This entrances me:

Cinco De Mayo Carnival from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.

2683 images, taken with 1 second exposures every 2 seconds. I like the ride at 2:15. Full-size link.

This morning’s post delivered a bunch of cheapo close-up filters - essentially magnifying glasses for the lens - so I spent the evening finally taking my ‘abstract’ pictures. I lost any sense of coherence after a while, but I’m hopeful there’ll be something usable. Some of the digital test shots turned out ok:

I’m hoping the filters didn’t degrade the slide quality too much.

I’ve been panicking over my ‘Urban Landscape’ project today. I have a massive sheet of ideas, all of which are either too ambitious - recreating this effect - or too dull - traffic cones in various odd places. So just before midnight I jumped into the car, slapped my camera onto a dashboard-mounted-monsterpod and went for a drive:

These turned out better than I expected, and would certainly fit the ‘urban landscape’ remit. I took a bunch of shots on slide film, but the daylight balance means they’ll all be way orange. Still, they might do, and if they’re nearly ok I can always get some filters…

It’s three and a half weeks until my photo projects are due in, and I’m currently flailing in PrePanic, hoping to avoid a full-on FreakOut. My abstract photos aren’t going well. I wanted to do camera-tossing, but the results weren’t all that great. There’s literally one good shot, with another that’s ok, and I really need 3 excellent / 5 not-bad. If I want to progress I need to throw the camera higher, so it can spin more during exposure, on scenes other than my computer monitor. But with only 3.5 weeks, slide film being expensive to buy/develop and slow to process, plus the possibility of wrecking my film camera, I can’t justify continuing with that one. I took way too long to decide this, hence today’s flailing.

So this afternoon I set up an idea I had last night. Here’s how it turned out on digital, and I haven’t processed the results beyond converting them from RAW. In theory, the developed slide film should look the same:

I was really happy with this. It’s basically a straw in a cup of lemonade, backlit by a coloured flash. This was perfect. Pretty, detailed and definitely abstract, I could easily come up with a few variations. So I switched to my film camera.

Nope.

None of my film lenses will focus close enough. If I back off I get un-abstract-background in the frame, and obviously slide film can’t be cropped in post-production. Even my cheap-and-cheerful 300mm zoom, once I was standing across the room, couldn’t handle it. My digital lens can presumably focus on objects closer to the lens because of some smaller-frame-optics thing I haven’t figured out yet. Dammit! It’s so frustrating to have the setup in place and be able to get good results, yet not on the medium required.

</damian>damned old technology. Who uses slide film anyway? What’s the point? Grumble grumble.<damian>

I need a macro lens, or maybe some extension tubes…It’d be cheapest to hire the former, I think. The university may be able to give me one, but that’ll take some time. Hmmm. Shall figure something out.

Tried to take some uni project photos this afternoon. Failed. Did this instead.

Will try again tomorrow.

I am now going to do something very very silly. I have to produce a set of abstract images, on slide film, for a uni project. While researching I came across camera tossing - a technique in which you throw your camera into the air while it’s taking a picture. This can produce utterly lovely results:

And it can also total your camera beyond repair. Various techniques and approaches for avoiding this outcome are detailed here, but it’s always a risk. I’m generally an ok catch - a benefit of learning to juggle - but I hadn’t twigged that I’d have to catch the camera in the dark. I had a brief, terrifying attempt with my digital SLR, and came out with this:

Which convinced me it’s worth trying out on slides. I originally intended to use a Very Old film SLR which could be destroyed without causing upset, but on inspection today it needs old+weird+expensive batteries, so I’m instead going to go with my Old But Still Pretty Good film SLR. I could cope with its devolving into a million pieces, but I’d really rather not.

I’m using old-school Velvia film, which has frankly insane colour saturation (never, ever photograph people with it). Should be fun, although I have visions of my SLR hitting the floor on shot 36 and sending the film spilling out…I’ll report back in a bit, if I’m not sobbing in a corner.

