Tag: Photography

September 27, 2012 Photography

Elan Valley, the return to be.

I *still* blame my good friend, it’s all her fault…. 🙂

I am so enamored with the place that I want to go back, and spend the time taking some of the shots I missed. (principally due to light being wrong – i.e. the sun in the wrong place in the sky)

Having thought about it quite hard, I think I have decided that I am going to ride the route, yes, ride, by bike, and not the Harley I don’t have, but pedal power, human (sorta – it is me we are talking about here) driven.

I’ve already plotted the route, all 33.7 miles of it, here.

Scary thing is, as you can see from the link, that I am likely to burn through 5500 calories, and that is just with my weight.
It doesn’t take into account the weight I will be carrying camera wise – or even food and water.

Camera-wise, my 7D coupled with the 24-70mm f/2.8 lens on it’s own is 2.5kgs.

I may even take my EOS 1v, and potentially with a 24-105mm f/4 on it – which is another 2.5kgs.

I am also going to need around 750-1000ml of water per hour if it’s a nice sunny day.

Each litre of water weighs a kilo, so, depending on how long this is going to take me, remember I’m not going to be doing this as a single non-stop ride, I’m gonna need a lot of water.

Lets put this into context – 33.7 miles, it would theoretically take me no more than 2 hours to do if I’m riding my racing bike at my normal decent clip (about 90 minutes should do) – thing is though, I’m going to be stopping regularly to take photographs, so my pace is going to be well off a “normal” ride, as low as 6mph – maybe even as low as 4mph.

I’m also not likely to do the whole thing quite in the order that it is listed as a “route” – as I will need to be in different places at different times of day, and that route plan doesn’t take that into consideration.

Remember here, I am going here to take photographs, and to do so requires light, and more importantly, light in the correct direction, hence the to-ing and fro-ing.

It’s no good to try and take a shot of some wooded area, with a narrow slice of sky in the background, which is nice and bright from the sun, but the wooded area is shaded from light, because the sun is the wrong side – as the contrast between the two gives you a shot that is basically a completely blown out sky, or a wooded area so under-exposed, you may as well have taken a shot of a black piece of card.

Anyway, back to that distance at the minimum, those 33.7 miles is therefore going to take me 5-8 hours maybe, so that’s 5-8 litres of water, or another 5-8kgs to carry.

And I’ve not touched on food….
6000 calories is a helluva lot of food, one site says 76 hard boiled eggs.

Hell!!! I’m not gonna carry 76 boiled eggs !!!!!
Or even 20 McDonald’s Cheesburgers………..

So, whatever the food requirements are, I am going to have to take them with me – lots of high density energy food is going to be required, but again extra weight.

To carry all this gear, I am either going to need to be a little mad and have it all in a backpack on my bike, or better, in a little trailer I can hook up to my bike, they really ain’t designed to have a trailer hooked up to them.
That means my mountain bike – which is about a billion times heavier than my racer…. more weight..

More weight = more calories = denser food…

Or just say to hell with it, and understand that I am going to be in a proper calorie deficit that day…

Damn – too complicated to figure out the calories, so buy myself a bike trailer and just do it with what I “feel” will be right.

That, I think is my final answer….

Now – when is this crappy weather going to break so as to be decent enough for me to do this at a weekend ?
That is the bigger question.

September 15, 2012 Photography

Wales – Part 2, Victorian Engineering Excellence.

I blame my good friend.

It all started with a conversation with my friend about the potential for meeting up in Wales during my holiday, and the routes that we both take to virtually the same place that we frequent in Wales. (like about 3 miles apart!!!)

Me, I like night cruising up the motorway in my RS4, cruise control on, clear road in front of me, no idiots about, and due to my normal, preferred, time of travel, listening to the “Best time of the day show” with Alex Lester on BBC Radio 2.

My friend however, well, she drives up the back roads, and up past the Elan Valley.

It was this discussion about the route, her recommendation that it was a beautiful place, and my interest in the fascinating history behind the Elan Valley that made me decide to wonder home via this route after my few days shooting my fast jets.

Well, I wasn’t disappointed, not by half.

It’s amazing!

It’s like all Victorian Engineering, supersized, supremely simple, but at the same time, craftily complex.

