The Far End of Central

The success of my previous attempt with more aggressive HDR and post-processing drew some very nice feedback. This shot isn't as strong as that one for a number of reasons (composition isn't as strong, shot isn't as crisp- I blame HK's air quality- and the lights on the right hand side of the shot bleed too much; whatever effects I apply makes the left hand side of the shot look better but the right side look worse) but the positive comments have encouraged me to experiment and be bolder with more extreme techniques whereas previously I tended to tried to treat these with a lighter touch. This result is passable, I feel. I'll keep on experimenting with it.

Cat

I'm looking after a friend's cat for a while. She proves to be an entertaining portrait subject.

Flickr has stated that it's going to be undergoing some pretty major changes, including discontinuing built-in editing via Picnik (which is now owned by Google, as opposed to Yahoo's Flickr). I've got pretty used to being able to make little tweaks post-upload (contrast with me borderline anti-post-processing entries earlier in this blog) so depending on what they replace it with may determine whether I stay with the service at all, or whether I just bite the bullet and take up something like Photoshop to handle post-processing. Picknik disappears around mid-April, we'll see what happens then.

Trimming the fat

I had a clean up of my Flickr account which had exceeded 800 items. There's no way that I've taken 800 photos good enough to showcase in public so I cropped around 100 from that number with more work to do. What I found was that the vast majority of the cull came from my earlier photos. Hopefully that's a sign that I'm improving and the standard of more recent efforts is superior.

As a case in point, here's another HDR attempt from the recent Tokyo trip. New Year is a big event for Japan and tied to the native shinto religion. Senso-ji, the 2nd largest shinto shrine in the capital, therefore, was crowded such that police were deployed to direct the crowds. This makes photography awkward, especially when you're outside of said crowds but I still managed to get this HDR shot with passable composition by shooting over them.

The view from my window

Just some continued experiments in HDR. This was sunrise as seen from my living room. Again, the colours resulting from the preset are both garish and washy. I've been playing around with the settings and have created a version that more... realistic in terms of palette. I'll upload that for comparison purposes soon, perhaps. Also, thanks to all of you who've been complimentary about my recent photos, either on FB or through other media.

Tokyo Triptych

Three more photos from Tokyo. I think the richness of colours brings the three of them together nicely a as a rough triptych.

Tokyo HDR

I had a last-minute trip to Tokyo for the New Year and this allowed me to try out my urban HDR a little bit more. While this photo is easily one of the best I've ever taken, clearly I've still got a lot to learn about HDR software and technique, specifically the fact that I seem to have lost all the 'true' blacks from the shot, giving it a slightly washed-out feel.

Christmas party

My work Christmas party was on Friday and I think the unspoken understanding was that I would be taking photos. This is more than fine by me as it gives me a license to both take sneaky candid shots and also pester people to pose for me. Additionally, I've had a couple of drinks so don't mind pestering people and they've had a couple of drinks so they're more amenable to having their photos taken than usual. The party itself was very pleasant and was fancy dress so there were some good costumes on display. Admittedly the majority of photos were more of the Facebook 'Woooo, look at us having a crazy old time' style but I did get some nice portraits out of it, both candid and posed.

Sadly the batteries for my flash gave out part way through the night (lesson learned there) and the club we moved onto later wouldn't let me use my camera there but still, practice and some good photos. A net win.

Self portrait

I'd been taking more portraits of people at work and, being in a portraiting mood, took one of myself when I got home. It's probably one of the better of me and one of only two that features my Movember moustache. As I've mentioned before, I'm pleased with the portraits I've produced from a crispness and subject POV, I think next I need to work on varying composition and pose.

Movember

As you may or may not have been aware, last month was Movember and many of the men in my office grew moustaches for the occasion. Not only did we raise £1,400 for the charity but I got to photograph the results. I found this was a really difficuly shot to take; poorly lit corridor, large group and a single flash. Yeah, the composition could be better too; I should have told the guys to spread out a bit more since I was using my wide-angle lens (that shot's cropped quite a bit) but that would only have exascerbated the lighting issue really. Anyway, any suggestions as to how to best light a scene such as this with a single flash?

HDR - 1st attempt

Apologies for the delay since the last update; sorting out the huge volume of photos from Hong Kong took far longer than expected. The above photo is one of the reasons why- I had my first attempt at HDR photography while in HK and then had to find and learn how to use (i.e. play around with) some software when I got back. Here's one of the better shots. As a friend pointed out, the composition could be better (I'm blaming lack of tripod at the time) but I think the HDR aspect of it has come through quite well.