The Transparent Work Round - Part Three - A File With A Cake In It

  

The whole point of this week's exercise is to save those images on my colour slides. Unfortunately some of them are dead...and I'm afraid I killed them through ignorance.

I kept them for years in the boxes in which they had been returned from Coburg or Nunawading, and scrabbled around whenever I put up a slide show trying to locate the picures I wanted. Finally I bit the bullet and purchased hanging slide pages that went in a file cabinet - 24 slides per page. The collection sat in the dark and cool since the 60's. But I was foolish enough to choose PVC pages and they started to sweat and stick to the films.

Had I known, I would have gotten polypropylene pages. They have gotten a far better rating from the Wilhelm Institute for long-term storage. To amend the current situation, I've ordered 100 of the new type and will be transferring transparencies to them as I digitize them. In the process I hope to clean any muck off the slides.

The cleaner of choice will be the FVE film cleaner that our shop sells. I've used it on negs and transparencies for years and as long as you do not soak things in it, it does a good job of wiping grease and dust off - cotton Q swabs are the applicator with a microfibre cloth to finish off. I have not succumbed to cowboy advice to use cheap vodka instead of the FVE cleaner - I suppose it might be more cost effective in the end but I'd rather use cheap vodka to form political opinions.

Once the images have been put onto the SD card in JPEG and RAW form I will be passing them through this computer to try to correct defects. I have to admit that my exposure work in the film era was pretty hit and miss, so there will be a big variation in results in any one division. I would ideally like to put a page of slides through Lightroom and make use of the batch processing facility to right the wrongs, but the wrongs are all over the shop...

I may have to send them through one by one with Photoshop Elements 14 and just hope that the Auto Smart Fix helps enough with several clicks to do the job. The really bad ones will need the whole treatment - contrast, haze reduction, resupply of missing tones, etc. The Agfa CT 18 slides from the 70's seem to be the worst of the lot, and if they are too far gone to recover colour I am going to run them through the Alien Skin Exposure plug-in for a sort of funky monochrome.  The ones taken in  rather dirty London in the 70's were fairly monochromatic to begin with...

The final touch will be perhaps the most important. I have long been puzzling how to apply some sort of label to each image to record the location, circumstances, and people. Most experiments so far were too clumsy and slow for words. Then a client of CE explained the file details and the different divisions of information that are attached automatically to each JPEG. I found a section that invited the sort of commentary that I want to make that is hidden normally but indivisibly attached to any particular file. If I fill in one of the fields I have the electronic equivalent of a lead pencil note on the back of a print. It just needs the discipline to do it.

A project for the long hot summer months if we ever see them.

Photoshop Vs Lightroom - The Battle Of The Mentors

Come to Shoot Photography in September of this year! See world-renowned photo mentors Adam Monk and Christopher Fulham slug it out file-to-file for the title of Adobe Heavyweight Champion!

Be chair-side as the referee steps back and they reach for the sliders! Cheer as the saturation goes wild! Gasp as the curve goes off the screen. Thrill to the sharpening!

This is one artistic RGB bloodbath you won't want to miss! Ring Shannon on 9228 8232 and get your tickets!

Thank you for reading this far into the column. Now we can reveal that Adam and Christopher are going to be teaching people about two entirely different Adobe products - Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop - and that they are going to be held on different dates and that they are not really going to be fighting with each other. The two programs are intended for different purposes - and while there can seem to be some overlap between them, they really address separate needs. But here is the interesting part:

You can really benefit by learning BOTH programs.

I have. Or, I should say, I flatter myself that I know enough of each program to do what I need to do. This may be so, but I suspect that I could do a great deal more if I knew a little more.

Lightroom helps me batch process things. It has ways of dealing with camera and lens distortions on a wide scale that are wonderful - I can wring some pretty good stuff out of old cameras. It does weddings and parties and lots of weblog images. If I was going to produce pictures without words, it is all I would need.

Photoshop goes further, but goes in smaller, more complex steps. It can put in words, take out annoying relatives, shift reality, and make large scale changes to the image. It can be artistic until people scream and wrench the mouse out of your hands. It has big time graphic power.

Both programs are state-of-the-art. Both are immediately accessible on a simple level, but both have deeper levels that reward exploration. Both are taught by Shoot mentors and you can access their expertise by ringing Shannon and booking a course. We're not talking millions here; either course cost $ 249...and they may be worth far more in a artistic terms for the instruction they give.

PS: Photo editing is traditionally done with bare knuckles, so be prepared...

Shoot Photography Lightroom with Adam Monk September 3

Shoot Photography Photoshop with Christopher Fulham September 6

Brush, Palette, Mouse....Ready For the Louvre

Last year I was black-balled from entry into a Facebook group of artists - condemned for being an "events photographer". I suspect it was also because I was unable to speak Artish and would not get a tattoo or a man-bun.