Update: Ok, that’s one roll exposed. Nothing broken, thank goodness. I put a load of pillows on the (wooden) floor, and the camera hit them a few times. I also caught it by the lens once or twice. My camera now hates me. I’ll take the film into Jessops tomorrow, then it’s a quaint 48hr wait for the results.

Abode released a beta of Lightroom 2.0 this morning, which was quite the surprise. The feature list is impressive, but most interesting are:

• Much better Photoshop integration. Images can now be sent directly into CS3 without requiring an export. It can also send a group of pictures straight through to be merged into a panorama or HDR image. Now they’ve implemented this feature I really don’t see the need for Bridge, Photoshop’s built-in image browser.
• Localised masking. This is the big, attention-grabbing one - Lightroom can now edit specific areas of images. It’s nicely implemented, although since it links so well into Photoshop I might just use that instead. Well, I say that. In practice it might be quicker to do lots in Lightroom - we’ll see.
• Smart collections. These are a bit like iTunes’ Smart Playlists. You can configure a bunch of rules, each with individual AND/OR inclusion settings, that give you a very nice way of focussing on specific images. So you can have a dynamically created set of recently-edited images, or anything with the keyword ‘monkeys’ taken last May, with a wide-angle lens. Etc..
• Dual-monitor support. I’ve got two monitors, so I can have the smaller one displaying an overview of an image as I change particular elements. Or it can show the grid of photos while I edit on the main monitor. My smaller monitor’s colours are a bit dodgy, but it’s still useful as a rough guide.

There’s a fair bit more: export sharpening, better filters, a loupe in the details panel, and the interface has been overhauled and some of the existing features tweaked. A full guide is here.

Scott Kelby etc. have some introductory videos up, and their FAQ has some interesting details. They reckon the full version will be released June-ish, and there won’t be any beta updates between now and then. No word on pricing yet.

I’ve been playing around with it today and they’ve certainly been listening to the feedback. Lots of things work just that bit better, but it’s the Photoshop links that are the most useful for me. There are a couple of bugs, as is to be expected with betas, but nothing show-stopping yet. The program was pretty good already, but v2 adds enough that I can’t see me not buying the upgrade.

Because I own version 1.3 I can invite people to be on the beta program for six months - otherwise you’re limited to a 30-day trial - so let me know if you’d like an invite.

My favourite, in a slightly disturbing way:

Via the increasingly-sucking-up-my-free-time metafilter. I’ve known about that site for years, but I’m only just starting to appreciate it.

I’ve recently been applying for summer internships. I’ll have a few months free after uni finishes in late May, so I thought I’d make the most of it. I’ve had three rejections this week, but today I received a acceptance letter! Woohoo! It’s not finalised, but if I get this right I’ll be a trainee with the photographic staff of the Daily Mail from mid-June to mid-September.  Apparently they have a fair few applicants, and they’ll judge on the basis of a project that I have to complete before the end of next week. I need to supply pictures of ‘people who don’t fit in’ in my local area. I’m not quite sure what this means, but they recommend it be on the basis of accent, or the type of work they do, or something like that. Shouldn’t be too hard. Once this is complete their photoshop experts will get to work, and who knows - I might even make the paper! Most chuffed.

Today’s Dinosaur Comic tells of Edward S. Curtis, an early 20th century photographer who photographed American Indians in highly subjective style. Not wanting to disappoint stereotypes, he deliberately dressed his subjects in ‘Indian’ garb and removed all signs of modernity. Most people bristle at this. Even if his motives were virtuous - he possibly thought he was documenting and ennobling a ‘dying’ race - this kind of manipulation seems akin to lying.

But at the same time plenty of photographers were travelling far and wide, offering their services to people never before photographed, and I recently learnt that many took along their own backgrounds. They produced thousands of images of…people…, all with the same lighting and against the same scene. I instinctively don’t like this either, but it’s harder to say why. What would the ‘correct’ background add? It would likely only be a very small area, and hardly representative of the surrounding environment. I don’t object to modern-day high-street portrait studios, either.

