Newsletters

11 October 2015

Love it or Hate it - HDR images can help overcome the limitations that all cameras have around their sensitivity to light and their ability to handle high contrast scenes.  I have 2 photos that seem to have attracted more attention than any of my others.  One is of Coniston Water at Sunset, and the other one is sunset over Tweed Bridge and the Old Parish Church of Peebles.   These are very different images, but the one thing they have in common is that they are both High Dynamic Range, or HDR photos.

Unlike the human eye, cameras can only record a limited range of brightness before either the lightest parts of the image (highlights, the sun, the sky) become pure white, or the darkest parts (the shadows) pure black.  In bright, high contrast scenes, A camera can normally be set to properly record one of these extremes, but it can be impossible to do both.  Photographers of old would use graduated filters (below), which are darker at the top and clear at the bottom, to help lower the brightness of the highlights (usually the sky) in the image closer to that of the darker areas, meaning that the whole image was then within the sensitivity range of the film, or camera sensor.  A drawback with a graduated filter though is that very few landscapes have straight lines in them, so particularly in hilly scenes, you'd end up with darker hilltops than valleys, where you had to place the graduation to make the sky darker.  It became a bit of an artform knowing where to place the graduation!  Grad filters are also expensive!

Then digital imaging and digital photography came along...  Being able to computerise an image made it a lot easier to manipulate and make changes to images to help compensate for some of these old camera and film limitations (and in fact ignite a whole creative industry manipulating and changing photos to compensate for many other things, allowing new tools and techniques to be invented, and completely destroying the old truth that the camera never lies!)

HDR is one of the techniques that has been created out of digital photography.  I personally find it an interesting tool that, if used properly, can produce images that better represent what your eyes (amazing optical devices connected to a supercomputer brain that see in HDR - and more! - by default) would have seen, but that the camera is incapable of capturing in a single image.  A photographer will shoot a series of photos of a scene, each with a different exposure (usually increasing or decreasing the shutter speed for each image) so that, within the series, you've captured the brightest and darkest parts of the image, as well as everything in between.  These images can then be combined in software to create a single image covering the entire dynamic range / brightness in the scene.

Here are the 4 images that went into making up the Parish Church HDR photo.  You can see that the images on the left have too bright a sky but the trees, grass, bridge and church are perfectly exposed.  The images on the right have shadows that are too dark, but you can see the colour in the sky that made the sunset so lovely.  You can see that, if you could merge all of these photos together, you'd get something nice.  However, I bet you're looking at these photos and thinking "well they're pretty average, aren't they!" and I think you'd be right!  More of that in a minute...

Once you've merged the images, the software lets you tweak the final image.  It's this manipulation that can make or break an HDR photo, and is what makes HDR such a "marmite" technique amongst photographers.  Many people don't like HDR as so many photos they've seen have been over-processed so as to look unrealistic, over saturated and containing ghosts, halos and artefacts that detract from the actual scene.  But then some scenes can benefit from more extreme processing - particularly industrial landscapes.  In terms of the Peebles image, well you can see I had a bit of fun with the processing!

My Coniston sunset and Peebles sunset were my first real experiments in HDR, with the Coniston sunset having the technique applied far more subtly than the Peebles sunset, partly due to the fact the Coniston sunset had far less contrast between light and dark than the Peebles sunset.  In fact, as I found out later, I didn't need to use HDR in the Coniston sunset as there was enough dynamic range in one photo (it wasn't too light or too dark) that I could create an almost identical photo without using HDR.  The original is on the left, and the resulting image is on the right.  I could never have done that with the Peebles photo though!

You can see that the Coniston HDR image processing is a lot more natural than with the Peebles photo, although you're probably still wondering how it's possible to turn the image on the left into the image on the right!  The answer is, it's possible to use the software to add a grad filter!  It's another tool in the toolbox than can compensate for lack of expensive equipment, but you've got to have an image with enough light data in it to work with.  In this case, I did!