Whatever, it set me out on a quest to become an artist in spite of the critics. I thought long and hard about what art I would pursue. Making miniature scenes was all very well, and taking pictures of weddings and hot rods and pretty girls might be a good training ground, but something more was needed. Something that would say Art loud enough and in a condescending enough manner to allow me to sit in a coffee shop and fill out Centrelink forms...What to do...What to do...

Then I had it. Digital art. Prints derived from images that I have taken, suitably modified until either they resemble other media or I resemble other artists.

Armed with that determination I ordered this book:

Focal press books are generally good, though they have had some authors who seem to have spent too much time in coffee shops filling out Centrelink forms. But in this case, Susan Roddick Bloom seems to have hit upon just the right level of communication to help the novice. And fortunately , Camera Electronic equipped me with the rest of what I needed.

Of course, I needed the images in the first place, and I've a Drobo full of them. And a Wacom Intuous tablet - CE had those too -  and a new iMac computer. I also had the Epson printer I got from CE and it is calibrated with the Spyder Express, so I was nearly all set. Final piece in the chain was the image editing program...and I went with my faithful Photoshop Elements 14.

It proved to be a good choice. Ruddick's book is several years old, but the basic procedures that she outlined in Photoshop itself are now quite do-able in the latest Photoshop Elements. There have been no procedures or techniques mentioned in her text that cannot be done in PE, and very few of the references she makes to specific things need to be translated to another wordage. Adobe have been decent enough to keep the same things in the same drawers in the digital desk.

Ms. Bloom covers sketches, pastels, cont, oils, watercolours, and illustrations. She has a chapter on some of the commercial plug-ins that also simulate drawn art...and she is not too prissy to admit that they can be a good jumping-off point for fast starts. I've tried a little from many of the chapters and found her advice to be excellent. it was money well spent.

The Photoshop Elements 14 program was also money well spent - and if you are at all interested in getting into digital shooting and manipulation I can recommend it.

Now it will be a case of experiment, practise, and time. One day I hope to be refused entry into ever more prestigious art groups. If I can be ejected from the Hermitage, Tate, or MOMA I shall consider myself a success.

Uncle Dick

$ 140 Or So Getsya

It gets ya either :

a. 12 months prepaid Lightroom and Photoshop on the Creative Cloud system. Good deal when you have internet access and want to do the more extensive image editing that PS is known for. You'll need to do a little more study and practise with PS than with PSE but the results acan be more controllable for some people. Of course Lightroom may be all you need for 95% of the images that you take - if you don't need to get out the electronic scissors and paste pot them LR is the go.

b. One-time for always purchase of Photoshop Elements 14. A slightly less complex version of Photoshop with enough processing power for most amateur and enthusiast users. capable of exhibition or self-publishing standards, though. This blog and many others depends upon PSE processing.

These products, like so many others these days, are available via internet downloading with the appropriate licensing numbers. We sell the cards for this, and for a number of other Adobe products, at the front counter. Some of the other things are quite extensive - ask our experts for advice about your level of processing.

Play Your cards RIght At The Rental Counter

If you would like to exercise your mind beyond the normal boundaries of time and space you can do several things; read the history of the Byzantine Empire and its succession of rulers, play 8-dimensional chess with Stephen Hawking, or try to understand the Adobe system of products and charges.

Okay, that was all exaggeration, but photographers over the last little bit might be forgiven for a bit of cynicism in regards to the variety and permutations of Adobe software.

Once upon a time you could buy a simple disc to load into your computer that had more things on them than you would ever need, use, or understand. You would then take courses to help you try to make it do something. If you stuck to it like sitting on a vinyl car seat in hot weather you eventually were able to select images and stick them to other images and then desaturate the thing. It was all some wedding shooters needed...

If you had no patience with this sort of thing you could opt for the trimmed version of the program and do pretty much the same things but with simplified instructions - as a bonus you got a cache of trite images to scatter about to liven up printed matter.

It was almost enough to make you relax and enjoy yourself...until the writers of software discovered that they could make new additions and you would pay them the same amount of money...or more...again each year to get that disc...again. I think they took their marketing strategy from the American car makers in the 1950's. Computer programs with tailfins and two-tone paint jobs...

And then...and then...and then they discovered that they could keep the main bits of the computer doin's on their own machines in Mumbai, Minneapolis, and Minsk. And charge you by the month or year to use them. You could enter into plans...

All the above is to sell you two products from the Rental counter - Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 and Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC. CC means creative cloud and that means that they let you do something if you pay them. It is a good something for many people, but you must remember that you are buying a contract to use the goods - you don't own the goods.

Still, no bad thing if the goods do what you want and the annual price is reasonable. The PE14 IS something that you own and can keep on using for jolly ever. I use PE10 and it does just fine for my old computer...and my old computer does just fine for me. Please do not be content with your old camera equipment - this is a shop and we want you to buy new camera equipment.

