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
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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.

Nana's Room

Sometimes you just chance on an image and have to act quickly. "Nana's Room" is one such image. 


I was passing the bedroom when I saw some beautiful light momentarily shining into the room. There was a lovely shadow on the wall and I wanted to get the image. My TZ-10 was to hand and I was able to quickly compose and shoot off six images before the light went. In fact, I captured more than the shadows; I got some of the dressing table, too, with some gorgeous rim lighting. It was an instant still life.


When time allowed (last evening!) I decided to process one of the images. Monochrome was my first choice and using Silver Efex Pro2 I selected a Fine Art Process preset as the start point. Next, I modified the brightness - highlights and midtones to +14% and shadows to -14%. I then increased the structure (contrast effectively) to +50% across all three ranges and adding a vignette preset.


Having done the basic work I went back to the brightness increasing the midtones to 42% and shadows to +10%. Returning to Elements I cropped to 12x8, applied an unsharp mask of 33% with a radius of 1 and a 3x threshold and, finally, a high pass filter at a radius of 0.2.


I really like the effect and hope you do, too.

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A Path Through the Dunes

There was some good weather during the summer and here is an image from one of those days.


We took a picnic to our favourite place, which is Llanddwyn on the island of Anglesey. Llanddwyn is an island in its own right being cut off from the mainland at high tide. There's the lovely woodlands of Newborough Forest to explore, long wild beaches that can be deserted, wildlife a plenty, rolling dunes with dense clumps of marram grass and super views to the Lleyn Peninsular. It's a great place for photography whatever the weather.


Paul Gallagher is a favourite photographer who works almost exclusively in black and white. He has captured some wonderful shots of the marram grasses on the coast between Liverpool and Southport. I'd been waiting for the right conditions to use some of his techniques and was blessed with a beautiful calm day with blue skies and wonderful cloud formations.


The image was captured using a polarising filter and Lee 0.6 graduated ND filter. I loved the savageness of the rocks against the softness of the marram and the clouds were just made to complement the image.

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The Evolution of an Image

During a few spare minutes earlier in the year I converted a colour image I'd posted here previously under the title "Holiday Homes". It was posted on my Fotoblur site under the title "Perfect Summer Day" and did quite well for itself being featured by the Monochrome group. Well, the same image has evolved still further!


I do love the square format and I wondered just how the image would look cropped to 5x5. I'm pleased with the result, which you can see below. It just goes to show that an image, like a painting, is never truly finished.

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The original mono conversion was hand done in Adobe Camera RAW and Elements using techniques from a Future Publishing black & white guide and at some stage during the long winter evenings I shall do a new conversion using Silver Efex2 Pro.

Panasonic DMC TZ-10

I dropped on a real bargain from Jacob’s in Liverpool to supplement my Leica C-Lux 3; a Panasonic DMC TZ-10 compact camera. What a grand little camera it has turned out to be getting lots of use alongside my Leica. Both comapcts have been bought for those times when I don’t feel like lugging my full Nikon kit around, which during the poor summer in the UK has been quite often.

The TZ-10 has a Leica DC 25mm lens and a 12.1MP sensor, lots of programme modes and “scene” settings. It’s light, easy to use and produces some wonderful images. It fits neatly in my pocket, is quick to start and quite unobtrusive in use. I’ve used it for street photography, sunsets, landscapes, portraits using natural light, flash and mixed light - which it handles very well indeed - architecture, wildlife and nature, simple record shots and macro.

The Leica DC lens is superb being very sharp at most apertures. Focusing is quick and accurate although sometimes it struggles a little if there’s a “busy” background. Exposure is also good but I’ve found that 1/3rd stop under exposure makes for richer colours; there’s a little too much noise at higher ISO ratings. I’m sure there’s a way round that! So far I’ve had to do very little post-processing and I’m very satisfied with the results particularly in mixed light situations.

