Category: Technique
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#293 – Re-visiting photos 2
More reworked photos! These are from Edenwood Mill, which if still standing, must be a pile of soggy wood and rubble as it was in a right state back in 2008. This one hasn’t really benefitted much from the monochrome conversion compared to some, but the lens corrections have slightly improved things. The next…
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#292 – Re-visiting photos 1
I’m in the middle of putting some themed Blurb books together and went for a rummage round the darker recesses of my Lightroom catalogue. Lightroom is a great piece of software and I now tend to do much of my photo editing on it (apart form mono conversions and multi layer work), and it’s a vastly…
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#263 – Recommendation – DS Colour Labs
Given the cost of ink and decent Fotospeed paper, I tend to use my A3 printer sparingly and for applications where I need control over the end result such as for competition and exhibition work. For everything else I either get done at my local Tesco (6×4 prints) or Photobox (everything bigger). Recently though I…
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#202 – High Dynamic Range Photography – A Substitute For Creativity?
Astley Green Colliery Several years ago, I experimented with using Photomatix to produce High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. I reasoned that as a lot of the urbex pictures I was taking were in low light, then this would be the ideal tool to capture the full range of visual information, or something like that. However,…
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#201 – before and after – articulating your vision photographically
“It is impossible for a photographic print to duplicate the range of brightnesses (luminances) of most subjects, and thus photographs are to some degree interpretations of the original subject values. Much of the creativity of photography lies in the infinite range of choices open to the photographer between attempting a nearly literal representation of the…
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#176 – The Last Days Of Fernhurst Mill – DoF Tomfoolery
With the trespassing element of the visit complete, I thought I’d indulge in a bit of creative arty-fartyness. Nikon D700, 28-70mm, 1/1600 @F2.8
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#166 – pre-visualising an image
In the words of one of my personal heroes, don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? I’d been planning to go and have a look at the Duke Of Lancaster for ages as I had an image in my mind. And it was exactly like the one at the top of the post that you’ve…
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#165 – Square Format
While I’ve never shot a square format camera, I’ve found myself on a number of occasions recently, cropping to a square format. While of course this is retrospective re-composition, as opposed to deliberate in-camera composition, the square format is an interesting one that for some reason is difficult to use. Maybe it’s to do with…
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#143 – A Photo From Hans Steeneken
A great thing about having websites (and the internet in general now I think about it), is how information and people have become more accessible. I wrote a blog article a few months back on Hans Steenekens All Trains To Stop, and a few weeks late, Hans contacted me via my blog, and we have exchanged…
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#138 – Two Views
Despite sending in photos to the railway mags, I’ve never had any published. I presume it’s because they’re either too alternative (possible) or not good enough (probably more likely!). I’m not losing sleep over it, I don’t photograph with the intention of publication, I do it as I enjoy the challenge of doing something different.…
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#137 – how to create a Blurb photobook
Over the past couple of years, I’ve created a few photobooks using Blurb and have always been very happy with the service and the product. In addition, their Booksmart software has got better especially with the ability to customise the templates or even design your own. This has opened up a huge range of creative…
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#130 – People in railway photographs
The overwhelming majority of railway photographs tend to be of the hardware, but I find it just as interesting to take photographs of the people on the railway as well. This is a subject that is rarely covered by railway photographers, but why is that? I think people who are involved with the railways are often (but not always)…
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#125 – Tilted Compositions 2
Site of what was (I think) the Group 2 area of Royal Ordnance Chorley, now Buckshaw Village. It’s all been cleared and graded, this single lump of reinforced concrete is pretty much the only remnant of anything resembling structural engineering. From a photographic perspective, the tilted compositions hasn’t worked here – a super wide angle lens would have been…
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#119 – Tilted Compositions
I shared a draft of a book project with a friend of mine and she commented that she’d get rid of the photos with angled compositions. This intrigued me, as this is a composition that I often use, but on reflection, I can understand why some people don’t like it. Traditionally, it’s said that tilted…
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#107 – Developing A Style
I responded to a thread on the Talk Photography discussion forum about developing your on style of photography. I realised some time ago that shooting something that you are interested in, regularly, helps you to develop a style. While it’s not something that you can consciously do (really, as it’s something that evolves over time), here’s a…
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#94 – V for V-Bomber
Sometimes, you don’t need to see the whole of the subject in an image. I deliberately composed this picture like this as I felt it showed the most interesting bits of the aircraft (a Handley Page Victor at the Yorkshire Air Museum – I can highly recommend a visit!), and not show anything that distracted…
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#88 – LX-3 High Dynamic Mode – More Samples
Took these in Edinburgh at the weekend. Couldn’t be bothered lugging the D700 round all weekend, so took the Panasonic LX-3 as it’s far more portable. This was on the (former) Royal Yacht Brittania, and as it was late in the day, the sun was quite low in the sky. The sun was kinda hazy,…
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#81 – White Balance Nightmare!!
I’d only had the camera a few weeks when I took this, so I suppose that’s my excuse for not fathoming out how to take a manual white balance for this scene. In actual fact, i struggle the whole night with the sodium vapour lighting, but for the most part I was able to correct it in…
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#49 – The Art of Cropping
I was one told that a good way of deciding how and where to crop was to cover up the bits you wanted to keep and just look at the bits you want to crop. If they contained nothing of interest, or didn’t add anything to the image, then cut them off. With that in…
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#47 – Panasonic LX3 High Dynamic Mode Part 1
I’ve barely used my LX-3 since I bought it in October, but there again I’ve done virtually no photography whatsoever since then for that matter! A trip over to Teeside to photograph the industrial landscape seemed like a good opportunity to dust it off and explore a little more of what it can do. One of…
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#42 – The Life Formula For Visual Variety In The Photo Essay
I can’t remember where I got this from. For a typical assignment at the old Life magazine, the editors expected the photographer on location to shoot at least eight basic types of photos to ensure complete coverage of the situation and to guarantee enough good pictures for a layout. 1] Introductory or overall – usually…
Mechanical Landscapes 