Dark Beach Ride

July 3, 2008 | Category: Image Processing | 2 Comments

I managed to pick a great day for my day off; sunshine and bright blue skies were the order of the day so I decided to take a trip to the beach. I opted for somewhere I haven’t been before, Cleethorpes, and was pleasantly surpirsed by the large beach.

The first photo that I have processed from that day is quite a light, colourful image of a childrens ride. When I took it I had a light ND Grad filter and a polarising filter on the camera so the colours are quite vivid, but I want to try and capture something about the British seaside in the picture and my enduring memories from recent trips to British seaside towns is the contrast between the stunning views looking away from the town and the relatively run down, verging on seedy, nature of the town itself.

This is the original image:

In the final image I have only made two changes, besides sharpening it a little. The first is that I have cropped it to reduce the space above the ride to try and make it feel more enclosed. I could have cropped it more at the bottom to get this effect more pronounced but I wanted some of the shabbyness lower down and so made a compromise.

The second change is that I have duplicated the layer in Photoshop and used a multiply layer blend to make it darker and highlight the shabby areas a little bit more while keeping the colours vivid.

This is the final image.

I’m not sure I have achieved exactly what I wanted and I may well come back to this again in future.

A larger version of this is published on my photblog: www.arickmann.co.uk

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location, location, location

July 2, 2008 | Category: Preparation | Leave a Comment

I’ve been taking photos for fun for a couple of years now and I think the hardest part is trying to find new places to photograph.

It feels like I live in a difficult place for photography. The towns are, despite their history, pretty unremarkable, being mostly a cross between old industry or old agriculture and much of the countryside is barren moorland, so I will often try to pick somewhere to travel to.

The problem is that hitting up a place for the first time makes it difficult to find the photogenic parts of it and checking out flickr to find out what is interesting in the area might mean spending some time finding a feature only to repeat someone else photograph when you get there.

I started a website a little while back (photospots.co.uk) where photographers could add their own locations, and share them. It has been a success but hasn’t really helped me find anything new locally. I may be the only user in West Yorkshire.

Despite all this I do continue to find, and look for, interesting places to photograph locally. On Monday I revisited the Yorkshire Sculpture park which I haven’t been two for over a year, and yesterday I headed to the coast, to Cleethorpes, and I should have a few shots from these days up over the next week.

Do you have any tips on finding interesting sights to photograph?

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Dark Flower

June 29, 2008 | Category: Flower, Image Processing | Leave a Comment

The weather is pretty poor today so I am spending it indoors. I’ve gone back to the shots I took at Beaumont Park a few weeks back to see if there were any good shots I could use. I’ve found a flower picture that has some potential.

This is the original shot from the camera.

Raw Flower Shot

I’ve shot this in RAW using my Canon 400D so before getting to photoshop I can tweak the camera settings a little. I’ve chosen the maximum level of sharpening, moved it to Photoshop and cropped it.

The crop places the flower on the right hand third, using the rule of thirds and cuts off the bottom of the two leaves that point towards the base of the flower, both of which help to place the focus on the flower itself instead of the surroundings.

Cropped and Sharpened

From this point I have a few choices. I can boost the colours a little and just make it pleasant or I can go for something darker. I choose the latter. To do this I have duplicated the layer in Photoshop and applied it using a multiply layer filter.

Multiplied

Now I need to re-balance the colours and ligthen the flower itself. I’ve done this using two hue and saturation adjustment layers, and a curves adjustment layers using the settings shown below:

Finally, I have reduced the opacity on the multiply layer to get the right balance between darkness and colour:

My final image looks like this:

You can see the full size image at: http://www.arickmann.co.uk/2008/06/29/dark-flower/

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Why the new blog?

June 28, 2008 | Category: General | Leave a Comment

I’ve been taking photographs with interest now for about two years and I have a photoblog over at http://www.arickmann.co.uk, so why am I starting a new photography blog?

This blog will be a dissection of the techniques I use when I am taking my photographs.

I am by no means an expert; nor am I the type of photographer who has thousands of pounds worth of fancy gear and who spends all his time planning trips and every weekend waiting for the perfect sunset / sunrise etc, but I think there is room to examine the ideas behind photographs and how they got the way they are. This isn’t a masterclass but an honest account of arriving at a nice picture.

I will also include some pictures that just didn’t work out, because there are more of these than anything else and it is often the case that you compose an image using the well known principles and they just aren’t any good when you get them home.

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