It’s immense, solid, even overkill, but, beautiful, and all well engineered.

If you don’t know about it’s history, or engineering, then I recommend going here to have a look at some of the history.
(Yes, it appears to be a little kid orientated, but, I have to say, I did enjoy reading it, and it did it’s job – provide more enticement for me to visit)

Bottom line, is that the Victorians wanted to give Birmingham some drinking water, and wanted to do it without a pumping station, so, they built a few dams, and one long pipe, and let gravity and nature do the rest.

Yeah – gravity…..

It’s gravity that feeds the water from the Elan Valley all the way (70 something miles) to Birmingham.

Now, to me, that is impressive.

What is also impressive, is that most of this pipe from Elan Valley to Birmingham is covered, and hidden – that took some thought to get done.

Well, enough about the engineering itself, and back to the lovely views that it gives.

When driving around the valley, there are times that you have a nice gurgling stream next to the road, and driving round a corner, you get a *WHAM* – an immense view of a stone damn, rising strong, proud and forceful out the ground to hold back the vast lake behind it.

When I was there, there were a group of engineers on the road above one of the damns, abseiling down the front face to clear the face of weeds and small trees that have started to grow in the cracks.
To do this, the water level in the lake behind had been dropped to allow them to work on the face of the damn without tonnes of water flowing over and down.

I don’t know whether this made for an extra *wow* factor, as this particular damn, Claerwen, being dry, was just so “solid”, I am not sure what he view would have been like had their been water flowing over it.

There was another damn where water was flowing over it, and that one glistened beautifully – at least what little of it was in sunlight when I saw it around 16:00 🙁

And that brings me to my “problem”.

The time of day that I was there, not just at that damn, but overall.

Sunlight plays a massive part in landscape photography, and there are times, like 16:00 in the afternoon, where a location is near as makes no difference, damn impossible to photograph satisfactorily, let alone have the ability to create something truly marvelous, simply because the sun is in the wrong position to light up the scene to do it justice.

All the data you can look up, and plan around, sometimes doesn’t help, you just don’t know what the view will be like until you are there, and in my case, there at the wrong time of day, and that can be a frustrating thing.

The good news is however, there isn’t anything stopping you going back, which is precisely what I am now planning to do 🙂

I loved the day over there, and other than the minor frustration of finding places that I can see the opportunity of a great photograph if I’d been there at a different time of day, I am rather happy with the shots that I have taken.

And with that – here are my photos from the day.

Hope you enjoy the photos.

September 9, 2012 Photography

Wales – part 1

Well, relaxation at last.

I’d “engineered” some time off between jobs, so, it was holiday time.

Wales is one of my favorite places to go, the scenery is astonishing – and I occassionally get to find low flying jet planes.

This time I might have met up with a good friend as well – but alas, they came back the day before I went 🙁
We keep missing each other in Wales by a few days every time… guess that is the way of the world.

Anyway, time to relax, pull out my camera, climb a few mountains (yes – they are a bit bigger than a “hill” 🙂 ) and shoot some planes, or sit and chill in the peace of the mountain air and let all life’s little niggles drain out.

Whilst walking, and being atop a mountain I also get to meet a fair few people as well, so hi to Mark, Paul and Ruud if they are reading.

This trip, I appear to have gotten pretty lucky, I’ve got a fair few decent shots IMHO, and I have now processed them and uploaded them here.

Hope you enjoy them as much as I did taking them.

July 20, 2012 *Nix, Geek-tech, Photography

I have seen the Light(room)

Well, I blame my friend Cath….
And I am sticking to that.

It is, as always with Cath, in a good way.

The other week, a group of us went to RIAT on the Sunday this year for a good day out, and the opportunity to have some good shooting of fast jets (and not-so fast prop planes, but with the BBMF – awesome planes)

Well, about 24GB of photos later (for me anyway), some of us were sat around munching pizza and reviewing our great (and sometimes not so great, again, more referring to me here) shots.

I fire up mine in Linux using Gnome Photo Viewer, Cath fires up Lightroom, and detail freak fires up Windows 7.