It won't cost you an arm and a leg to try the PS and LR on a CC basis for one year. If your needs for photoshopping surpass what PE14 can do, this is the way to go. Certainly if your needs are for LR it will be developed far more in the future than its rival Aperture 3 which was abandoned on the doorstep with a tear-stained note.

" How Did You Spend Your Weekend? "

" Recreating the St. Valentine's Day Massacre."

"...Well I just asked a sensible question! There's no need to give that sort of answer! "

" No, no, really. Come back. Don't go away mad. I'm telling the absolute truth..."

I had done a publicity shoot for a group of dancers a couple of weeks ago in a rather bare dance studio. Simple stuff, with a pretty bare backdrop and basic umbrella lighting. Really only record shots of their costuming - it was a practice session for a big show that saw them dressed as 1920's flappers. At the end of the evening I had them line up against the white wall and pretend to be terrified.

Note: dancers are good value as far as subjects go. They know how to pose and by the time they get to the stage-ready stage they have lost a lot of inhibitions. You can get theatre out of them with a cup of coffee and a strong light...

Into the studio - a flat bare tabletop with a dirty green cloth on it. Strong even light on a paper backdrop bouncing back into the camera. Two 1:18 car models - a Model A Ford and a Model B Ford. Posed them on either side of the frame in semi-silhouette and shot off a series of images.

Back in the dimroom, extracted the sillhouettes and layered them up. Extracted the dancers from the best image and layered that up - that was the longest part of the job. Photoshop Elements made it reasonably easy as I used about 4 different tools in various areas of the image.

I needed a dirty brick wall behind the girls and fortunately I had a disc of just such on file. The tiling and copying facility of Photoshop Elements was used to extend the wall wide enough to cover the entire frame. In retrospect I should have added some bullet holes but as the whole image is still in a psd form I can revise it later.

Making the splash of light from the car headlamps was simple - one bright layer of brick under one dark layer of brick and then erase part of the top with a fuzzy round eraser.

Making the reflected shadow from the dancers was also simple. Duplicated their layer, selected them, blacked them out, flipped that image vertically, spread it at their feet with perspective distortion, applied some gaussian blur, and reduced the opacity of the layer to match the shadows that the toy model cars were casting. If it sounds tough it wasn't

Blending all the layers was the trick - and the trick I used was to go round the edges of each image on a layer with the small blur tool set to 10 px and 50%. Just smoothed them enough.

Final touch was a suitable text underneath. Photoshop has a lot of fonts but there are far more out there in graphic design books. I got a one in Melbourne in January called " Retro Fonts" that has a CD in the back containing a vast number of authentic styles from all modern eras. You just select one, open it in the HD and assign it to Photoshop Elements and away you go. I picked Empire Deco as being exactly right for the period.

Fun? Darned right it was fun. And it made a good title image for the entire job. Two shots and a morning of computer work. Murder in Chicago was never this easy...or maybe it was...

Hold High The Multiple Standards, They Must Not Suffer Loss...

I am always amazed when I note that the manufacturers of regular flash-light batteries  managed to make AAA, AA, C, and D cells and by and large the products of any particular maker are fairly similar to the same class from another factory. Of course there can be a variation in the supplies - some have lots of electricity and some don't - also some leak and some don't. But generally an AA cell will fit in an AA holder no matter who made it.

Not so for Li-ion batteries. Each maker seems to have a different shape or size, and not just different from other firms - different from themslves. It is a rare and welcome thing for the developing line of new cameras to contain the same battery three years in a row.

A nightmare for the user? For the stockist? Wait until you consider what those batteries do inside the cameras...

The jpeg is pretty universal for most cameras. Take a jpeg and everything can read it from the storage device and show it on a screen. But there are limitations - even with the best jpeg cameras in the world, you can sometimes exceed the capabilities. RAW files are what you need. And then away you go on the chicken chase again as you try to get your new camera's files to open in your old computer program. Or find an update. Or find a new program. Or take to drink.

Some manufacturers have tried to institute a DNG file that will be universal but then lots of their competitors have not taken them up on it. Indeed sometimes there are computer crashes and problems but then that is one of the  mysteries of the occident.

Occidents will happen...

Which Colour Space Should You Use?

Here's a question to fill those long lonely nights at the camera club as you sit around the flames of the  blazing digital projector and reminisce about cocking a shutter.

Which digital colour space do you need? The old days ( Elvis, dinosaurs, 50¢ hot dogs...) were easy because you got the colour space the manufacturer handed you and were darned grateful for it. If you loaded Kodachrome you got Hollywood colour and paid a premium - if you shot Afga you got European art colour and watched it turn magenta - and if you purchased Ferrania you wondered where the strange smell was coming from.

