The Best Laid Plans...

The weather in Wales last weekend was wonderful; pity I had a minor technical problem with my big kit! I missed a couple of good sunsets and a stunning dawn. So... I used my iPhone to take a few street images.


There's been a lot in the photo press recently extolling the virtues of the iPhone and its various apps. Lee Frost has written and illustrated a couple of very good articles in Black & White Photography magazine while Daniel Lezano in Digital SLR Photography did pretty much the same. The photographs below were downloaded into Adobe Bridge then tweaked slightly and cropped in Elements 9 before getting a monochrome makeover with my product of the year, Silver Efex Pro 2, which continues to amaze me - the effects this software applied to the original images is quite remarkable and improved every aspect of them.


I selected a custom preset (landscape) then added the film emulsion for Kodak ISO32 Panatomic X before a little tweaking of the contrast settings to bring out some detail. That might sound an awful lot of work for iPhone images but each one took less than five minutes to process. I think the monochrome conversion has really improved the images. It would be interesting to see comments from you, dear reader. Anyway, here's the pictures:

A Dog Named Boo

UPDATE 11 NOVEMBER 2011: I submitted "A Dog Named Boo" to my Fotoblur account and I'm both thrilled and pleased to report that it was a Featured Image in their Street Performance category.

Music to Watch Girls By

The Pirates Den

Asleep at the Wheel
Click on any image for the bigger picture

The two musician images were taken in Bangor city centre, the ramshackle garage was found in Menai Bridge and the sleeping man was in Beaumaris.

It's the First Breath of Springtime*

Spring really is here - hurrah!


The beautiful weather of the past few days really has been inspirational and after listening to Heather Angel at Focus earlier in the month I was eager to try my hand at a bit of macro photography. The light on Saturday afternoon was perfect and  I set up a simple studio, fitted my Nikkor 60mm macro lens to the D700, dusted off my Lastolite reflector and got to work. The reflector helped to illuminate the inside of the flowers - tulips - while backlight from the sun helped to create a high key effect in the first picture and to saturate the colours in the second.

Click the image for the bigger picture

Click the image for the bigger picture

Once I uploaded the pictures into Elements I decided to have a play with some of them using Niksoft's Silver Efex Pro 2 plug-in, which I upgraded to earlier this week. Here's my first attempt using some presets with a tad of tinkering in Elements once I was satisfied with the effects. Enjoy!

Click the image for the bigger picture

There is an awful lot more to version two of Niksoft's package and I think it will become a much used tool in the coming weeks.


As always, your comments are welcome.


*Thankful by Rumer from the album 'Seasons of My Soul'