To me the photos don’t feel false, just disappointing - is this because of the missed opportunity to capture these people in their environments (despite the word ‘documentary’ not being invented until the 20s)? Or could it be that people looked roughly the same 100 years ago as they do now, and the lack of anchoring context robs me of the romance of empathy? I can (kinda) imagine myself in the place of an 1890s farmer working the fields, but in a staged, fixed-background picture there’s nothing to latch onto - it could be any old dude. Accompanying text can tell me who these people are, but this doesn’t produce the same kind of connection as actually seeing photographic ‘proof’. Why do I care about feeling a connection, anyway?

Odd. I don’t have any kind of conclusion here, it’s just an aspect of photographic theory I find interesting. Photos produce weirdly abstracted feelings, sometimes.

I headed to a local Ball last Saturday. It was a reasonably posh affair arranged by the Midland Amateur Dancers club, and in a large octagonal hall that I remember being daunting for beginners (right angles are the norm). I was on my own, and unfortunately didn’t know anybody other than my dance teachers. I was probably the youngest attendee - the average age was likely late 50s - which makes it slightly awkward to find a partner. Having said that, it wasn’t really the kind of night for asking strangers to dance anyway¹. I ended up having just the one cha-cha, with my teacher.

It wasn’t a total loss, though. When taken to my seat I immediately noticed two enormous Nikons on the table, and the guy next to me turned out to be official photographer for the World Championships(!). I introduced myself and we got chatting. I asked for advice on photographing dances, as I’ve been churning out mediocre results for years. His primary tip was to know the subject - he was a competitive dancer for 40 years, so could anticipate routines and their best photographic moments. He was photographing the night’s competition, and generously made a point of showing me how to handle the situation. It’s actually ok to physically move people into good positions - apparently people’s desire to look good in photos outweighs usual social norms (which sounds vain, but isn’t really).

It also helps if you have a stupidly powerful flash. Dance venues are often enormous and it can be tricky to balance light across the photo. Unfortunately this size offers few opportunities to soften light by bouncing it, so blasting across the floor is the only option. I don’t like direct flash much, and full-frontal light doesn’t do dancers any favours imho - I might work on some wireless off-camera setups, maybe work it into an appropriate uni project at some point.

I was then abruptly asked if I’d be stand-in photographer at a competition in May! Yikes. I agreed as it’ll be great experience, but I’m nervous already. I practiced a little on the night:

Most of my shots came out underexposed, which was deliberate - I’d rather have a sharp, darker image than a properly-exposed shot in which the dancers are blurred. I brought back much of the detail in Lightroom, and my newly-arrived copy of Photoshop got a workout too. Colours are a nightmare, however.

I hadn’t been looking forward to going alone, but it turned out to be a surprisingly interesting and productive evening. I learnt a lot, and I’m very grateful to the Proper Photographer for putting up with my annoying questions.

1. possibly a rationalisation, but my teachers are normally good at pointing out suitable candidates, and even they were at a loss [↩]

Photojojo just publicly launched their Time Capsule system, which emails you twice a month with your Flickr photos from a year ago. I had a sneak preview of this, and it’s a delightful little thing: very simple, infrequent enough to retain its charm, and oddly fascinating.

The Focus on Imaging photography fair was at the NEC on Sunday, so my friend Ben and I headed along. It was a bit nuts. Over a hundred vendors demonstrated cameras, tripods, lighting equipment, software, frame-making services etc., and everything was for sale. Happily, very very little came anything near my price range.

Photography is an inescapably expensive hobby, but it’s ripe for exploitation. Case in point: at one point we were grabbed by an ExpoDisc salesman. The ExpoDisc is a filter that approximates 18% grey, the point being to slip it over the lens and generate a custom white balance for the scene. It filters light with prisms and “some kind of white material”; no price was given. We politely moved on, then later discovered they cost £50. £50! The same effect is achievable with five seconds’ extra effort and a piece of card - this would also let you white balance for specific lights, rather than the entire scene.

