A bit of a gap

There appears to be a bit of a gap between my posting on the web galleries and the final assignment, I have used this time to research my ideas on tattoos and start the process of 'asking' people if I could photograph them, although most people were happy to help they weren't always willing to have their faces on show, mostly as they aren't comfortable in front of the camera. I hope I was able to help them realise its possible to be photographed and still be relaxed.

Project: A Web Gallery

This project is all about creating a web gallery regardless of whether I want to physically create one at this stage, or just do some research about the sort of gallery I would like, and by looking at other photographers sites things that I might want to differently.

I have just set up a web gallery and although it is still very much in its infancy it has been interesting to get other peoples feedback on it.Http://pdphotography.zenfolio.com.

The feedback I have had so far has been encouraging, I  have asked family and friends to look at the site and let me know how easy it is to navigate, at the moment there appears to be no problems. The black surround has been well received particularly for black and white and the vintage work. I opted to have a series of thumb nails for views to easily locate a photograph they may want to view in more detail.

I had been thinking about setting up a gallery for some time I had the usual face book page and flickr accounts but wanted something a bit more professional. Originally I had been planning to use a word press site, but was advised by a fellow camera club member who also happened to be in computing to look at a couple of sites that are set up with photographers in mind. I looked at smugmug and zenfolio and decided to use zenfolio partly because it seemed fairly straight forward and also he used the same host so would be able to offer any help I needed getting things set up.

I started to look at other photographers websites including the one of the photographer who helped me with mine http://ibimages.zenfolio.com and realised that I wanted something that was easy for me to use, but also easy for people to navigate round without having too many steps to get to the pages they wanted to see.

I also looked at professional photographers working in the same location as me, partly because they may well be my competition in the future, therefore I wanted to see how their websites looked and how easy they were to navigate. I singled out two in particular.

 Melvin Sillcock is a Sittingbourne based photographer who covers a wide range of subjects including portraiture and baby photography the areas I am most interested in working in. I liked his site, I found it very easy to use, the background colours worked well with the photographs and it flowed well.www.melvinsillcockphotography.co.uk

The brown shades of the side panels compliment the earth tones in the photograph, this theme is reproduced through out the site, which also uses a slide show to show case his work.


The second photographer I chose is also Sittingbourne based but this time is a female photographer.
Joanne Collins again covers a variety of subjects. I found her site easy to use she had a bio on the first page which I found slightly off putting and would rather have seen more of her work with  the bio available as a page I could view if I wished to. I also found that although the site was easy to use it wasn't easy to view a good selection of her work sometimes I could only view one or two photographs. www.joannecollins.co.uk.

Above is a screen shot of Joanne's websites home page I just found it a bit too 'busy' with too much information on the home page.

Part Five: The Final image: Sharpening

Well I have arrived at the final part of this course and this time its all about the finishing:  I need to look at sharpening to begin with, and having read the information on sharpening and why we do it in The Digital SLR Handbook by Michael Freeman (further details are in my reading list) I feel I am read to start.

When I started reading I found it interesting that it can be better to 'un sharpen' than to 'sharpen', this goes back to film days. Sharpening is a subjective impression and how much a photograph is sharpened can depend on the person doing the sharpening and personal preference. This should also be the last action you perform on an image before it is printed, used digitally etc. There are three standard settings used in the un sharpen process, radius: the distance around the pixels to calculate the sharpening process, the amount: it is not unusual for this to be between 150 and 200% and finally the threshold: This is used to prevent sharpening where the difference between pixel values is small.

I need to use an image that has been processed as a standard reference, but there must be no sharpening applied to this one.  I then need to make a further three versions applying more sharpening each time, the strongest should be noticeably sharper.
I had just done a photo shoot with a rockabilly model and thought that the photograph would work well for this exercise.
Below is the original photograph and then the following three show various degrees of sharpening, this might not be as obvious on the smaller size photographs displayed on here so I will write about my findings in more detail below.

 I took the first photograph and looking at it on my desk next to the computer screen with the on screen image at 100% and started to look for details, the first thing I noticed was there was little definition to the shape of the lips this was particularly noticeable when viewed through the magnifying glass or on screen at 100% , I must admit I was quite surprised by this.