Now we are generally given the choice of Adobe RGB or sRGB in our camera menu. The first for printing, the second for computer display, is the general tenor of the advice. Follow it if you like, but we earnestly suggest you investigate other alternatives:

1. FinalYEARstudentRGB

This is a colour space that is so dark and grungy that it feels like reading Kafka on a wet night in Pittsburg. The white portion of the spectrum never gets above the luminance level of a boarding house sheet at the end of the month.

2. CAMeraclubRGB

On the other end of the scale is this colour space that constantly bangs the saturation meter needle off the stops like a machine gun. You wondered why the digital projector started smoking? This is the reason. It comes pre-loaded with a sharpening algorithm that actually hurts the eyes to see.

3. Ilford CIBA RGB

This was first announced in the 1956 British Workingman's Socialist Camera Society Annual and will be ready for final release in about 4 months. From Pentonville.

4. FlapoRGB

Distinctive to the Flapoflex range of cameras, this colour space will not work with anything else. If you offend the clerk who sells it to you, it will not work at all. Mind your tongue.

5. soBRG

The sort of colour space that does everything backwards just to spite you. Slide the controls at your peril.

6. WellnessRGB

As a complete contrast, this is a kind and gentle colour space that lends itself to pastels, soft flowers and fluffy kittens. Actually it has no contrast at all - everything looks as if it was shot through waxed paper. A soothing choice if you can stay awake.

7. The New Colour Space

This is the setting that appears on your camera menu a month after you have set up all the criteria and just started to get used to it. It appears overnight with no indication of what it does - the David Carradine of computer programs. If you select it, it will disappear from the menu again.

There, that was easy. Now we can get on to calibrating your memory card for the northern or southern hemisphere. Complete instructions in the next blog post.

Pictures At An Exhibition - Or How To Be Modest

As photographers we are rarely encouraged to take pictures of someones else's photographs when they are exhibited. It is considered naff in some cases and criminal in others - particularly if we then whack them on our websites and claim them as our own.

It's a little different if we go to see pictures that have been done by other means - or sculptures or artefacts and manufactured articles. Sure, there can still be a degree of  taboo, but many public galleries are okay with it - as long as you do not use flash or tripods.

This is fine - I love wandering the art galleries of Victoria and New South Wales to see famous works of art - and new, obscure things. I have learned to cope with the light conditions of the places and to get a clear result.

The illumination can be problematical, though good galleries will have directed lighting that shows the art to good advantage. But the colour temperature of it may be all over the shop. I've taken to recording the art with RAW and a small jpeg - the little one as a sighting rifle for he more detailed capture. I have also considered one of the tiny Spyder Checkr 24 colour cards for my travelling bag so that I can reference back to a neutral result later on my computer.

Flash is out - the galleries do not want to subject the works of art to the danger of fading or the cleaning staff to the danger of discovery...put your camera up to the highest ISO that will deliver a clean image for your purposes, and turn the image stabilisation on. Consider attaching a Steadepod to the bottom of the camera and stepping on the footplate whenever you need utmost stability.

Lens choice? Well, if you have a lens that has very little distortion in the first place - like the 23mm f:2 on my Fujifilm X 100 - you need not worry. If you are using a zoom, do a little investigation beforehand to find out the focal length that will have the least barrel or pincushion to it - somewhere in the middle of the range.

Stop it down one stop from wide open if the lighting permits. Nearly every lens gains something from this.

Try to stand square to a flat work of art, or at the most attractive angle to a 3-D object. If the thing is big and you are standing on the floor you are likely be tilted up and getting some keystoning - correct it later with DxO or Photoshop. If you find that you can capture the image you want from further away in the gallery wit a longer focal length the keystoning will be less evident.

Be prepared to experiment. Circular polarisers can sometimes help with the view through a glass cover - sometimes not. Painters who have decided to express the grace and beauty of life with a trowel and mortar board are likely to have left a problem, as the surfaces of their works reflect light everywhere. You are allowed to curse them quietly.

You are also allowed to quietly abominate the crowds of people who will surge in front of you just as you press the shutter button. Patience - they will drift onwards eventually and if you  wait you will get a clear shot. It is the same at a car show - the gawkers and strollers sometimes work in tag teams but eventually they tire.

Final note. When you bring someone else's vision home to look at you are free to look and free to admire but you are not free to publish it out. There are still laws for this. The artist might be dead but you can bet their lawyers are alive.

Experimental Weekend - A Note Of Caution

This has been a weekend of quiet experimentation in the dark room. Not the darkroom -  chemical work was laid aside some years ago and has not been picked up. The dark room that used to be the darkroom, but is now a not-so-dark room. I hesitate to say a light room for fear of Adobe's branding lawyers...

