Email from the Ansang photography competition yesterday – have two images short listed for the awards (only entered 4 )

They will be in the exhibition (and book) that opens at the Adelaide Mueseum on Oct 5th and then travels around the country.

I will update this post in the coming days with the images that are up for consideration.

A Guide to Pleasing Blurs – Artie Morris & Denise Ippolito

Creating a pleasing photographic blur is a lot harder than what you would think, a accidentally blurred photo is usually not going to cut it. You need to be intentionally setting out to create a Blur, of course doing so is going to require a slow shutter speed often requiring the use of a ND filter to reduce the amount of light entering the lens of the camera.

Fellow photographers, Artie Morris and Denise Ippolito have just released what should become the guide of choice for how to create pleasing blurs. The book is a wealth of information and richly illustrated with a huge number of excellent examples of wonderful images. Denise and Artie explain their thinking and give full technical information on each image. They cover many different techniques including in camera and post production techniques.

It is a excellent guide on how to create a pleasing blur and is available as a digital download from www.birdsasart.com

Armed with the knowledge from the book, I set out to make some blurs. Had my trusty DS3 and 150MM Sigma macro and ND 400 Filter (10 stop light reduction) and visited the local botanical gardens, The ND400 being a 10 stop reduction filter can make it quite difficult to see through the viewfinder (Also they are quite hard to source and are limited in what size they come in) as I was shooting in quite bright harsh light though I was able to get by. The filter combined with the D3S gave me lots of options as I could increase the ISO quite a lot if required to get to the Shutter Speed I was looking for.

BLUR1 BLUR2 BLUR3

Here are my tips….

1. Take lots of images
2. Try different techniques on the same scene
3. Have fun

The images in the slide show above are all of the same scene, they are all as shot (No added effects applied in Photoshop) and all have a different feel courtesy of different camera movements during the image capture. I found a effective technique was to move the camera in the directions of the dominate lines in the image, hence here the plants had a strong curved line to the leaves, so I moved the camera in a curved direction during the exposure. Likewise if the scene contains vertical lines I would move the camera vertically during the exposure.

Abstract blurs like the above can be a created from just about anything, I very nearly overlooked this scene. Blurs are artistic expression so don’t expect everyone to like any particular image, personal taste comes into play with these type images. Some people will love a image whilst others will see nothing worthwhile in the same image.

If you are a Nikon user, you have a EXTRA tool up your sleeve – Multiple Exposure Blurs!!  (Not covered in the Book) I will provide a guide for creating these in the next couple of weeks.

Cya

Im – Off with the Birds!

The Info Palette

Photoshop’s Info palette is a important and often under utilised tool in your colour correction workflow, whilst it does not make any changes itself, the information it provides is vital to help you correct colour casts. No matter how well your monitor is calibrated or how god your eye’s are subtle colour casts can be difficult to see and correct – is it a blue cast or red. The Info palette provides no nonsense answers.

The info palette should be open and visible when ever you are doing colour corrections (Window  - Info or F8) it provides the values and location of the pixels under your cursor.

First Colour readout – RGB (Or actual colour,which displays info for whichever mode you are working in)

Second Colour readout – CMYK

Mouse co-ordinates – Pixels (Same as edit- preferences – rulers)

What Do The Color Readouts Mean?

If you have your Info Palette set up as the one above, it shows you RGB numeric values and CMYK percentage values of the point beneath your cursor on the image. RGB numbers represent intensity values running from 0 to 255 for each of the three color channels. CMYK percents represent percent of cyan, yellow, magenta, or black making up the color under the cursor.

No matter what your monitor displays, you can always move your cursor over a given point in an image and determine the values that make up that color in the Info Palette. In the Info Palette shown above, green predominates at a value of 146. The pixels under your cursor should appear green.

If you are working in one of Photoshop’s color working spaces such as Adobe RGB and you move your cursor over a value you know to be neutral in your image―black, white, or gray―each of the three color channels should display the same value. If one of the RGB values predominates, chances are you have a color caste. The Info Palette makes this color caste evident even if it is too subtle to be seen on your monitor.

Color Sampling Using the Info Palette

You can use the Info Palette to store and display sampled points from 

Storing sampled values is an extremely useful feature when trying to color correct an image. A useful technique is to sample and store a black shadow value, a white highlight value, and a neutral value. You can then use image adjustment tools to change the color values of your image while monitoring these sampled points.

The Info Palette just above has three sampled values: #1 a shadow, #2 a highlight, and #3 a midtone. The sample points are visible on the image itself and are labeled #1, #2, and #3 to match the sampled information in the palette.