On photograph one I just altered the levels slightly but other than that I didn't do any other alterations.
For the following three photographs I used the same method but in varying degrees,

Photograph two I used the un sharp mask and adjusted the amount to 58%, the radius to 1.4 pixels and the threshold amount to 14.
Having made just small adjustments I thought it would be interesting to see if there was any difference to the prints in particular. This time I could start to see a bit of definition coming to the eyes and lips this is also  noticeable on the models eyeliner.

Photograph three and this time I applied a bit more sharpening, again I used the un sharp mask and adjusted the amount to 76% the radius to 2.0 pixels and the threshold to 30 levels. This time there is quite a noticeable difference between the unsharpened photograph and this one, I looked closely not only at the eyes and lips but I could also see how fine lines and the creases around her nose start to be more pronounced in this photograph, this didn't look so bad on the printed one. By now I am really interested to see the results of the final amount of sharpening has done.

Photograph four and the adjustments are as follows: amount 118% the radius 5 pixels and the threshold 81 levels, now you can really see the difference between the unsharpened image and this one. There is a real sharpness to the final image its almost hard in places and really shows up any fine lines or creases to the skin. This didn't seem to be noticeable on the on screen image which surprised me and I kept going backwards and forwards to be sure, as this is different from the results on photograph three.

I now have to chose which amount of sharpening I prefer, I discounted images one and two almost immediately as neither of these showed the shapes of my models features, and as she is partly Malaysian I considered it important to show that off particularly in the shape of her eyes. I also think the amount of sharpening depends on how large and image you require as the final product.
 Images three and four are left and I must admit it has been difficult to decided between the two of them, although I think image four is slightly over sharpened, I almost prefer the shape of her lips, but the eyes are too hard, however if I was having this as a large print this would be the one I would go with.  I have decided to walk away from the images for a few minutes and then view them again with fresh eyes. I ended up walking away for nearly an hour and having viewed the two photographs again I have finally decided on photograph three, I think overall this has just the right amount of sharpening, her features are clear but not harsh there is still some softness to her face and is more true to life.



I have been reading back over my notes and decided to try amount 200%  radius 2 pixels and 68 threshold but this was much too harsh on her features.

Sharpening isn't something that I have done a lot of previously but I can now see how the correct amount of it can make a difference to a photography and I will make it the final step when processing images in future.

Exercise: Alteration

The final exercise of this section is called alteration, this time I need to make a deliberate alteration and in fact I need to 'remove' someone from a photograph.

for this exercise I needed to use tools from photoshop and I chose to use the clone stamp and also cutting and pasting of some areas.

 Above is the original photograph, I took this a while ago but I wanted to see what it would be like if I removed the person from it, and whether it might work as a background for writing.

Here I have started the removal process, I have cloned the water and I used the copy and paste to start on her legs and body. I found that the best think to do was make each area I wanted to work on about 75% larger so I could make sure I included all the details.  Problems occurred when using the cloning tool, if I strayed too far from an area therefore bringing other factors into the picture. An example of this would be rocks in the water when working on the head area rather than just water.

The finished result, I found it quite interesting using the copy and paste for the rocks I wanted to try and make them look as if they had always been there but also to have a slight variety, in the hope that anyone seeing this photograph for the first time might think it had been taken like that.  I feel that this photograph worked quite well and could be used as advertising as there is plenty of free space now to write on, it would also be possible to write over the rock area.

Exercise: Addition

For this exercise I need to add something to the photograph, in this instance it is a new sky, basically the idea is for me to take two photographs one exposed for the sky with nice clouds and not just a plain blue sky and the second exposed for the rest of the photograph. But... the weather which seems to have a common thread through this blog is once again not being kind to me and rather than wait for a cloudy day I am planning on going back through my photographs and finding a couple that I can use for the same sort of effect.

The three photographs I have decided to use are of Leeds Castle in Kent. This beautiful castle is a joy to photograph if the conditions are good, which on the day we chose were not ideal.  My first attempt will be made using photographs one and three, the third photograph was taken with a blue filter on it, as at the time of taking these photographs we hadn't done a lot of work on exposure of different parts of the photograph.

From the top I have combined the two photographs then gone into layers and multiply I then used a mask to mask the bottom of the photograph as I didn't want any changes to that part I then erased the over exposed sky.

I had two attempts at this and prefer the darker photograph.  I did have trouble trying to get the photographs lined up and used the transform tool to try to achieve the correct placement, this resulted in me having to apply a small amount of cropping.