The TZ-10 is now discontinued hence the bargain prices they were being sold for but if you’re considering a compact I can’t praise the Panasonic range highly enough - good quality, good value and great results. Several friends have Panasonic’s in one form or another and the images I’ve seen are very good indeed.

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The images were taken on two separate street photography trips to Liverpool using the TZ-10. The colour one is a panorama using two shots stitched together in Elements while the monochromes were processed using Silver EfexPro 2.

I'm Down on the Street

Having joined the Street Photography group on Fotoblur I thought I'd better get some street images together so I wandered around Liverpool city centre and captured these images. Two have been previously published on Fotoblur.

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*Out in the Street by Bruce Springsteen from the album 'The River'

See All the Colours Run*

Having a little time on my hands I decided to play about with the tulip image from Sunday's session and really go for the fine art look!

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Silver Efex Pro 2 took care of the monochrome conversion and I followed a tutorial in Scott Selby and Matt Kloskowski's book 'The Photoshop Elements Book for Digital Photographers' to make the card. I'm quite pleased with the results.


*The Painter's Link by Kate Bush from the album 'Aerial'

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.

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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!

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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'

Focus on Imaging

The annual photography trade show that is Focus on Imaging has come and gone for another year. I went along on Tuesday to a look round and to get one or two bits of new kit if the prices were right, and to chat the the manufactures, try their products and listen to some of the experts who give of their knowledge freely at various seminars.


Three seminars by eminent photographers were planned; the first, with David Clapp at Imagine Publishing's stand, was interesting and gave some new ideas for future pictures. Paul Gallagher gets a link from this blog (see the links on the right) so any chance to listen to him, see his work and listen to how he gets the effects in his wonderful monochrome landscapes is a must do. He didn't disappoint. Paul really does have a minimalist approach to image editing! After scanning large format negatives he sets about enhancing them with small selections using the lasso tool and curves in Photoshop. What he achieves is quite remarkable and, in his words, it's little more than dodging and burning he would do in the darkroom. Finally, and in a change to my programme, I sat in on a macro photography lecture from Heather Angel on the Nikon stand. Wow! What fabulous images and such simple techniques.


In between seminars I wandered about looking at new toys to add to the wish list, played with a few bits and bobs, made a few purchases and picked up a few freebies - calendars, pens and the like. 


I've been looking to get more into monochrome photography and had been looking at Niksoft's Silver Efex Pro, recently updated to version 2. Well, dear reader, I bought a copy and having only briefly played with it I can tell you that I'm very impressed with it. I've only tinkered with one picture so far, which is the bicycle picture from Bridlington posted a few entries back. I thought when I took the picture that it might make a good monochrome image and I'm not disappointed with the results. Only a tad of additional tinkering was made and the addition of Kodak's ISO32 Panatomic X emulsion, a lovely black and white film that I used in the past. Here's the updated picture:

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I'd appreciate any comments about which image readers might prefer.


All in all, a very good day out.

Storming North

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I grew up with steam trains... as a small boy my bedroom window overlooked a quite busy line and I was always fascinated by the sight and sound of a steam locomotive. In the late 1960's as the steam locomotive was phased out railway photography was radically changed from the sunlit front three-quarters view of a clean engine to a more realistic dirty, gritty, rainy one by the likes of Colin Gifford, Ian Krause and many others. They didn't go for pretty locations; the industrial north with its decaying buildings and lousy weather became the backdrop. And often the train was secondary to the location. I photographed many steam trains with my little Halina 120 camera during 1967 and to the end of July 1968. Sadly, the negatives were lost in various house moves.


Whenever it's possible I still get out and photograph steam trains. This is 71000 'Duke of Gloucester' at Coppenhall Moss just north of Crewe working very hard; I've treated this to a monochrome conversion, a severe crop and added some Giffordesque grain.


Two books that I can recommend are Gifford's 'Decline of Steam' and 'Each a Glimpse' and Ian Krause's 'Steam', which show how steam railway photography changed in the mid- to late-sixties.