In sample #1, the shadow value, note the blue value of 28 versus the lower values for red and green. This higher blue value likely indicates the shadow has a blue caste. If you know the shadow value should be a neutral black, then using one of the adjustment dialogs like Curves or Levels to lower the blue shadow value to 11 (and the green value to 11) will neutralize the shadow.

Likewise, the higher R values in samples #2 and #3 likely indicates a slight red caste for the overall image. Raising the G and B values of sample #2 to the R value of 253 will give you a neutral white and equalizing the #3 values at a midpoint value of 127 will give you a neutral gray midpoint. Simple corrections like this to remove color casts will frequently clear up most of the color problems for a given image.

Equipment Reviews

I intend to provide some equipment reviews for those that are interested, there are plenty of mumbo jumbo scientific reviews of camera’s and lenses on the Net, but what I am going to give you is a real world overview of the equipment that I use every day. I have no affiliations with any company, so you can be sure that I will tell it as I see it, the good,the bad and the ugly!

Here is a list of what will be forthcoming (All equipment I own or have access to)

• Sigmonster 300-800mm F5.6 zoom
• Nikon D3S
• Nikon 300mm F2.8
• Nikon 200-400MM F4 Zoom
• Nikon 1.7X Tele Converter
• Nikon 1.4X Tele Converter
• Gurra Gear Kiboko bag
• Nikon SB 900 Flash

Along with various other bits and pieces including software, might even include a few Nikon rumors as well.

If there is anything you would like my opinion on, Just ask.

Im Off with the Birds.

Today we are talking about what is often referred to as the colour wash technique, although it is really more of a compositional style than a technique per se. So what is it?

It is the use of out of focus foreground and background elements to frame or overlay a colour onto the main subject. It can be hit and miss until you develop a bit of a eye for which situations it is likely to work in, when it does work though the results can be quite spectacular.

With the Gannet image above, the Background is the sunset and the foreground is nesting material right in front of me – the bird was over the edge of a cliff, I was shooting down over the cliff and the nesting material in the foreground was quite close to me, hence it is out of focus.

The spoonbill image was one i could have easily passed by until I thought about the colour wash technique, I saw the spoonbills on the banks of the river a little distance from me however there were quite a lot of reeds and bushes between us – so I decided to incorporate the reeds into the composition of the image. You don’t want to overdo it too much, you still need to have your main subject in focus and sharp – the spoonbill in the lower right adds to the effect, just enough of it can be seen to add to the story.

I made this image around easter time, Foreground is bushes that were between myself and the rabbit, all I needed to do was to make sure I got that big eye and as much of the head in focus as possible. Normally with this style I find myself shooting wide open – you want to throw the background and foreground out of focus as much as possible to heighten the effect.

One of my favourite Gannet images, once again the background is the sky and the foreground nesting material with the added bonus here of the foreground hues contrasting against the blue of the sky. Notice the subject is sharp and in focus, very important to have this, you need to make sure that the camera locks focus on the subject and not something in the foreground or background. Here I would recommend setting your autofocus to single point.

So as you can see, it is really more of a eye for situations in which this style of composition will work other than anything else – Get out there and experiment and have fun.

I’m off with the birds.

Welcome to “Off with the Birds”

My old website was badly in need of some TLC. SO rather than spend time trying to fix things that could not be fixed I decided to go with a new domain and new website. I will be updating the blog section of the site more frequently in the past.

I will be including all sorts of content, various photography tips and tricks, basic photography knowledge, Howto’s, Technology and maybe even a few new equipment rumours. A little background information for those that may be interested – OWTB is a wordpress site with a premium template from the folks at prophotoblogs.com. The Prophoto template is very good, very easy to customise and most things can be adjusted, I am a big fan of the KISS principle, which is why I went with this solution. I know there are hundreds of free wordpress templates out there that do much the same thing, big advantage for me with the prophoto template is the support, questions and requests for help are answered promptly.

OWTB is hosted through Bluehost – Have to say I am very impressed with these guys, Signed up and everything was ready to go straight away, Email arrived within minutes with all my settings – flawless. Two days later I even got a verification phone call from them (Yes from the States). A pleasure to deal with. If you are looking to host with these guys please use my link at the bottom of the page – muchly appreciated!

I am using a minimalist design, simple, clean and lets the images speak for themselves. Feel free to leave comments or use the email/contact me forms.

I’m Off with the Birds!!