I know this isn't much of an exciting photo but I was excited to have used it in the latest website I have made. Geoff needed a photo of himself with the equipment that he specialises in so I went along to photograph it. 

I then used the photo on the home page of the website I made and another close up of flow meters for a separate page. Although I'm learning these different skills independently it's nice when they overlap and I get to use both of them on the same project.

I'll be making a few more websites like this one in the coming weeks.

These are a few photos I took from the Vivid light show at Sydney this last month. The Cathedral photo was particularly hard to photograph because the image that was projected onto it was changing fairly quickly. This prevented me from shooting long exposures which would have made all the photos blurry. So I used a high ISO and a fast 50mm lens, which allowed for a quicker shutter speed. This meant I had to get as far back as I could to get the whole building into view, I wish I could have gotten just a little further back to get more of the people in the foreground but there just wasn't room.

The Cathedral is impressive under normal lighting conditions but when they turned the light's on for the Vivid show it was amazing. Easily the most impressive of the light show.

This photo of Sydney Harbour bridge and the Opera House was also taken at the Vivid light show. I used a long exposure to capture the moving trees in the foreground. Well it was only a couple of minutes long but it felt longer because it was so cold that night. I love the fact that you can see star trails in the sky. Astro photography is something I would love to get into, however I imagine it is about the most difficult type of photography there is.

Next week I plan on shooting some landscape photos under moonlight. Ever since I read a great article on how to do it over at the DPExperience. 

check out the gallery

I've always read in photographic books to protect the highlights. More recently since the advent of digital photography and especially the widespread use of RAW images I have been hearing we should expose for the highlights because the brighter sections of a scene contain a lot more information than the shadows do. The way we do this is by making sure that the spikes on your camera's histogram are pushed to the right but not clipped. Enough of the technical gobbledy goop.

This is a very important rule to keep in mind because it a) ensures that you keep all that precious detail in the image and b)it also ensures good colour results. There have been many times when I have under or over exposed an image and ended up with a strong colour cast or with a very flat and dull image. And now that everything is digital the practice of protecting those tones could not be easier, all we have to do is check the histogram on the back of our camera to make sure neither the right or left side is clipped.

I agree with this rule when shooting but as soon as I get in the digital darkroom 'anything goes'. Often my workflow includes trying to capture an image with as much information as possible - i.e. with highlights and shadows exposed for, and then when I process the image I deliberately clip details by blowing out the highlights (as in the image above) or by clipping the shadows.

This two things for my images. The first is it adds drama to the scene by giving it strong contrast and 'punchy' colours. The second is something I learnt from reading Trey Radcliff's book (A World in HDR) which relates to colour theory and how we interpret colours. In its simplest it is the theory that we all view images and interpret colours relative to other colours in close proximity. Therefore a light grey around some other colours may appear to be a pure white because there is actually no pure white in the scene from which to compare it. Therefore it is important to include a true black and or a pure white in a scene (if appropriate) in order to give the viewer a point of reference. This will effectively enhance how the other colours are viewed.

I don't usually get this technical but I felt I had a point to make. The thing I try to remember is to expose for the highlights when shooting but don't clip any data. However when it comes time to process the images feel free to go crazy with contrast and colour.

Koala munching on a leaf - GalleryThe light hitting this little Koala was really soft, it helped to make it's coat look really cuddly also the fact that you can't see it's nasty looking claws helps as well.

I used a Gaussian blur to soften the edges of details around the coat and in the background, and I used a high pass filter to sharpen areas of the image I thought needed it - such as the Koala's eye and the leaf it is holding.

I have talked about sharpening and the high pass filter in one of my previous posts so I won't go into it again here. I just thought I would share this photo because most people outside of Australia are amazed by these marsupials. 

Have a great day.

Gallery Images

This image took longer than normal to edit. Because it was shot through thick glass a lot of tweaking had to be done to bring back sharpness, clarity colour saturation and temperature. (see original below). Again, I hate to keep banging on about this but I simply could not have made so much adjustment without the file format being RAW. It allowed me to extract the most out of the original image data.

The high pass filter in photoshop is an often overlooked tool in bringing out midtone contrast and sharpening. Up until recently I didn't know what it was and where to find it. Now it has become an essential part of my workflow as has a new masking method and vignette technique. In the coming blog posts I'll be exploring  these techniques, but for now I just wanted to post this image together with the original to demonstrate how powerful these tools are.