Right - level of illumination aside, it was a weekend of careful photo manipulation and posting on several websites. During which I gained an insight into what several of our customers have been saying - they don't want anything to do with photo manipulation and storage if it involves the cloud system.

I heard them say this but was ignorant as to the whole affair - a little questioning of other staff and of family members helped, but I still thought that the customers might have been making too much of a fuss about nothing - after all, the internet works flawlessly and all those servers and computers and experts would make sure that it all went perfectly...no?

Well, no. Not for me this weekend. Starting with an attempted hack from overseas, a reset password for Facebook, then hours spent trying to re-connect the Wordpress blogs that I write to a Facebook page, then watching selected posts drop out of FB, then drop back in again, then lose their photos, then regain them...

It was interesting work resetting and reconnecting things but it used up hours of reading, clicking, retracing, etc. Had I experienced the same misery with Photoshop manipulation or the localised resizing and reformatting of photos that is be done with Aperture or Silkypix I would tempted to unplug the entire electronic web and get out the developing tank and trays...

The day was as slow as the internet was slow and as scattered as the various places that needed to be contacted. I suspect that cloud storage and accessing would have been impossible yesterday. which leads me to the point of this post: there are still a few programs available that are not cloud-based.

I see we have some Photoshop Elements 13, some DxO programs, and some of the Lightroom ones that can stand alone on your computer. I would encourage anyone who is at the same level of computer knowledge as me ( The I is on and the O is off, do not lick the monitor screen...) to think about keeping the photo manipulation in-box as it were rather than depending upon Telstra, Berkeley, and state of the atmosphere to make it possible.

Software Sale - Things In Boxes

Software is a hard subject to cover in small blog - particularly when it is constantly changing.

 By the time you finish reading this page someone in Silicon Valley or Mumbai will have written two generations on in whatever image-editing program you use and someone in Khazaksan will be frantically pirating it. If you pop out to the newsagent tomorrow you can get a free copy in a plastic baggy stapled to the front cover of  " Knitters And Crocheters Weekly ".

Nevertheless, if you are immune from the dizzying pace, we do have a number of boxed editions of useful Adobe and DxO material that may be what your system needs to succeed. We'll be doing half price on boxes of :

LR3 upgrade to LR4
Photoshop Elements 13
Premiere Elements 13
DxO Viewpoint 2
DxO Filmpack 4
DxO Optics Pro 9 Elite and Standard

Make sure your computer system is new enough to make use of these and then go for it. I use the Photoshop Elements program and find it excellent for screen work and printing.

Curing The Group Portrait Blues - With DXO

We all love doing group portraits. Not.

Whether it is an undisciplined family group at a party, an overly-disciplined regimental portrait, or just wedding guests gathered around the wreckage, the shoot can be difficult to do, and the results patchy.

The family party is composed of people who will not obey - the relatives and children. They will be difficult to marshal into one area, will insist on changing places continuously to gain precedence, and will never ALL be looking in the same direction.

The regiment or ship's company CAN be compelled to sit or stand in order - correctly - and can be ordered to all look toward the camera with no-one making Indian feather fingers. But you won't be the one doing the ordering. For that you need the senior warrant officer. Contact him early on, do as he says, and he will deliver the goods.

The wedding group includes the bride and groom and their parents - who are paying you to be there. Put them in the center, expose so that they look good, and let their relatives fall as they may.

All this said, there is one problem if you have a large group to photograph that spreads wide in front of your lens - you will be forced by the geometry to use a wide-angle lens and that in turn will force you by the nature of optics to get distorted faces on the outer edges. Faces that started out round end up flattened like pumpkins. Grins become maniacal.

If you can get the group to curve round you like the horns of a buffalo, you can reduce this. If not, try getting one of the DxO Viewpoint 2 programs - you can plunk it into a number of Adobe photoshop programs - both regular CS. PSE, and LR, as well as Aperture 3.

It will perfectly correct the distorted faces at the edge of the frame without narrowing to ones in the middle. If you have jiggered up architectural shots it will straighten and correct the distortion. You'd be surprised just how much better this makes even studio shots when you are using extreme wides but have let you camera deviate from the horizontal ever so little...

Reflections On The Model As A Subject

I'm not being literary or philosophical or anything. I am just struggling with reflections from the shiny surfaces of scale models in studio photography.

If it was just depiction of the scale models in a bare space the problem would be easy - I would take home a Glanz light tent, pop the car inside and flood the outside with flash light. The reflections that bounce back from the little chrome bumpers and shiny paint surfaces would be an even white with no hot spots. Good advertising picture but not the artistic effect I want.

I set the little cars in little scenes and then add more in Photoshop, but the surfaces of the cars can betray the position of the lights...and the surroundings of the studio...in little vignettes all over the model. Silver slab surfaces, flat windows, and chrome hubcaps are like little mirrors reflecting the tripod, camera, walls, curtains, and me. A dead giveaway that it is fake.

