Crêpes Salées

As an Englishman, yesterday marked the highlight of the annual calendar with the arrival of Pancake Day. I divulge from many of my countrymen at this point, preferring a more savoury option. This, depending on your interpretation, might actually make the above a crêpe salées since it's filled with bacon, cheese and spinach. In any case, it's likely the most succesful food photo I've ever taken.

Technicolour bridge

Just a bit more HDR experimentation. This bridge is, well, colourful. It comes from the same location as the previous entry and, being shot close up, likewise escaped the fog that plagued the rest of the shoot.

The Lowry Theatre

Another unreal landscape from my native city (well okay, it's from our sister city over the water but that's kind of a semantics thing as far as I'm concerned). I went to a show here last night, arrived early and took some shots while I waited. Again, forgot the lens hood and didn't bring the tripod and the area was blanketed with fog (not, it turns out, good HDR material) but I still managed to get this shot, easily the best of the bunch. The lights in the bottom left of the frame bother me a lot since they really distract from the main focus of the picture. The vignette effect helped to mute them a bit but I couldn't eclipse them without compromising the composition. Even so, I'm happy with the shot overall, especially after my usual less than subtle post-processing effects.

Time well spent?

Encouraged by recent HDR successes, I took the scenic route home after work (having taken my tripod along) and tried to recreate early token HDR experimentation more seriously. The temperature is below 0 here at the moment and I couldn't feel my fingers by the time I got home. The tripod did its job but I got the photos onto my computer to find that the exposures (a number of them long, since this was after dark) all had massive streaks, specs, smears etc. from crap on my lens. Lesson learned: invest in a lens brush and look after your kit.

The other factor that makes the shots difficult is that I was in the city using my 11mm Tokina lens and the sheer number of lights in the location combined with the all-seeing lens made it very difficult to avoid profound lens flare. The lens hood may have helped to some degree on a few of the shots so I'll remember to take it with me next time.

So there we go: an evening of disappointing photos but lessons learned.

My basic HDR process

Following on from my last entry, I thought I'd give a little insight on the comparatively basic process I use in creating images such as the one I posted.


So this is the raw image that my camera took, having assessed the light in the scene etc.


This is the HDR image having mixed in one overexposed and one underexposed shot (D7000 only supports 3-step autobracketing).


...and this is the image after further post-processing. A little sharpening, exposure/contrast and filters and you get this less-than-subtle fantasy skyline.

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.