I have just realised that I have shown the finished photograph and although I have shown the various steps I didn't show the sky erased and the photograph flattened and the same with the main body of the photograph, however I think the end result will be very similar.

This post production work could be said to be legitimate as sometimes the weather is not favourable to both land and sky and it is necessary to do this to achieve the correct exposure.

I have been looking through both the course notes and playing around in elements and have found photo merge, this is not something I have ever tried before, but over all I think the effect has worked quite well.

The two photographs with the area masked off and then shown on the second photograph.Below is how it started.

 

The next set shows the area I wanted to use.

 

 

The final photograph.

For the second part of this exercise I need to change a sky completely, this I think is pushing the limits, I do accept that this is a personal preference and there are people that are more than happy to change sky's as a bare minimum. I did in fact go to a wedding a few years ago where the bride and groom were told in advance that the sky's in their photographs would all be changed. 

 

for this I decided to try something a bit more extreme, I had a photograph of Reculver castle with is basically a front wall with some bits of wall and add a sunrise to it.

These were the two original photographs as you can see the sky was completed blank and I felt the castle needed something a bit more dramatic in keeping with its origins.

This is the finished photograph I have cropped a bit of the fore ground out as I considered it to be surplus to requirements.

I blended the photographs together then using the multiply layer I then erased the parts I didn't require.

Exercise:Enhancment

For this exercise I need to enhance a photograph, as this needs to be a head and shoulder shot I took advantage of taking this one at the same time as the previous exercise. My husband as very piercing eyes at times and I wanted to see how the enhancements would work on him.

This is the starting point all I have done is crop it slightly and adjust the clarity slider.

I then masked off the area I didn't want to adjust using the quick selection mask set at 50%  hardness, and then increased the brightness and contrast on his face.

I then went on to use a quick selection tool to draw round the iris and pupils of both eyes before adjusting the saturation and brightness of his eyes. 

Finally I adjusted the hue of his eyes, In doing so I changed the colour of his eyes from blue to green, I felt that that changing the colour of his eyes was a step too far and that reality had been tampered with, I think to enhance the eye colour if fine but to change the colour completely is wrong.

The photograph above it the finished article after the saturation adjustment has been done.
The photograph below is the finished article after the hue adjustment has been done.

I will let readers of this blog decide which they like best.



Now may be the best time to talk about the ethics of enhancing photographs in particular the enhancements of famous people that are done by the press, and the pressure it puts on normal people to look like that.  In particular when people are made to look a lot slimmer than they are, or they have their waists made smaller and their chests larger young girls are very prone to believing what they see in the press is real and they think if they were slimmer prettier taller etc they would be happier. People are slowly realising that the images are not real and in fact some celebrities are now saying no air brushing, something I applaud them for doing. hopefully this may also help reduce the amount of anorexia in young people.  About a year or so ago there was a programme on the TV with Gok Wan the well known stylist, he produced a series of three programmes with young people about making them feel normal, in the one a young girl was staving herself almost to death to look like the photographs of models she saw in magazines, to begin with he couldn't make her see the photographs were 'fake' and that no one really looked like that, in the end he took her to a model shoot where she met a model and watched her being photographed and then saw the photographs after they had been 'enhanced', when she saw the difference she finally started to see how people are 'dupped' ,that programme may well have saved her life.

As I said earlier there is nothing wrong with a small amount of air brushing for want of a better word, but this really should be limited in its use, to maybe the removal of blemishes and the like.

Exercise: Improvement or Interpretation.

This is all about taking a photograph and making 'improvements' to it.
These can take the shape of several things but the main objective of this exercise is to take a portrait style photograph and select the person from the setting and make them 'stand out'.

Having bribed hubby again I set about taking a photograph in the shade, when I was reasonably happy with the photograph I started the processing. firstly I cropped it in camera raw as I didn't want the top of the fence with wires showing, I then adjusted the clarity slider before opening the photograph in camera raw. I then used the quick selection tool to 'draw around' him and then used colour curves to make my adjustments.

Above is the screen print showing the adjustments made by me.  As you will be able to see I didn't make a huge change to the photograph, one thing for me to remember for next time is no check shirts as it flares, this is something I am normally aware of I don't really know why I forgot this time.

