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.

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

Being An Upright Photographer

Last year I had a chance to see an exhibition of photographs prints that had been taken in and around the City of Perth. We might not necessarily think of our town as an exotic place for photos...but the vision of the photographers was acute enough to find dozens of unique and memorable sights. Some of these were historical but a complete mystery to me - I'm glad there were captions.

One point of amazement was how many of Perth's buildings are built with walls that slope inwards from the bottom. I think that the designers must have been trained on Mayan ziggurats...or maybe they just ran out of materials as they went higher and had to make the buildings narrower.

Of course, it may have been to counteract the forces of nature, as I noted in about 20% of the entries that the horizon sloped down from right to left or vice versa. Perhaps the buildings were only reacting to the shifting gravity. Amazing how well the ocean stayed on some prints, when it should have dripped off to the side...

Well, snide comments aside, it did point out the basic optical fact that when you point your camera up or down get in all of the top or bottom of a building, the structure will seem to taper away from you. Your eye sees it as well, but when your brain processes the information it lies to you and tells you the building walls are straight up and down, because it knows they probably are. The camera is a much more literal observer.

Pro shooters have known for years that they need to keep the camera level get the building walls vertical. Even if it is just the back of the camera, it has to be straight up and down to avoid distortion of the image. This means that the person taking the picture has to be far enough away or use a wide enough angle on the lens to get the part of the building they want on the sensor...and in some cases it means that they have to half-way up a building nearby their target to satisfy all the criteria.

Old timers like me who used view and field cameras with rising and falling fronts and lenses with a large coverage could sometimes fiddle this to perfection from ground level . Modern digital shooters with tilt/shift lenses (Nikon, Canon, Samyang) can also do it.

If pressed to it we can also go into many of the digital editing programs like Photoshop and Photoshop Elements and pick a portion of the filters that will correct this distortion. It is amazing to see how far a bad situation can be recovered, though not getting that far away from the correct shooting makes the repair a lot easier.

At this point I will admit that there are any number of photographs that have wildly converging verticals and have benefited from the look - they have been made with a deliberate use of the forced perspective to make an artistic statement. It is only the ones that have tried to be realistic and failed that we address with the special lenses or programs.

As for the tilting horizon? Well, Cullmann, Manfrotto, and Promaster all make extremely neat little bubble levels that will allow you yo shoot with the camera level to the horizon. Lots of camera s have artificial horizon indicators built into the EVF or LCD display. If you use them they work.

If your image passes through a computer between your camera and the printer...then take the time to correct that horizon in the editing program. Even if you have to measure the screen with a wooden school ruler you can still make your vision conform to the way gravity actually works.

Left Or Right To See The Sights - Tilt/Shift part Two

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In the first column that looked at the Samyang 24mm f:3.5 tilt/shift lens we turned the little plastic knob that shot the lens structure off the central optical axis in an arc. If we waggled it left or fight we could induce the Scheimpflug effect ( I'll wait here while you Google it. Come back after you're done...) and we got sharp focus along a lot longer area of a studio subject.

Today we take the lens out and leave it looking straight ahead... but we make it shift from side to side like a nervous kid to see what it does.

Here is our street shot in the afternoon*. Camera on a tripod, artificial level indicator turned on in the LCD, horizon about mid way.

Here is the shot with the lens racked to the left.

Here is the shot with the lens racked to the right. The camera position remains exactly the same.

And here is the result of the two images emerged in Photomerge - the Photoshop feature inside their editing programs. Not a glorious scenic prospect, but an easy way to get about a 2.8:1 panorama picture. You've got to help the program by giving it clean stuff to work with and you still have to remember your horizon and your light levels, but once you get the two good shots the computer can assemble them with minimal distortion.

I'm afraid our suburb is deficient in sky scrapers, thank goodness, and I could not do the classic architectural shot of the Empire State Building to show you how this sort of lens renders tall buildings with correct perpendiculars - but take it from me that it does. You would still benefit from being halfway or so up the side of a building opposite the one you are targeting and back far enough to give the lens full play in upper extension, but the effect is both magical and professional.

* Fujifilm X-Pro1 with the film simulation set to Provia mode.

$ 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...

Click. Click. Clickclickclickclick.....

Some camera users are lucky - they get to do things that other people are prevented from.

Take for example the user of the large -format wet plate camera with the Petzval lens. Like you see at every football game down on the goal line...they operate their shutter by taking off the lens cap - or by covering and uncovering the lens with their bowler hat. They are not restricted to 1 second-1/4000 second exposures. They can keep their hat off the shutter as long as they like and get the whole game in. It won't be in focus, but then that's what you get when you support certain teams...