This recalls the story I heard at the AIPP convention a couple of years ago*. The chap who shoots roadways and scenes for Mercedes and Dodge so that they can strip in their studio shots of the latest cars also takes a panorama sweep picture behind himself so that the digital artist can put elements of the scenery into the shiny bits of he real cars. I thought it was a little over-complex when I heard it but I am not so sure now - I can see the problem.

I am going to have to deal with it in-studio and preferably in-camera in one shot - 'cause I ain't that good a digital artist. The next series of coffee-fuelled experiments will involve large panels of Superior backdrop paper in sky-blue or light-grey to simulate the sky in various forms and some vague shapes to suggest mountains or buildings pinned to the panels. I shall crouch behind them and fire the camera with a cable release.

And then we shall deal with the sun. Creating the sun in the studio with a flash tube that is larger than the sun in the sky...

* Name dropping.

After The Ball Is Over - With Fujifilm

Did goe to the Great Charity Steampunk Ball at the Government House ballroom on laste Saturday and was greatley entertained.

Also greatly relieved as the image will show. it was the first time that the Moriarty Portrait Camera was put to use in earnest. Some 280 images were recorded with it of ball-goers and general views. About 30 of those images have been suppressed by Government Order but I am confident that the others will give satisfaction.

Readers of this blog may know of the Moriarty. It is a camera that has a Fujifilm lens fitted - currently the 18mm f:2 version - and records images upon an electronic sensor that is 18mm x 24mm in size. Under normal circumstances in the field it might utilise a setting of 400 ISO, though when it is in use in the ball with the associated Nikon SB 700 flashes it is turned to 800 ISO.

The Forbidden Images were taken at 3200 ISO and are free of most defects - really very pleasing images. But you won't see them. Government Order.

The Moriarty connects directly to one of the SB 700 flashes which is set to Manual control. The other SB 700 is hand-held with a restrictor on the front to direct the output. It slaves off the connected flash. Unfortunately it also slaves optically off other flashes but if you are at a venue that has few other flash users, you can manage it well. Just put your thumb over the sensor window at the side and it goes blind.

As you can see, the Moriarty is fully capable of producing Autochrome colour plates as well as daguerreotypes. Of course it must be used in conjunction with and Adobe software program and an Alien Skin plug-in to reveal this but you knew that already.

One necessity for any studio work, apart from the studio and a really big Aspidistra in a pot, is a good tripod. As the recipe in Nadar's photographic cookbook says, " Let it be a  good size and of the best quality. Do not neglect the adjustable head as it will save you many hours of retouching time if the subjects are straight to begin with.". I use an ancient Tiltall but can also recommend the sturdier Cullmann devices as well.

Please note that all the images were taken in sRGB colour space and jpeg. 

The Bastard File

I used to be embarrassed in shop class when the teacher talked about using bastard files. That sort of language was discouraged at home. I was careful not to use it in front of my mother.

Bless her, she is long gone. I am free to express myself when I edit pictures on the computer. And I do. Sometimes the family are scandalised and I have noted the occasionally the wife closes the door on the computer room when I am working in there. I just wish she wouldn't wedge it shut with a hammer...

Bastard files come in several varieties:

1: The ones that have a dynamic range of 56 stops. The low tones are so low that you can see nothing and the high tones are so high that you can see nothing. Eventually you lose interest and stop looking.

2: The noise traps. No matter what setting you have dialled into the camera these files have electronic noise. In the low tones, in the high tones, in the margin. Even the Exif data is speckled and grey. They look like someone has dropped them onto the floor and rolled them in kitty litter.

3: The Walking Dead. Files that have so little character or substance that the most attractive portions of them are the chromatic aberration. Many of them have been made using Big Stopper filters and many of them have been made by elderly Frenchmen.

4: The Fun House. Files so distorted that they could feature in a parliamentary enquiry. That lens that you bought at the Camera Mart for the low price was being sold for a very good reason...

5: The files that are supplied in the 18.5 - bit HOOTx format. This is a format devised by a graduate student in Nebraska that was briefly thrown out as freeware on the net in 1998 for a week. Before the narcs got to him. It surfaces like a dying Soviet submarine every few years and some fool converts normal digital data to it. and then throws away the normal digital data. No known program actually decodes it but once the files get into your drive they can never be removed.

6: The files that are all watermark. No actual image but entirely safe.

7: Commercial traps. The file that contains an opposing product to the one that you are trying to advertise. The kind of photo-bombng that spreads radiation.

8: Private traps. The thumb drive o' death that your mate gives you. Plug it in at your peril, but be warned that your mate has nursed a grievance against you for a long time and this may well be the opportunity to revenge it.

You must understand that none of this ever happened in the dear old days of film photography. We were pure and simple and never had fungus on our lenses. And none of our negative files ever got wet an smelly and mouldy. Wanna see some of my unicorn pictures?