Well, that’s a pretty full complement of alternatives between us.
That, in it’s own right is hilarious, and worthy of a celebration that there is that much choice about, as we have all, in our own way, taken a different path.

However, the one thing that did stand out, at least to my mind, was the power of Lightroom.
Who used that out of the three of us ? Yup, the pro photographer, and yup, of course, on a MacBook.

Opened my eyes I can tell you.

I am used to copying all my files off my CF cards onto an external hard drive.

I then write a script to go through all the files, do a little re-name on them, and then create a new directory, and then move all the RAW files into that new directory.

As I am paranoid, I then back them up to another hard drive, and then sync one of the two external drives to a NAS.

I then go through all the files using Gnome Viewer, and each time I get to a photo I class as “best” – to at least worthy of using, move it to a directory called “Best”.

If those photographs are feeling a little, “missing”, then I will fire up UFRAW, and do a “fix” or, enhancement with that, and maybe use GIMP to do a crop…

I then re-sync all 3 devices, 2 ext drives, and the NAS, so I’ve not lost anything.

Cath showed me, through the gift of Lightroom a whole new, more efficient way of working, just use Lightroom to import the RAW photos, rate them how good they are, and then process them, including tweaking/correcting them for body and/or lenses.

… Oh – and tag them with the date, context, place etc….

And sod the JPG’s from the camera, just take RAW, and process them in Lightroom to JPG if required for my web gallery. (and even print them from Lightroom)

So – guess what happened the following week at work – when my work PC decided to tell me my Adobe Flash was out of date????

Show me a link to a trial download of Lightroom – so, once home, fired up the link again, and dropped myself a copy onto my MacBook.

I’m hooked.
Completely.
… and utterly.

I put it to the test on the photographs I took at RIAT.
Out of the 1800 or so that I took, I rated them, and ended up with 255 shots that I then processed.

Lightroom also then processed them, correcting for my lens (my Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8), then processed them into a web gallery, using flash to create a slideshow, which I uploaded here.

I’ve called it “OLD” as I don’t expect it to be around long, as whilst it was a good test of what Lightroom can do, it doesn’t fit in with the gallery software I use to showcase my photographs, and to be honest, much as that software has been a pain recently, I don’t think I will be replacing it any time soon.

One of the things I will say, is that there is a considerable difference between the JPGs produced by the camera and the JPGs produced by Lightroom.

IMHO, and it is very humble, I am really preferring the output from Lightroom, even with almost no “tweaking”.

Again – let me say that again – I prefer the output from Lightroom.

Is this me looking at the JPGs produced from the camera on one machine against ones on another machine – NO.

Same machine.

And – yeah, I have calibrated the screen.
And yeah, in the same program – in the case of viewing the output, this was using either Safari or Chrome on my MacBook.

The JPGs produced by the camera are too “watery”, it’s the best description of the output I can give.

They are lacking a certain something.

It’s a frustrating position.

It means that on each every shoot I need to process the shots through Lightroom (or equivalent) to get a JPG out for display in a gallery.

It’s a different way of working I guess, but, as I alluded to earlier, I think more efficient.

Well, me being an Open Source software advocate, is there something I can put onto my Linux machine that does the same thing as Lightroom ?
Would it give me the same workflow ?

I had a look around, and found a GPL’d piece of software called Darktable.
I’ve aded the Ubuntu repositories to my 10.04 LTS box (that yeah, is no longer supported, but need a bigger HDD to do a reinstall) installed it, and will report back on it’s functionality as and when.

Whilst I was looking at Darktable tonight, I looked at the status of GIMP and 16bbp editing, something that I personally haven’t worried about, until now.

At the moment, it works, but only apparently in the development versions, nothing stable.
OK – for now, putting off using it for proper manipulation.

There is one other thing that is rather interesting with all my investigation and trial work.

At *NO* point did I even contemplate going down the Windows route and whatever tools I could get on Windows – Lightroom/Photoshop included.

It simply didn’t even enter into my mind as an option, not until I had almost finished writing this entry.

Is that because I haven’t used Windows as a home tool in so long now that it is out of my conscious thought ?

Is it because I don’t know Windows well enough these days to make an informed decision ?

Actually, I don’t know, probably the former, even though I have to use Windows at work, its use as a tool for me, is just irrelevant.

