Hi all,

a more traditional black and white shot.. this time of a building in the main square in Brugge.




This time, I've taken a colour jpg (I took this before I did RAW), desaturated, and added a light semi-transparent orangey/brown layer. To this layer I added some noise to create a little grain, and hopefully a sort of vintage feel. I've played with the contrast a bit as well just to get everything to look just right. Hopefully it looks like a 60s-esque shot??????

It's not purple anyway..

Cheers

Liam

Hi smc,

I think you may be right about a little under-exposure with most lenses, I'd never really thought about it, but setting WB and taking the shot with manual lenses ups it by a stop or more; bringing it into line with what I'd normally get from the AF lenses. In which case the manuals could be 2 stops or more underexposed with auto WB.

Cheers

Liam

Hi all,

Auto WB on the DL with manual lenses almost always results (in my case) with at least a stop, if not more, under-exposure. My example lenses being a 70-210 f3.5 Macro (Soligor) and a 300 5.6 (can't remember the brand, and I'm off out now.. suffice to say, not a Pentax). I don't the technical reason for this though.

Shoot RAW, and pick pretty much any WB and just adjust later.. obviously picking the right one will save a second or two..

HTH

Cheers

Liam

Hi Will,

I don't think I've been to Whipsnade before, so I'll have to pop over there sometime.

Thunderstorms in your first car.. mine was a Cortina MkIV estate, and as waterproof as a teabag.. I did get caught in one driving up to Wales, and there was about two inches of water in the passenger footwell by the end of the trip..

Cheers

Liam

Hi Pete,

Re. the frame.. I know.. I've started doing that too much, so it's gone.

Not sure what you mean about shadows and highlights though.

The 'shadows' are meant to be silhouettes, so they're black, and the highlights are meant to be white. I've pulled the magenta out of of the midtones, which is why it doesn't have the look of a magenta mask over it.

Hi Will,

I have no idea.. I grabbed the camera and found Mrs Liam in the car studying the map book. I started reading and a while later there we were. There was a large lion (the Whipsnade lion, as I found out later) carved into the hill across the valley.. we were on the ridgeway opposite. Had a walk round, and came back. I didn't take that many photos to be honest, but there was a glider not far off the top of the ridge, and I took a few of it.. you may or may not get to see one of those later..

Cheers

Liam

Hi all,
I went out and about somewhere near Dunstable today.. Mrs. L drove and I read a book there and back, so I'm not 100% on where exactly.

Anyway, as the theme of the week seems to be mono, I thought I'd have a play with one of the photos I took.. purely experimental, but I think it turned out OK, if a little different to usual..




Although the sky was blue, if a little cloudy, I thought the clouds in this one looked a little stormy once I'd converted to greyscale, so I had a play around, and this is what.. err.. happened to it.

Hope you like it...

Cheers

Liam

Not sure if this is the one I read..

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/bit-depth.shtml

but it basically backs up my previous comment. Just using black ink gives a choice of 256 shades of grey, whereas using the coloured ink as well gives you 16 million shades. The article explains it better than I could..

Cheers

Liam

Don't forget that coloured inks produce a much wider range of greys than black can on it's own. I read an article online about the technical stuff, on it somewhere.. I'll see if I can find it for you.

Cheers

Liam

Peter, that's lovely.

The tracks in the sand just haul you into the photo.

Cracking shot..

Cheers

Liam

Hi Peter,

I don't use PS 7, but there should be; somewhere, a tool for picking a white point.. usually a little dropper icon. Click that, and then click on a point that should be pure white (in this case the snow) and it will render the whole image based on your choice of white. This will also pull all the other colours into line.

I hope you don't mind, but I've had a quick go myself..




Hope that helps,

Cheers

Liam