As Simple As It Gets

If you are a keen enthusiastic photographer who wants to know all the possible permutations of lens/camera/computer/tripod/boom arm/studio light/cut lunch as it applies to post-modern iconic parameters of existential thought, rack off.

I am addressing myself to today to people who want to take pictures and see them easily - good pictures of real life.

1. Get a Fuji X 100s. Or another Fuji camera - the X-A1, X-M1, X-Pro1, etc. Suit yourself if you'd like a zoom lens or removable lenses, or are happy with a perfect fixed focal length. I'm happy with the 23mm lens on the X100s camera - it equates to a 35mm lens on an older film camera and that just about sees the world the way I see it when I am just looking.

The X 100s is the kind of camera that you really CAN put on automatic - in this case by turning the aperture and shutter rings to 'A' and leaving the auto focus switch to AF-S. If you've asked it to adjust the ISO itself, all you need to do is look through the viewfinder and press the button. I do this when I am on holiday, and am rewarded with perfect records of what i have seen - and I am amazed that the camera sees it the same way. I can go into an art gallery to admire the paintings and when allowed to take photos, the photos look like the paintings. It copes with whatever the galleries come up with for lighting.

2. Get a Mac. If you haven't got a computer yet, get an Apple laptop or iMac. The people in Apple shops are helpful. They know their product.

If you are already using a Windows PC, carry on. Your comfort and skill with it will help you to succeed.

3. Get Photoshop Elements 12. I bang on about this program a lot because I have used PE  programs for years - all the way from PE 3. I am not a computer wizard, and do not need to be - the Adobe people have made the Photoshop Elements programs easy to understand and easy to remember. I started out doing things using pictograms to help me and have advanced to using keyboard shortcuts - the thing just flies along.

Here's a couple of examples of easy shooting last Saturday at Big Al's Poker Run. It is just what I saw and just what I want to remember. You can get on board with these products too - right now.

PE For Smarties

Over the years we have seen any number of yellow-covered books in the bookstore entitled " Whatever For Dummies". The range of topics seems to have ranged from religion and philosophy to storm door repairs. I bought one that dealt with my new computer system and as I progressed through I realised it was telling the absolute truth...anyone who spent money on it was a dummy.

I tried another tack - I invested in the first of my Photoshop Elements editing programs...in this case it was Photoshop Elements 3. I found it surprisingly easy to use, and as my artistic ability was on a level with a preschooler, I was rewarded with bright pop colours. On everything...

Determined to do better I bought the Photoshop Elements 10 and switched to it. A whole new world of elegant image manipulation opened up...and I discovered the layer system as well. All of a sudden I could clean up all my image files as well as making an imaginary world of my own.

Photoshop Elements has since gone to No.11 and No.12 and they have added more features. More of the power of the classic Photoshop program has been added but the difficult learning curve that you might expect with the standard program is not there. PE is really intuitive.

Now, if you'd like to equip yourself with the best introduction to Photoshop Elements, make a booking to attend the February 9th workshop with Nick Melidonis at Shoot Photography. He'll show you how to get the best from it, while creating and managing your images.

Ring Jonathan Cousins at Shoot on 9228-8232 to book a place. Beginner or enthusiast, you can place your reliance on Adobe and their Photoshop Elements program.And you won't be a dummy...

Two Panel Or Three Panel?

Planning ahead for my holidays, I have decided to review the capabilities of my imaging system* to deliver panoramic pictures. That sounds very grand, but it really means I am going to see if I can't do the most with the least - least weight, least cost, least fuss.

I plan to reserve my serious cultural and intellectual efforts for toy stores, book stores, and pubs. If the Jack Stanbridge's put in a used book section, a couch, and a keg I would never leave the town...

Be that as it may I experimented this morning with the Fuji X camera perched on top of a monopod. The places I go to have other tourists swirling about and a tripod would be a distinct hazard - and the extra weight and volume of one would cut down on the capacity of my luggage to bring back toy cars and books. The monopod is a carbon fibre one, fits into my folded photo bag, and with a Novoflex panorama plate on top makes a handy war hammer for late night explorations.

The panorama plate is normally seen on a tripod - you get the bubble level centered and then spin the camera around the vertical axis and get good horizons on your image. I figured that I could HOLD it vertical and then spin it for 2 or three shots. Out on the lawn this morning to experiment...

Yes. it works. I let the camera set its own exposure, though on other occasions I would use manual - there are some scenes that change light value widely and you really need to set a good compromise and then run all the panels with it. The Fuji puts out a good image on the rear screen and writes its RAF files fast enough to let me do three panels.

The files go into the Photoshop Elements program in the computer - it has a very easy-to-use panorama maker that allows a number of different perspectives on the scene. You can get a flat horizon with essentially flat images or they can curve up at the ends in several ways. I have been experimenting with it but have not decided which I prefer.

