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Showing posts from 2010

Christmas Market

So that was 2010. What did we all think of it? Rubbish? Fair enough. One last post of pics from 2010, this time from Sheffield's Christmas Market. I took these a week after it was supposed to close down, so it was somewhat barren. Still, I think they're quite nice. The ice rink ones didn't come out at all, but mostly that's because I was uninspired by it. If you don't put inspiration and feeling into the taking of a picture, there won't be any taken from it. A stack of fantastic hats What stalls remained were very nice. Colourful, and the wood gave a warm glow to everything. Some of the stalls even looked nice despite most of the goods having been purchased last week. Mmm cupcakes All in all, visiting a half shut market isn't a very exciting thing to do, but it is always a good photo opportunity. And I did have a bratwurst filled with cheese, so that was new and interesting.

A tree is not just for Christmas

Big box o' decorations ready to hang It's that time again. Tree decorating. I'm not very good at it, and I always lose bits of my fake tree. Then I get the lights all tied up in knots. Then ... well, it's not good. So this year I've very much cheated and bought a fibre optic tree. It is the lights! Genius. Fibre optics make tree lights easy It's not a very big tree, admittedly. Only 3'. But substantially bigger than last year's 12" effort, which is also out and still decorated with its miniature decorations. Still, looks nice enough. The first decoration goes on, looking very lonesome

Bonus

Bonus follow-up post just because I thought this was a cool picture. Again, the detail and clarity are great, and I love the pose. This was obviously "pose du jour" because it cropped up a few times.

Resolution

Took some more portraits of the kids while I still had a blank wall for them to sit against. Been having a lot of fun in Aperture messing with sliders and changing the tone of pictures, or accentuating a mood through colour. 50mm (80mm @ 1.6x crop) f5.6, 1/125th sec, ISO 400, bounce flash + slave backlight Here we have the mid-shoot strop (aspiring pro model, perhaps?) I snapped it just because it let me capture a different sort of picture to the usual portraiture. A lot more emotion. To enhance that, I've toned down the intensity of the colour and desaturated it just a tiny bit. This gives it a softened look and brings out some detail that I thought was lost to the flash. I especially like the hair texture and fine detail around the eyes. Speaking of which, here is a 100% crop from this very image. Not bad for ISO 400. Good sensor, but great optics thanks to the nifty fifty.

Icicles

The snow is finally beginning to melt (not that you'd know, trying to drive about) and so the icicles are finally forming. Hanging out of the bedroom window, I risked life and limb to take a few pics.  

It's looking scarily like Christmas ...

It snowed again. It keeps doing that. Very annoying.  50mm f/1.8, 1/200th second, ISO 100 The kids enjoy the snow, anyway. This is Aimee revelling in the snow, throwing it about and creating what I think is a very Marks & Spencer feel. I used wide apertures so that the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze any flying snow while still giving a little motion blur. This also let me use a low ISO for smooth, noise free pictures. The wide aperture also helped give some depth to the pictures, which I find is important with snow. It's easy to lose any sense of depth or scale when everything is white. Setting the metering to +2/3EV ensured the snow stayed white, instead of averaging to dirty grey. This worked well for the whole set, but this one in particular fell perfectly. The snow is in focus, frozen and distinct from the blurred background. The trees are snow covered and give atmosphere and context. The canted angle and framing gives a sense of space and motion

Snowed in ... again

The cars are stuck. The buses are cancelled. The trains are nowhere to be seen. I'm not walking 7 miles in this. Looks like we're ... snowed in! Here is the car, stranded and buried.

Fun, fun, fun in the s...now?

It must be time for sledging! And an opportunity for some "action photography" for daddy, of course! We went to Longley Park just because it's round the corner. The hills were mostly still covered, although some areas were starting to melt already. Mind you, with the way it's been coming down we'll probably be able to go again this weekend. As the kids readied themselves for their first descent, I readied myself by setting up the camera. I used the EF 28-135mm for this one so I could zoom in for close-ups without risking getting whacked with the sledge. At f5.6 it was wide enough for a bit of DOF fiddling so it's all good. I also opted for AI Servo focus, which is Canon speak for continuous autofocus. The autofocus point can be set manually, so while tracking you could, for instance, choose to keep the top left corner in focus which is handy for tracking a sledge while keeping the other side open for good composition. Another thing I to

Flashy

Photography is all about lighting. When all is said and done, it's about getting the light to bounce off things in a nice way and land in the right place on a photosensitive surface. Dictionary definition, right there. But what if the light you have available is rubbish? You have to supplement. Up to now I've been limited to built-in flash and a non-adjustable slave for backlighting. Not great for getting light in just the right place because you're basically limited to pointing the light straight at the subject. Harsh shadows abound. However, I recently took delivery of a Yongnuo YN-460 flash. It's entirely manual, so no TTL or auto-metering. It has no zoom. But it does boast an impressive range of features considering that it costs £30. It has adjustable flash power, from full to 1/64th. It has slave mode so you can use it off camera. It has a fully adjustable head, with 90 degrees of movement vertically and 270 degrees horizontally. Pointing it where you need it

Snow!

