Hi all,

I volunteered my photographic services tonight for a darts presentation evening. I myself picked up a couple of trophies and knew most of the people there, so a hundred odd piccys for the league website have been sorted.. without much in the way of hard work. I also got an offer of work.. a ninth birthday party.. for a friends grand-daughter; this Saturday. The Mum's skint, so it's a charity affair. I like these as I get to practice for nothing.. well except that I need to buy a pink lacy backdrop. I use ( or have, with the potential to use) a 4' x 31/2' projector screen as a backdrop, and now need to scour the cheepie shops for some pink lace to suit.

I'm basically attempting to practice for another (also skint) mate's son's wedding.. but have yet to accept, although the temptation is there. That's it really.

I'll post up some piccys of Bruges tomorrow ( or rather one.. and a link to a gallery on my site, when I get around to building it [the gallery, not the site]) as they seemed to come out well.

Cheers

Liam (in need of sleep.. and in great danger of rambling for a long while)

That's one advantage to film.. the sensor is of the use once variety.

Hi Drew,

it'll pretty much be as clean as the surrounding air. Wrap a piece of a coffee machine filter or similar around the exit tube, and see what you catch. You'll probably lose a fair amount of the power though, as the "filter" will diffuse the air, depending on how the fibres of the filter are arranged.

Cheers

Liam

Hi,

as the dust is on the inside of the lens, and although not airtight, should be able to keep out most foreign particles, try ringing up Pentax and see what they say.. you might get it cleaned.. or even replaced, if a bad tolerance between the barrels is to blame, as the lens is only three months old. It probably won't work, but 10p in the phone won't hurt either.

Cheers

Liam

Hi,

I do like that picture Ammonyte. Using the ND grad has made it stand out from the usual pictures you see of Stonehenge.

We live in Bracknell, and after seeing that the weather was going to be clearer in that direction, we just sort of headed west, got to Leigh Delaware services and had a choice of Wales or Somerset basically.. so we went to Somerset.

I didn't actually take that many pictures.. around 60 or so, so I'm happy to get this one. We were driving down a country lane, and saw a couple of Kites/Buzzards in the air. By the time I'd stuck the 100-300 lens on they'd gone, so I'm not 100% on what they were.

I did see a butterfly skipping around the backed sides of the lane, (white with orange wing tips), and must have looked a complete idiot to the elderly lady having an afternoon walk at the time, what with a hairy arsed biker type skipping up and down the lane after a butterfly, with Mrs Liam trying to crawl under the passenger seat in shame and embarrasment.

All in all, a good day.

George, thanks. I'd never thought of it like that.. post modern impressionism anyone.

Cheers

Liam

Hi al,

I was in North Somerset (Watchett) on Monday, and took this shot. I'm not sure what it is exactly that appeals to me. I find it quite a calming image, and not my usual sort of subject.. so I thought I'd see what you all thought of it. No cropping involved, just a little saturation and sharpening.




I now have to go to a pool team meeting.. in a social club.. that sells nice beer.. Hiccup..

Cheers

Liam

Hi,

I did a wedding for a friend's daughter once, who couldn't afford a proper photographer at the time. I have to say that it's one of the most nerve racking days I've ever had.. until the pictures came back. That was using 35mm (ME Super), and my better half stood over my shoulder with a P&S and doubled up on every shot.. just in case.

One tip I can offer that was given to me though, and I may be teaching Granny to suck eggs here, but for the staged group shots, before taking the shot, get every one to close their eyes, and then get them to open them when you shout smile This gives a better than average chance of them all having their eyes open when the shutter clicks. This also gets you talking to them, as once the actual service is over, friends of the happy couple are generally waiting to get some food and beer down their necks, and if you can get them involved in the picture taking, then they don't look as bored in the final photos.

Right, off to darts now,

Cheers

Liam

Hi Brian,

Have you tried using the levels adjustment in PS. That's what I used to do this, although with GIMP. Basically, you just play around with the arrows under the histogram, until you find the correct levels of shadow, highlight and contrast.

This is what it the tool looks like in GIMP, and I assume very similar in PS..




The histogram shows all the pixels in the image, and how many of each there are. It's split into 5 stops, of 51 points each. At the dark end of the histogram, it shows a fairly regular amount of pixels for three stops, and then very little in the two lighter stops. Imagine that you have a bar chart with 255 columns and each pixel in the image is rated for how dark or light it is, and stacked accordingly in columns. That's what the histogram shows. In this image, 3/5ths of the pixels are in the range of black to dark-mid grey, with virtually none in the lightest two stops. To get an overall well exposed image, you can drag the right hand arrow back towards the middle, until you get to the start of the 4th stop, just where you see the most action in the histogram end. This when OK'd will average out the vast majority of pixels over the whole image, which in turn will lighten it, but by averaging out the lightness/darkness of each pixel relative to it's neighbouring column. This means that black stays as black, and white stays as white, but the midtones are gradually stretched across the whole 5 stops, rather than just three, giving greater tone across the image as a whole.

If you alter the contrast, then it removes whole columns of pixels from the histogram, so that you don't get the subtle changes between shades, Have a play and see what you come up with by moving the arrows around. I was going to explain further, but it's too early.

Cheers

Liam

Hi Brian,

Don't worry.. I used this as an experiment only, and I'll remove it from my server if you want me to.

Cheers

Liam

Hi Brian,

I was just having a play in GIMP, to get a bit of practice with the histograms. I hope you don't mind, but I used your image as a guinea pig.




the histogram settings for black, midtone and white are 0 : 0.90 : 224 to get this. I had a play with the curves, but as this is pretty new to me, I couldn't get anything better and left them alone. As Ammonyte said, there's a lot of ways to get a good effect.. especially when you start off with a shot this good.

Cheers

Liam