One good setting in there removes most of the vignetting that might occur around the edges of the panels - in a single photograph it might be quite attractive, but in multiple panels it is disturbing. Of course it adds a little time to the assembly of the images, but it is automatic and you can drink coffee while it works.

Purists will squawk at the imprecision of the monopod vs the tripod - at the simplicity of the PSE10 program - and at the modest nature of the result. But if I see a good panorama I can capture it in a minute and I won't have to haul 10Kg of gear to do it. I can leave my nodal points and virtual reality at home in the cupboard and leave space in the camera bag for a chocolate bar. And a hot rod magazine.

Ya gotta get yer priorities right...

* I used to own a camera and photo album. Now it is an imaging system.

Avast There Ye Lubbers!

The International Talk Like A Pirate day came and went last year and we arrrred for all we were worth. In some cases it was about 56¢ worth...but it was a good day to celebrate slavery, murder, and theft on the high seas. The rum was particularly refreshing after the pillaging.

Being a pillager is fun, and profitable. Being a pillagee sucks. This is why the music producers make such an effort to seize pirated copies of their CDs and other recorded pieces of music and prosecute the offenders. I remember seeing television footage of thousands of discs being crushed under a front-end loader somewhere in Siam or the Dutch East Indies with the officers of the local militia standing around shaking hands for the camera.

 I couldn't help wondering if they would have had a more effective message had they substituted the local sellers of the discs under the wheels of the loader. Or a few of the  tourists who keep the trade alive by buying them.

In the photo world piracy seems to be expressed in two ways; stealing images off the net and displaying them on your own website and swarming through the studio windows of your local business rival with a knife between your teeth. Both are bad, but the first one particularly so - bloodshed is something that can be cleaned up with a mop and bucket but stolen images are on the net FOREVER. And ask as you might, it is nearly impossible to find someone who can remove them. Once your rival steals your picture of mysterious gunman on the grassy knoll, you will never get the credit you deserve.

How to combat this sort of thing? The studio invasion is easy - a small swivel gun loaded with langridge and trained on the window is cheap and simple insurance. Okay, you may have to replace the glass and repaint the wall a couple of times but your average pirate will get the message quickly. The website thefts are another matter.

Watermarking, copyrighting, studio advertising, outright defacement, all serve to make an image unattractive to pirates. They also make it unattractive to clients. You can do a number of computer tricks that make it awkward to try to download something but eventually a client will roast you for making it difficult to do. And eventually every computer command system ages or breaks down - my Pong game is getting problematical.
Then YOU can't download, upload, or control it. And it lurches away forever telling people what a klutz you are. If you don't believe me look at all the computer sites that went feral in 2004 and are still there...

The safest way to present your work is still in print form, in a steel frame, with a strong chain attached to the edge of the frame. Hold on to one end of the chain with one hand and a cutlass with the other hand. Arrrrrr....

Who she? The fabulous Cap'n Jane. Curviest buccaneer in the Caribbean.

Gapping The Generations - Or Not Poking The Bear

I was scrapping for a topic this morning until I talked to Ernest, our chief technician. He mentioned that he had read a request from me for information - I had put it out on the internet. When I expanded on what I wanted to know and why, he had a word of caution for me.

I tend to take Ernest's words of caution seriously. I remember he once advised me NOT to stick my fingers into a live light socket and this proved to be quite correct. I wish I had listened then - at least I can listen now.

The question I posed was what the new operating system for my Macintosh computers was like - I was looking at the advertisement for the OSX Maverick. It seems to be three steps on from the one that is in the computers now. The underlying reason for this is the advent of some new cameras that attract me - if I am to use RAW files from them I need to upgrade the ACR rating...and in turn this means a later operating system.

At this point the image of a beagle chasing its tail in a circle comes to mind, but read on...

Ernest mentioned that the newer operating systems are now involving themselves with information storage elsewhere in the electronic universe - the "cloud" system. Call me paranoid, but by accepting the benefits of the new software I think I might  be sending my images who knows where and in turn they might not come back to me. They might come back to other people. Hmmmm.

Personal data? I don't mind mine going everywhere, except I don't want people to know exactly what I think in case I don't agree with me. I had a garlic curry that didn't agree with me and that was unpleasant enough...I think I have come to terms with the thought that whatever I write or look at is noted down in Langley, Virginia or somewhere in Russia. I can only hope that when I become feeble-minded with age they can send some of it back to me.

Ernest said it best - if what I have now does what I need now, I would be a fool to chase the electronic rainbow on the basis of a colourful advert from Apple or the pressure of the next camera. If I change my computer to a new one, I can go in clean with a new system and all the current ACR keys will be good - and a considerable number of ones for the future. But if what I got ain't broke...don't fix it.