With whatever the outcome of my experiments with Darktable, and the wait for GIMP to do 16/32bbp, I’ve decided it’s high time to finally bite the bullet, and go Lightroom and Photoshop on my MacBook.

I just don’t think that as a photographer, ameteur as I am, I can justify *NOT* going down this route now, not after seeing the power and simplicity that it can give me.

Even though any photo reviewing and processing is going to take some time, like it did in the days of film, anything that can cut it down, and gain me extra time in the “field” shooting, that has to be a blessing.

For the moment, for me, that is Lightroom at a minimum.

Doing it this way does give me a minor headache now though….

OSX doesn’t read my Ext3/JFS formatted disks….

That, however, is a problem I will look at another day.

Thanks Cath, I have a different photographic related problem…. x 🙂
(One I prefer to be honest)

July 11, 2012 Photography 1 Comment

RIAT in the Rain 2012…. (and the sun)

Well, at the weekend, it was that time of year again – RIAT.

RIAT, properly known as the Royal International Air Tattoo, held at RAF Fairford, which isn’t that far down the road from me, is listed as the worlds largest military air show, and as a fan of technology, and the challenge of photographing the fast moving jets, attendance is almost mandatory.

It’s also a time to meet up with friends, some of whom I see relatively precious little of.

This year, two sets of people made some really strange decisions.
Silverstone/FIA, and RIAT organisers – they made the British F1 Grands Prix and RIAT fall on the same weekend – eh what ????????
So people like me had a choice – go to one or the other, sorta.

I could have gone to the GP itself on the Sunday, and RIAT on the Saturday, but, as my friends wanted to go to RIAT on the Sunday, that is missing the GP.

It also happened to coincide with the first time a Briton has reached the Final of the Mens Singles of Wimbledon. (Pity he only won the first set – but let’s face it, he was up against Federer, arguably one, if not, *the* best in the game of all time)

Please FIA/Siverstone and RIAT – don’t so this in 2013.
(At least RIAT already has it’s dates for 2013 – so I guess this is directed at FIA/Silverstone to NOT hold the F1 GP on 20-21 July)

Back to RIAT……

Last year I bought myself a 6 day FRIAT ticket (MACH 3 it’s called) , which gave me entry to the first 3 days – Wednesday->Friday, where a lot of the aircraft arrive at RAF Fairford, the two days of the actual air show, and then the Monday where all the aircraft depart.

THe FRIAT MACH X tickets are an expensive way of getting in, but well worth it – the seats in the FRIAT enclosure provide you with a damn good view of the action. (which last year I didn’t use on the Saturday, as my friends only had general admission tickets, so I stayed with them).

Just to highlight that – I got a lovely shot of a Panavia Tornado GR4 taking off on full re-heat, with a nice cone of flame out of the rear.

This year, however, I decided not to do that, and also as I was properly disorganised with tickets for everything this year, missed out on a 2 day FRIAT ticket as they were all sold out.

I therefore went with a 2 day ticket to the air show itself, and the Friday arrivals, and the Monday departures.

Why go to both days of the air show ?
Simple – last year it was rather wet on the Saturday, and the display’s started very late, and therefore there was less of a display, and I didn’t want a complete wash out, so, both days is a kind of insurance of one day being poor weather.

Well, it’s now Wednesday evening, and I haven’t really had the chance to go through all my photographs of the weekend yet, and process them ready for any kind of publishing.

The only photographs that I have had processed, were literally processed, the old-fashioned way, chemically.

Yes – I used film.

…..
…..

Now you have picked yourself up from the floor, and gotten over the shock – you may be asking yourself why I chose to take some photographs using such an “old” medium of film.

Well, I do have film cameras, and have had since my father passed away.

I inherited three 35mm cameras from my father, as well as a 110 type film camera, 2 medium format cameras (6×6) and a digital camera.

I do run film though all the 35mm cameras, and as two of them are identical Minolta X300’s, I actually have black and white in one, and colour in the other, to give me some creative opportunities.

The “problem” I have with all the 35mm cameras I inherited from my father, is that they are all manual.
Manual everything, including focus.

