Pole Star Photography

Antony Gormley – Another Place

Chris — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:27:28 +0000

On Friday, Kim and I managed to get a break in the weeks of rain we seem to be having at the moment to spend a few hours at Antony Gormley’s Another Place. Another Place is a stretch of beach at Crosby on Merseyside where Gormley “harnesses the ebb and flow of the tide to explore man’s relationship with nature”. He’s done this by placing 100 figures, based on casts of himself, across a long section of the beach. The location we chose is very close to the (free) parking at Crosby’s leisure centre.

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The first shot below was looking east, back towards Liverpool. You can see that the sculpture is on a raised plinth. These are actually 3 metres tall to help stabilise the sculptures. In some cases they are visible above the sand whereas for others the sculptures themselves have become partially buried in the sand. The idea behind this first shot was to try and place the sculptures in their overall industrial context. In the background are windfarms and the start of what is left of Liverpool’s docks. From what I could tell though, none of the sculpture actually face this way. They all face either across the Mersey or out to sea.

This second image is taken from behind one of the sculptures, looking across the Mersey to the Welsh mountains in the background. As with most of these images, it’s an HDR shot comprised of 4 very long exposure originals. Apart from trying to illustrate the emptiness perhaps Gormley was trying to achieve, I also tried to connect this figure to the mountains by placing its head into a dip in the ridge line. The positioning isn’t quite what I hoped for though because its head is slightly too high in the frame. Raising my camera position may have worked better.

Although the small pool of water tries to balance the left side of the image above, I felt that the image may work better by giving more space to the right. The image below is my attempt at this. In this case the figure is viewing a natural and manmade world, with mountains on the left and a windfarm on the horizon to the right.

The sun was starting to break through a strip of sky on the western horizon giving it was orange cast. I liked the way this contrasted with the heavy blue of the clouds. This next image places a line of figures leading out towards the sun, with the windfarm balancing on the left.

This final image again looks at the emptiness of the scene, returning to the figure used in images two and three, but in this case balanced by an outflow pipe and its warning marker.

All images where taken with a Canon 5D Mk II and tripod. A Lee Big Stopper was used for the long exposures along with a hard grad filter to balance the sky and land. For some of these images (and some that aren’t in this post), I also shot tethered to allow live-view on a small laptop computer.

How Many Megapixels Are Enough?

Chris — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:59:20 +0000

Scott Bourne over at Photofocus is currently (12 Feb 2012) running a poll asking how many megapixels is enough. This is being asked after the announcement of Nikon’s D800. Here’s the link if you want to vote: http://photofocus.com/2012/02/12/how-many-pixels-do-we-need/

I voted for 30+. In fact I’d go as far as to say the you can’t have enough megapixels (assuming quality remains high and you don’t go beyond what you lens can resolve). 100 megapixels, 1000 megapixels may wel come. I doubt they’ll be what is currently called full frame which after all is a strange measure because it refers to an old 35mm film standard. Chances they’ll be much larger than 35mm film and may get round the whole lens issue by having micro lenses embedded into the chips themselves. Perhaps not too, but I look forward to finding out!

So why do I want more megapixels? It’s quite simple. It gives you flexibility to recompose in post processing. I see a composition and take a picture. Quite often, when I have the photo in Lightroom or Photoshop I’ll see lots of options I didn’t notice at the time. The more megapixels I have the more options I have to realise those photos at an acceptable resolution.

Easy Way Of Getting Control Of The Images in a WordPress Gallery

Chris — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 19:58:33 +0000

WordPress has a built-in media library management system with the ability to display photographs in a tabular gallery style. The images themselves are all associated with a particular page or post. For a simple blogging site this is fine, but for me this presents two problems:

I have lots of photos that I want to present in many different galleries.
I don’t want to have to load them separately into each page that is displaying the gallery

There are several great gallery add-ons for WordPress which help address these issues as well as providing many additional photo management features. Although I’ve used a few of them in the past, part of my approach to my new site design is to use out of the box functionality wherever possible; In particular for image management.

So I needed a simple way of putting a gallery on a page and then being able to easily choose images from anywhere on my site. The approach I’m going to outline is not for the serious WordPress developer because it does not follow good WordPress coding standards. But, it easy to use and easy for somebody with a blog but no real html/php experience.

The first step in the process was to place a standard WordPress gallery on a page (left in draft mode for the whole of this exercise). This was done so that I could copy its html and styles.

I then deleted the standard gallery and switched the page view into html mode and pasted the copied html and styles into the post/page at the place I wanted it to appear. The gallery is now back, but crucially, because the gallery is now just html & styles, I can treat the images just like any other image inserted into a post. So I can select them individually, edit them or select new ones from anywhere else in the site.