Above is the final photograph I am not 100% happy with this as I think there has been a bit of adjustment to the rest of the photograph which I didn't want.

As this exercise is about 'improvement' I think it is important to make some adjustments but not too many, there are many arguments for and against adjustments I think I will follow the exercises and see how my feeling change as they progress.  e. I have been asked to say how far I would go in making adjustments, my answer to this would be remove any noticeable blemishes, maybe brighten the eyes or smooth out the skin I would not however be happy altering body shapes.At the moment I believe in keeping images as close to the original object, person or what ever without loosing sight of the 'clients' wishes if there is one.

Exercise: correction.

For this exercise I need to have two images one with dust spots on and one with lens flare, easy to find images with dust spots on from my collection I thought as I had a problem with dust on my sensor for a couple of months before finally resolving it. However finding a photograph to actually include was harder than I thought finally though I chose one.

Above is the image I chose this is Baltimore harbour and I took it last year whilst out there for a family wedding, I have circled a dust spot.
Below is the 'corrected' version I have scrolled the image to 100% and removed the dust spot using the spot removal tool and making sure proximity match was ticked. Interestingly I also found a couple of other small dust spots that I hadn't seen on the original image so I removed those, then adjusted the levels and contrast sliders.

This image looks more like I remember the day to be with a blue sky and the buildings standing out against it. further adjustments I could make would include cropping the photograph to remove the top of the light at the bottom right hand side.

In answer to the question should dust spots be removed? I would say yes if they spoil the photograph , sometimes dust spots look like a greasy mark and I think most people would agree these should be removed. On the other side of the argument I would say that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between marks that could be birds in the sky at a distance and dust spots in which case I would leave them alone.

The second part of this exercise is to do with lens flare, these are far more difficult to resolve and having searched through my photographs I think I have found a suitable one to work on.

I have chosen to use this photograph I took of some poppies, you can see the lens flare marked in the area out lined in black.

I am hoping that I will be able to 'clone' the lens flare to remove it and allow it to blend in with the greenery in the background.

The photograph I chose had highlight clipping warning on when I opened it in camera raw therefore I firstly adjusted these before continuing.
I used the darker green area to clone from for most of the photograph but I also used the blue of the sky in a couple of places too. I found that by zooming to 50 % I could see the areas that needed to be cloned.

Do I think this exercise was justified? For the above photograph probably not as I think the lens flare adds a slight artistic flare and that by cloning the 'flare out' the photograph has lost something and looks almost flat this time. Having said that I am sure that this exercise could be justified on other occasions, I think it comes down to the individual and what effect they are looking for.

Part four Reality and Intervention.

This part is all about the 'truth' of photography, how much of the work done to an image afterwards is acceptable and how far is too far.

It could be argued that the photographer should get it right in camera and not have to do any 'work' to the image afterwards but as most of us are aware this work is nothing new and a lot of the adjustments made to digital images started life in the dark room.


It would be very easy to get into various moral debates at this point one of the most obvious ones would be the 'work' done to actresses and the like and how this can affect peoples image not only of that actress but also of that person, this is a subject I suspect I will dealt with in more depth further through this part.

To begin with I will discuss points as they become relevant to the part I am doing.

Wildlife Heritage Foundation

I was very lucky recently to spend a day at the wildlife Heritage Foundation about an hours drive from where I live. I was part of a group of six photographers who had the joy of not only having a superb professional photographer with us for the day whose sole aim was for everyone to get amazing photographs but also to be able to get very close to lions, tigers, leopards and many others including white lions and a snow leopard. I even got to stroke a lion something that I felt very honoured to have done.
I came away from the day having learnt so much about light, iso, shutter speeds and positioning the subject I felt I wanted to include a small piece on my blog to show a part of my learning curve.

I have included just one of the photographs that I took.

Exercise: Colours into tones 2

The aim of this exercise is to achieve a specific effect.

There are three different ideas for me to choose from,
 Landscape, not my strong point and something I am really not looking forward to doing a  whole module on.
Portrait My favourite and the one I have chosen.
Garden. I  have already included a few pictures of gardens in this section.

I was looking through some of my photographs and came across a couple of my young grandson, at the time he was a bit unsure about having his photograph taken, but the expressions are lovely on his face.