It's snowed. This is problematic. However, it's also pretty. I've recently upgraded my post-processing kit. I was using The Gimp on an ancient MacBook with a dim, yellowing screen. This did not produce good pictures. I was also still shooting in JPEG rather than RAW, simply because I didn't have the tools to do RAW justice. The camera's internal software did a better job than The Gimp because, while the camera handles 14 bit channels, The Gimp can only handle 8 bit channels. So here I have Aperture 3 on a MacBook Pro. LED backlit screen, 4GB of RAM and a 2.4GHz processor. Perfect. One immediate advantage of switching to RAW is the amount of control over the sharpness of the image. JPEG has a tendency to soften the image due to compression artefacts, and processing a JPEG into another JPEG just makes it worse. Aperture lets me apply adjustments without ever touching the original pixels, so nothing gets ruined. It's only when I export the final image d

Crime Scene Investigation

This actually should have been posted last Tuesday (23rd Nov) but due to me being slow and a bit daft, I completely forgot. We had a CSI night. This involved playing the CSI board game, then laughing at CSI:Miami. Rather amazingly, we discovered that if you shine the little UV torches that come with the game into the dice, it glows in an eery manner.

James Montgomery

I decided to take some random pics around Sheffield cathedral just because. I got this nice shot of the statue of James Montgomery. What's particularly impressive about this one is the amount of detail. Have a look at this 100% crop of the same image: Impressive, no? Now I just have to play around and figure out the sweet spot on each lens to get the absolute best detail out of them. About f/5.6 should do it. And I must practice getting landscape orientation pictures ... I'm definitely still a naturally vertically oriented person.

Skittles

Today I've been playing with skittles. This took 156 exposures to get right, 5 at a time in burst mode. This one was actually exposure number 48, but I didn't realise until quite a while later that it was the best. I used a relatively slow shutter and flash on rear curtain to freeze the ball and skittle while maintaining motion blur. For the  dailyshoot  assignment, I shot another without flash. Instead, I used a tungsten lamp for a warm feel and a slow shutter. This led to the falling skittles and the swinging ball becoming abstract blurs around the central skittle, which I managed to miss completely. Finally I have one taken from a different angle. I prefer the feeling of motion in the first, but the composition of this one.   

The Fog Descends

Today I went to Manchester, and it was very foggy. Fortunately I had my camera with me (I'm getting better at this "always have a camera" business) so I stopped in Derwent to take a few snaps. Obviously they are all low contrast and, well, covered in fog. 38mm, f11, 1/25th sec, ISO 100 This was my first opportunity to try out my new EF 28-135mm f3.5-5.6 in anger. It's a heavy beast, weighing down the front of the camera so it hangs vertically round my neck. I'd say it weighs twice as much as the body. But that's ok. It's comfortable to hold, easy to operate, and the autofocus is silent. Add to that the fact that it has optical image stabilisation via an in-built gyro and it's a lovely thing to use. I switched to my EF 18-55mm on the way back. It's the kit lens that came with the body, but it's the most wide angle I have. I used it to try and take in the height of the trees. At a minimum focal length of 44mm (thanks to the 1.6x crop fac

Plant

A plant for your viewing pleasure.

Graffiti

Graffiti on my garage door. Really should get that repainted one of these days ...

Isolated Subject, High Contrast

Today's assignment: Isolated subject, high contrast. These are, obviously, coat hooks. The two lights almost equidistant from the subject make the interesting shadows beneath. Taken with Hipstamatic for iPhone because it's the only camera I had with me at the time.

Busy doing nothing

Today's theme is "calendars". I chose to take a picture of the inside of my diary to demonstrate how little I have to do at the moment. Of course, it's a complete lie. I'm insanely busy this week, running up and down the country for work until I finish this job on Friday and start a new, more local one on Monday. I just haven't written any of it in the diary yet because it wasn't decided until very recently. I thought it'd be a nice subject, anyway. I was also testing the low light capabilities of my new camera. This picture was shot at ISO 3200, if you can believe it! And just to clarify, I've focussed on tomorrow's date because I thought it best from an artistic viewpoint. And not at all because I forgot what day it is. No. That would just be silly. *ahem* Now to the subject of why I even have a new camera. As some of you may know, a bunch of cretins broke in and stole a load of stuff, including a laptop, a Wii, and all my camera gear.

Fairy Lights

Street lights at night can be very pretty. For someone who lives close to the centre of a large city, skirting round the edge of the town centre can provide a host of beautiful views at night. One advantage to using a wide open lens when taking these pictures is the capture of bokeh, or creative blur. An extreme example is shown to your right; a mass of coloured circles that roughly represent the city they are part of. A more subtle example, of course, is in the picture of the day at the top of this post. The lights cluster around the top of the leaves like fireflies, obviously part of a cityscape but at the same time abstract. The extreme out of focus image is a blurred version of the picture on the left. A view over Sheffield from Pitsmoor, looking up Netherthorpe Road and up to the university. Even when the buildings are focussed (roughly; I'm still practicing) the lights take on the shape of the lens's aperture. I try to incorporate some foreground focus wh

I'd rather be here

In other news, yay for low light performance!