So far so good.

The only real issue I bumped into was that the gallery didn’t layout quite as I wanted. The (non-technical) reason for this is that WordPress takes over the text you type in (even in html mode) and manipulates it so that it is suitable for a blog post. For the most part this is fine and works well. But in my case the translation breaks the gallery layout because of the way it treats newlines (
in html).

I gave up looking for a solution after some Googling and decided to fix it myself. Basically wherever one of the broken
tags appear in the gallery, I replaced it with my WordPress safe
. The approach I used to sod this was to create a WordPress short code that bypasses WordPress’s tag manipulated. So, the general structure becomes:

A line of gallery images
One or two of my
short codes
A line of gallery images
One or two of my
short codes
etc…

Anyway, by way of example, this is the “code” to insert into the post/page’s html view to get a 4 column gallery:


Seascapes

Infrared

Black & White

Mountains
[[br style='clear:both;']]


Long Exposure

Toned

BBC
BBC
[[br style='clear:both;']][[br style='clear:both;']]

The “br style=’clear:both;’” in square brackets is my short code that bypasses WordPress’s translation routine and outputs the correct newline (break in html). The code for this is:

function apBR_ShortCode( $atts, $content = null ) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		"style" => 'clear:both;'
	), $atts));

	return $content . '
';
}
add_shortcode('br', 'apBR_ShortCode');

This needs to be placed in your functions.php file. You can easily paste this in by going to the Appearance Menu, then choosing Editor. On the edit page choose the functions.php (depending on your version of WordPress it may be titled “Theme Functions”). Paste the short code code at the end of the file and press the “Update File” button.

And that’s it! You now have a four column gallery that you have control over. The above technique allows one gallery per page, but I’ll blog later about the (easy) extension you need to allow multiple galleries on a page.

Why Are Wedding Photographers “So” Expensive?

Chris — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:59:07 +0000

A wedding photographer in the USA (Nikki Wagner) has posted a very well written argument explaining why wedding photographers are “so” expensive. Her post was written in a response to a bride-to-be in the Seattle area complaining about photography charges.

The crux of her argument is that many people, perhaps the majority of people, fail to recognise that professional photographers either work for a company or are operating their own company. You may only appear to turn up at a shoot (or wedding) with “only a camera and some lenses”, but when you operate a business you have inevitable overheads. These have to be paid for, and as with any viable business it’s the clients/customers that pay.

Anyway, both complaint and response are recommended reads, whether you are a wedding or any other professional photographer:

Complaint: http://files.petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2012/01/craigslist.html
Nikki’s response: http://www.petapixel.com/2012/01/26/why-wedding-photographers-prices-are-wack/

Video of a DLSR Mirror and Sensor Curtain In Action

Chris — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:36:31 +0000

The video above is a high speed capture of a DSLR’s (Canon 60D) mirror and curtain operation. So, if you’ve ever wondered what happens mechanically inside your camera when you press the shutter button check it out.

Going back to previous posts about mirrors in DSLRs (here and here), it’s interesting to see how much the mirror and curtains bounce around!

(via DIY Photography)

Becoming Emotionally Attached To A Photograph

Chris — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:16:08 +0000

An East Coast Beach With Moon

Now that I’ve redesigned my website I’ve started to go back through my (digital) photo catalogue to create some new galleries. The image to the right is one of my 300D shots from 2004 (iso 400, f11, 1/320s). This is an image I keep returning to time and again. Each time I try a little change here and a little change there. I try editing in Lightroom, Aperture and Photoshop. I try colour and black and white and, in this version, a blue & sepia split tone.

I think on any objective assessment I’m wasting my time with this image. Let’s face it, it’s not that good. It has some interesting features, such as the groyne leading out to sea, a pretty much full moon and the groyne and moon sort of balancing each other in the frame. But, in reality, there’s too much lost space in the middle, the moon is too far into the corner, the beach & sea too close to the bottom, the foreground is too dark (pushed in this version creating artefacts), the focus isn’t sharp and the overall image is flat and grainy. Oh, and I don’t even know where it was taken. It’s somewhere on England’s east coast, probably between Scarborough and Skegness.

So why do I keep going back to it, when in reality I know I’m not going to be able to turn it into a picture I’m proud of. I think it’s because, despite all it’s short comings, I do have an emotional attachment to it. In this case it has nothing to do with the trip I was on or the circumstances at the time. No, in this case it is because it was the first opportunity I had with my first digital SLR to take more than a snap. I saw the moon, saw the lead ins, tried to compose for the scene’s obvious potential and took a few shots. Could it have been done better? Yes, absolutely, although I suspect this was as good as it got for me at the time. And that’s just it, regardless of where I feel my photography is now, I’m proud of this image, warts and all, and I’m sure I’ll keep going back to it!