The top photograph has been de saturated in camera raw then opened in elements.
I then converted it using enhance remove colour, there is an option for portraits within this, which I used then I did further adjustments using the channel sliders. I lightened the red then also made smaller adjustments to the green and blue sliders before finally tweaking the contrast.
The complexion has been lightened considerably, however it has also adjusted the soft toy he is holding. This means this picture doesn't quite meet the criteria of the brief. therefore I processed a second photograph.

On this second set of photographs he looks much happier, again I de-saturated in camera raw before opening the photograph in elements, I made very similar adjustments again enhance, remove colour then adjusted the various sliders.

The one thing I have noticed is that by lightening the complexion it is possible to lose detail in the skin tones, care needs to be taken to make sure that areas aren't burnt out, something I feel is evident on the second photograph.

Overall the last two exercises have been very interesting, I am starting to think that elements may have its limitations, I have light room installed on my computer and I really think the time has come for me to experiment with it a lot more.

Exercise Colours into tones 1

For this exercise I have to chose an image with at least two contrasting colours, I have chosen red and green in the form of poppies.

This is the original JPEG version I decided to use aperture priority for these photographs allowing me to concentrate on the image its self.
The settings were F6.3 with a shutter speed of 1/640's matrix metering and daylight white balance, I kept the iso at 200 as there was plenty of light.

I then needed to produce a 'default' black and white image this I did by opening the photograph in raw  and adjusting the clarity before opening it again in elements and going image,  convert to black and white.

This produced a fairly 'flat' photograph with no real depth to anything.

The third photograph in the series saw me lighten the red of the poppies and darken the green of the leaves.

This produced a completely different image, the poppies are now white and detail is missing in the bottom right hand corner, the green is still almost a background to the poppies without much detail or interest being there.

the final photograph saw me make the opposite adjustments this time lightening the green and darkening the red.

This time the poppies are almost black and again detail is lost , the leaves are much lighter now and are more evident in the photograph. One other thing that I did notice was that the bright spots are more noticeable in the final photograph, in a way there is an almost dappled light to it.

For the purpose of this exercise I have pushed the sliders to the extreme, to really highlight for myself the 'power of getting the tones correct.

Exercise: Strength of Interpretation.

The idea of this exercise is to take two photographs and create two different effects one in colour and one in black and white.

This first photograph was taken along the Thames not far from the London eye, it was quite a bright day when I took this. 
I increased the contrast as much as I could and when I looked at the raw conversion it was possible to see the clipped shadow highlights around the folds in the fabric, detail was also lost in the facial features, I tried to increase the clarity to see if it was possible to compensate for this but it didn't really make that much of a difference.

The black and White conversion I did using just the raw settings. Firstly I de saturated to remove the colour and then checked for shadow clipping, I noticed that this was more evident in the black and white photograph, I did however notice that the main focal point ie the 'statue' looks more pronounced.
for the high key versions I again chose I photograph from a recent trip to London, this time it was taken from the London eye.

I adjusted the clarity in raw then opened the photograph in elements and used levels to make the adjustments.

for the high key Black and white conversion I adjusted the clarity in raw then opened it in elements, I then used enhance remove colour and did the final adjustments in levels. I like this photograph it has an almost misty look about it that seems to suit the subject.

exercise: Black and white

For this exercise I need to plan and take a photograph which will look better in black and white.

I have chosen a building over looking the creek in Faversham, the shape was one of the first things that attracted me. I decided to focus purely on the shape of the building, and composed my shot accordingly, there was nothing I could do about the bushes around the base of the building so I decided I would need to work with them and use them to form a base to the shot.
As it was quite a bright day I used F11 at 125's shutter speed with a daylight white balance and matrix metering.

 Above is the original colour photograph, which is ok but nothing special, with all the colours the shape of the building is lost.

By converting the shot to black and white the shape is more defined, and appears more 3 dimensional.
To convert the photograph to black and white I carried out the following adjustments.

I opened the image in raw and adjusted the exposure slightly to remove the clipped highlights on the windows and door frames I then adjusted the clarity slider and then opened the image in photoshop elements. Once opened I went to image  convert to black and white and used the pre set urban/snapshots as a starting point.  I made further small adjustments to the red, green and blue sliders and the contrast. finally I adjusted the black and white points in levels.
I was surprised how differently I looked at something when I wanted to photograph it as a black and white picture rather than just taking a photography then getting home and thinking that might work in black and white.