Likewise the users of some cameras that decouple mechanical shutters from film advance or electronic capture - they can overlay shot after shot on one frame. Done cleverly, it is science. Done randomly, it is art. Done inadvertently, it is modern art.

The users of the more mundane digital cameras have to do it differently - if they are locked out of multiple exposures by the camera design they have to take separate exposures and blend them in Photoshop. Do-able, and not hard.

Some DSLR designs will permit multiple shots on one frame. Be sure that if you engage this setting for artistic purpose that you disengage it when you are finished. Putting an entire European holiday on one frame of the card is probably not a good idea.

Note that one manufacturer makes multiple exposure provision that accommodates itself  to the measured light of the scene and divides the exposure accordingly. Set-piece and tabletop photographers can make some interesting effects using this.

Aw, SHOOT! Guess I Better Get Along To Learn How To Do It.

Well...yes... SHOOT Photography Workshops is a very good idea if you want to learn how to do it. And here are a few new dates to put in your calendar for just that purpose:

August 8th is this saturday morning. If you'd like to go to the beginner's workshop entitled Digital Stills with  Anthony Wilson - and it is only $ 99 for a full four hours between 12:00 and 4:00PM - email to   shannon@shootworkshops.com.au.

On August 15 Nick Melidonis will help new learners to begin to cope with the Adobe Photoshop editing program. It is knowledge that we ALL need to make out photographs sing, and Nick is a good teacher - or should that be choirmaster? Whatever, Saturday the 15th and the course runs from 10:00 AM to 4:00PM. $ 249...email Shannon as per the note above.

Okay - now the next one was a mystery to me until I phoned Shannon myself.

On Saturday the 22nd of August Dale Neill will be speaking about " Broken Images ". Dale has seen a lot of photo competitions and noted the entries that are submitted - but that will never be considered for recognition and prizes. He's inviting people to bring a few of their own shots for consideration but the most important message will be how to avoid the " broken " images that rule you out of contention.

If you are at all interested in competitive photography and the exhibition image this would be a very good $ 49 spent - and Dale is a good speaker as well. Phone Shannon on 9228 8232 if you'd like to book in or use the email system.

Last cab off the rank for the more advanced photographer is a chance to tune your food photography skills with Stefan Gosatti on Wednesday, August the 26th. Running between 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM, this will be $ 199 worth of very up-to-the-minute instruction from someone who knows food and photography on a pro level. I don't think he swears like Gordon Ramsay, so that is a good thing.

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...

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.

The Annual Leap Of Faith

Spring is here, the grass is riz. I wonder where the annual update to Photoshop Elements is...

Ah, It's on the net. Just announced today in fact. I daresay we'll get some boxed sets of them fairly shortly...but don't ring me up this morning to ask when because I don't know.
Suffice it to say that if you are banging out your work on an older version, this might be a good investment.

I fit into the banging away category - I started my digital adolescence with the Elements 3 version - got free with a scaner. Then I bought Elements 6, and eventually went to Elements 10. Each one was separated far enough in generation to encompass real improvements while retaining most of the useful features of the past.

Note that I said " most " - in between 6 and 10 they ditched some paste-in graphics that they considered tired. In reality they were useful - I am going to go back and capture them and store them for future use. You can never tell when you'll need a Drum Majorette's cap to put onto a bridesmaid...

The new Photoshop Elements 12 seems to have additional features that move items in the picture and then fill in the backdrop behind them. Very useful for street and event photography. There is also an improvement to the straighten tool that settles the horizon and then fills in the little wedge-shaped blank areas at the side with similar content to the main subject.

I am also looking forward to an automatic colour correct that has the capability to learn your preferences and to slap it on at a click. I hope to use other plug-ins to custom craft a look that I can teach to the Photoshop Elements 12 - then I'll just go straight to it for a 50's look. You can do that with the plug-ins now but you are bouncing back and forward to do it. One stop shop is the go.

Is this program prestigious and complex enough for your photographic business? If you need prestige and complexity to sell your services go for the full PS6 Cloud and add a host of special layers and curves and extra operations. The clients will notice, or not, as the case may be...Make sure you tell them about how you spend hours at the computer hand-crafting their images.

Make sure they don't ever get to see what your editing desktop really looks like. Coffee cup rings on your laptop never look good. Especially when they are on the screen...