There were plenty of such products on display. A large crowd gathered around a demonstration of software apparently designed to automatically airbrush the hell out of already beautiful women - I’m far from a no-editing purist, but flawless skin and glowing highlights look ridiculous imho. Nevertheless the software was undeniably powerful and probably easy to use, which counts for a lot if you (for some reason) desire the end result; indeed, there were a few Photoshop plugin packages that seemed to consist entirely of scripted actions.

It wasn’t all like that, though - there was plenty of Cool Stuff too. High-quality printers were churning out A1 prints in just a few minutes, with paper manufacturers close by. The Nikon stand¹ demonstrated 52-point autofocus systems, while Canon’s platform housed a bank of Serious Cameras with Serious Lenses, all bolted to the floor and usable by the general public. I slipped my memory card into an EOS 1-Ds Mark III with a 500mm lens, which cost £4500 and £3800 respectively:

The full JPEG is 20 megapixels. Quite nice. The camera weighs as much as a mature badger, however, so I don’t think I’ll get one.

I felt weirdly intimidated, walking around. We were surrounded by Proper Photographers, all of whom looked extremely knowledgeable, capable and tall (seriously, I was average height at school, what happened?) and at times I felt like a play-acting child. I was too intimidated to try out the Canon until Ben wisely talked me into it. Hopefully I’ll get better at that.

We drooled over macro lenses and the non-bonkers cameras for a while, but somehow managed not to buy anything, despite being tempted by reasonably priced (ish) monitor calibration tools and instant-camera-cred lens hoods. I found it very interesting to see all this equipment in person - it removed some of the product-shot mystique, at least.

1. Ben took a wrong turn at an early technological crossroads and as a result is a Nikon lad. I attempted to educate him in the Ways of Righteousness, but was sadly unsuccessful. I’ll keep trying [↩]

I had a happy lighting accident this evening:

T-Rex is standing on a mirror, in front of a white background. I fired a flash with red “gel” (actually a silk handkerchief from my old magic gear) into the mirror at 40ish degrees to my left. I expected the red filter to give a bloody, macabre feel, and the resulting pink/purple gradient took me by surprise. I love the effect, but I’m puzzled - surely it should go from bright red –> dark red –> black? I’m wondering whether it’s a white balance thing, although I can’t see how that makes sense…

I hope to read this post in a few months and think “that’s so obvious”.

My university’s library has a huge photography section, and I’m allowed to keep books indefinitely providing nobody else requests them. I checked out Martin Evening’s guide to Adobe Lightroom in late November, and quickly glanced at some issues that were confusing me at the time. The book has been in the ‘I should really read that properly’ pile ever since, until yesterday when guilt got the better of me. I moved it to the ‘take back to uni’ pile, then just before midnight started flicking through it. I was still going at 0200.

Adobe Lightroom is my favourite image processing program, and I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how to use it. I really didn’t. The Lightroom manual detailed a huge variety of tips and tricks, as well as a few features I’d somehow missed. It also took me step by step through a digital workflow, explaining when it’s best to make each adjustment, giving basic primers in tonal range and broadly indicating what I should be trying to achieve. For example, I now understand how Lightroom tells me about overblown highlights, know a quick way to temporarily view only these pure-white areas of an image, and can judge which to leave intact. I also now see that Lightroom’s tone curves are much more powerful than I realised, and are in fact superior to Photoshop’s. I’d only scraped the surface of their functionality before.

I wish I’d read this book months ago! I re-edited a batch of photos using the book’s workflow suggestions this morning, and they all looked much better. Embarrassingly so - I replaced their Flickr versions immediately. 

I should have known better. I’m reasonably proficient in Dreamweaver, and that’s entirely down to working through a huge manual when I bought the full version. Such complex software is fun to play around with, but playing can’t pick up design rationales and subtleties. Lesson re-learned.