Now this leads us on nicely to another thorny subject:  Post processing - cheating or not?  Maybe I'll leave that for another day though! :)

I hope you've found this interesting, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Have a look at some more HDR images over on Flickr:  HDR Images on Flickr

9 August 2015

What happens when people actually want to buy your work?  It might sound like a silly title for an article on a website where I have my work for sale, but the practicalities of actually selling stuff hadn't really occurred to me when I set up my website.  Obviously I hoped  that the awesome people looking at my website (that's you! :) ) might like my work enough to want to buy it, but I don't think I ever really considered that anyone would actually click "buy"!

Only you did!  And at that point I realised that the way I'd set up my website really didn't work well if you wanted to buy things!  Doh...

For starters, very few of my pictures properly fitted the paper sizes I was offering.  Yes, you all know what an A4 or A3 piece of paper looks like, but that isn't the shape of the picture as it comes out of my camera, or the shape of the picture I put together.  So that meant that you, the customer, had to crop my photo to fit the paper - not ideal for either of us, particularly if you liked the picture in its entirety!  (I know I did, which is why I took it that way)

Secondly, what exactly was it you wanted to buy?  The website gave you (and me) the option to buy prints on photographic paper at different sizes, and it was really easy to set up and run - ideal!  Only it isn't if you consider what you're buying (and what I'm selling) is a piece of art to go on a wall, rather than just a nice photo.  You might want it to be a bit special - I know I do!    So photographic paper might not cut it.

I've spent some time recently working with a very patient customer to refine the print sizes, prices and available options, making sure they fit the photos and can accommodate pictures of different proportions.  I've worked with my suppliers to make sure that the website (and myself) can cope with the changes I've made, which means I can now offer a far more personal service, with more appealing print and display options.  This barely scratches the surface of the print and framing options available from each of my suppliers, but I'm working on the basis that simple is best, and if you want something specific, I can probably get it.

The print samples were a real revelation to me - the descriptions don't do them justice and I'll try to upload some photos that do!  The fine art papers are fantastic - each with a different character and texture.  I really wanted to see how each of the papers handled the detail and colour in the photos, as logically (you'd think!) detail would be lost in some of the rougher textured papers and colours would perhaps be more subdued.  I was genuinely impressed at how well these papers retained detail - I don't think anything was lost over normal photographic paper, even on the rougher papers.  The colours were as bright and vibrant as you'd want and expect from a photograph, but because these papers are generally have a matte finish, they almost look like velvet.  I think they'll look particularly stunning behind glass!

I was really keen to see the metallic paper and I wasn't disappointed - WOW!  What an amazing effect it has on the pictures!  Whilst it is a smooth, glossy photographic paper, the metallic base adds a real depth to the image.  I've seen that written before and never really understood what was meant by that, but in this case, the image almost took on a 3D quality.  I think would be particularly well suited to some of the abstract or detailed work and particularly infrared, where it's as if you've printed the photo on silver paper.   However it does still have a stunning effect on normal landscapes!

I'll hopefully add a canvas to my sample pack in the next month or so, but given the price, I want to make sure it's something I want to hang up on my wall and I can kill 2 birds with one stone! :)

I've also given the site a bit of a refresh.  A friend pointed out to me that, for a photography site, I wasn't showing an awful lot of photography on the front page!  So I've fixed that :)  Hopefully you like the changes, but as always, I'm happy to receive feedback, particularly if something doesn't work for you.  I'll be changing some of the images over the next few days and add some new photos I've taken over the last few months.

PRINTS DOWNLOADS, CANVAS WALL ART

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

DELIVERY TIMESCALE

At vero eos et accusamus et iusto odio dignissimos ducimus qui blanditiis praesentium voluptatum deleniti atque corrupti quos dolores et quas molestias excepturi sint occaecati cupiditate non provident, similique sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollitia animi, id est laborum et dolorum fuga. Et harum quidem rerum facilis est et expedita distinctio.

• Nam libero tempore - 2-3  days
• Soluta nobis est eligendi - 7 days
• Temporibus autem - courier delivery