better if I'd actually got her in focus though.


* you don't see that too often. Generally people use their mobiles to find where each other are, rather than hang around at a pre-arranged time & place.

Opener

I've wanted to blog for a while, though I'm not sure why. I guess everyone else does it, and it's one of those things you can do pretty much when you want. Then there's the "what to blog about" thing, I'm not one of those people who can just write endlessly about any subject. Those that know me know I tend to be the quiet one in a group, and I'm the same when it comes to writing - try to get 100 words out of me, and I've said everything I need to say in the first 50.

I've had my SLR for about three years now, and what started off as "I think I'll get a new camera" has started to verge on an obsession. What I lack is an artistic streak - I really admire the way some people can see a great picture in everyday life, while I'd just walk on by. I recenly bought a copy of Photoshop Elements (actually, that was about a year ago now I think about it) and that's added a whole new arm to the hobby.

So, here we go. I'll take a few photographs, and use this to describe what I was looking for, why I took them, what I did to make them better, etc.