Early HDR Photos at Holy Island

Chris — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:34:40 +0000

This is the first article in a occasional series I’ll be running looking at some of my early attempts at various photographic techniques. In September 2005 Kim & I were at one of our favourite photo locations, England’s north east coast (the bit between north Newcastle and the Scottish border).

The image below (Canon 300D, ISO100, 32mm, 1/6s, f29) is a shot of one of the old fishing boats on Holy Island with Lindisfarne Castle in the background. There are several in this harbour in various states of disrepair. I was quite close to the boat when I took the shot so even at f29 the immediate foreground and background are not in focus. These are aren’t the only technical failings either I’m sure you’ll agree!

Boat on Holy Island - Original

But, even though it had plenty of technical issues I still quite liked the shot, so I decided to post-process it using an HDR technique, using Photomatix. I’d not set out with this intention so I didn’t have multiple actual exposures to play with so I created -1 and +1 stop virtual images in Lightroom and used these for the HDR image.

Boat on Holy Island - HDR

The processing has had a noticeable effect to:

deepened the blue (unrealistically) in the sky and bringing out some of the faint cloud structure
increase the local contrast to give certain areas more definition, eg on the water and around the flowers
increase brightness in the shadow areas of the boat and shaded grass

Looking back now I think I over-processed the image. It suffers from banding and quite serious halo effects. Also, it’s getting to the point of looking quite artificial, almost like painting. At the time though it did leave me impressed with the possibilities that HDR offered and what could be achieved with practise and more attention to detail.

Fujifilm X-Pro1

Chris — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:07:38 +0000

Earlier in the week I commented on mirrors in the current crop of professional cameras and how I see them as a connection with the past rather than the future.

Well, CES 2012 is here and the mirror-less market just seems to keep getting more interesting. Much has already been written about the previously announced Sony NEX-7 (see here if you want an overview), but the big news (for me) at CES was the Fujifilm X-Pro1.

Apart from the X-Pro1 looking great, it also has some interesting features:

Large (APS-C) 16MP CMOS sensor
No low pass filter, but a sensor structure that tries to achieve the same aim. Nett effect that it will hopefully improve image quality
A viewfinder that you can switch between electronic and optical modes without taking it from your eye
Support to be provided for (Leica) M-Mount lenses

DP Review have a preview on their site, but I’ll be looking forward to knowing what the actual image quality and shutter lag is like. If they get these right at a reasonable price I think Nikon and Canon may have to up their game a little!

Buachaille Etive Mor At Night

Chris — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:51:51 +0000

For those of you that haven’t been, Rannoch Moor is a fantastic photography location; if the weather is on your side of course, this is western Scotland after all! In the east there are picturesque small lochs, in the centre an open expanse of “wilderness” and in the west the mountains that surround Glen Coe. At this edge of moor, towering over entrance to Glen Coe, is Buachaille Etive Mor.

Kim and I spent a few days based in Glen Coe in Feb of 2010. The images below are a small selection of night exposures taken in the shadow of the Bauchaille.

The first image was taken from a small lay-by at the side of the Glen Etive road, looking west towards the iconic face of Buachaille Etive Mor. It had snowed quite recently and the road was only really passible with a 4×4, which lucky we were driving. The image is a 10 second exposure at f10, taken after sunset at about 18:30, on a 5D Mk I. It was pretty cold that night with quite a bit of cloud and wind. Much of the evening was spent clearing ice off our lens and warming batteries up to get a few more minutes of life out of them!

Buachaille Etive Mor 1

The next image was taken a few days later, a little further down the Glen Etive road. There is a small bridge with a parking spot next to it. From there follow the river west for the best vantage points. It was taken on Kim’s infrared converted 20D and then converted to black & white. It’s a 342 second exposure at f10. As you can see from the foreground, we weren’t the first people there after the snow fall.

Buachaille Etive Mor 2

The third and final image in this set was taken at roughly the same spot as the second, but this time facing away from the Buachaille towards Sron na Creise. I used Kim’s 20D again for this 600 second f10 shot. It’s been quite harshly post processed to give it what I hope is an aged look. I’ve tried to add to this with a bit of toning.

Sron na Creise

Funny Video For New Beauty Product – Fotoshop by Adobé

Chris — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:55:44 +0000

This video made me smile. If it was true, Adobé would make a fortune!

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.