Now, I love this when doing something like flowers, sunsets, and maybe even subjects that move relatively slowly, like my daughter, but……. with something travelling at well over 200mph – yeah, I’m not quick enough to focus.

So, wishing to get the joy out of film, and also to try and force myself to slow down, and enjoy the moment of taking, I looked for, and purchased a new film camera.

Well, I say new, new to me, it was second-hand off that well-known auction site, Ebay.

Having said that it wasn’t new, it may as well have been.
It’s in immaculate condition, and first thing I have done is pull my 24-70 f/2.8 L off my 7D and plug it on.

What did I get ?
An Canon EOS 1V HS.

It’s gorgeous, I love it.

The first film I have run through it was to prove that the camera actually took decent photos, and I used an old film, so the colours on the results are a little “off” – but I have actually proved the camera works, and that ignoring the slightly odd colours on the film, it takes good shots with my 24-70 f/2.8 L.

I went for a Canon EOS EF device, so that I could use my existing lenses on the body (most of mine are EF, not EF-S – the only EF-S is the 18-200mm which lives on the 50D), and was initially looking for a EOS 1-N, but the 1V is newer, so plumped for that one.

Now, going back a second or two, I said I bought the film camera to slow me down, but I also said that for fast moving objects the fully manual cameras would be potentially inappropriate.
(yes, I know that I could use the film cameras on fast moving objects, and in fact I have done – shooting F1 cars – but definitely need lots of practice there due to the requirement of fast fingers for the focussing.)

There are two slow down drivers.

The first, is the fact I can’t see the photograph I have just taken until the film has been processed, so the result is unknown.

The second, to a lesser degree, cost of processing.

The first slow down is the most important for me – the not knowing.
This focusses my mind on making sure that the photograph I am taking is “right” – first time.

For static objects, this means making sure what I want is in focus, and looking at interesting points in the view to focus on, checking, and adjusting the depth of field, the framing, perspective etc.

For faster objects, like cars and planes, the autofocus has freed me of the worry of screwing up the focussing with the manual X300’s, and has allowed me to practice things like panning, and choosing the moment for the shot, rather than relying the high speed continuous shooting mode to take a sequence of shots, some of those in the sequence might be bad, but the sheer number of shots that you have taken means that there is a high probability that there will be a good shot somewhere in that sequence.

All in all – another step towards more fun.

July 11, 2012 Photography Post a Comment

Chasing the Dragon

Photography is addictive.

I have begun to think that photography is a drug.
It’s addictive, seriously addictive.

I could even liken it to the term used around heroin addiction/taking – “Chasing the dragon”.

If I use the term Chasing the Dragon as detailed in the Urban Dictionary entry 1,here, then I might actually have a good case.

Photography can be thought of in a number of ways, something my pro friend and I have discussed many times, is it an art form, or a precision technical experience, i.e. like “how accurate/detailed can you get a photo?”.

It’s also something I have discussed with another amateur photographer friend.

Cath, the pro, now, she is an extremely talented artist, the other friend is a detail freak.

Does one side mean that it is impossible to do the other ?
No – I am kinda in the middle, although I tend to the detail more than the artist, and I have way less talent than Cath.

I do know however that my detail freak friend and I share a common affliction….. that addiction to the perfect shot. (I’m not saying Cath doesn’t want a perfect shot – somehow that’s different, and honestly, probably a better approach)

Detail freak and I, we both have in our portfolios, shots that are absolutely special, that almost elusive “perfect” shot, e.g. something such as a shot where we can see the rivets on an aircraft flying past us at 450knots, and that has given us the “buzz”, or “high” of that perfect shot.

And this is where I go back to the “Chasing the Dragon” analogy.
We’ve got that first “high” of a precise shot, that “buzz” of excitement as we have zoomed into the shot, and seen those rivets, and the writing on the plane/car.

Trouble is, now we are doing everything we can to get that “high” again…… and again, and it’s taking a ever increasingly better shot to get us that “high”

We are in danger of overlooking the enjoyment of actually taking the photographs and reviewing good shots, at the expense of the crave for the detail.

And with that “chase” of the detail, we are looking at more expensive gear, both camera bodies and/or lenses as we come to the horrific conclusion that when you compare the results of a sanely priced body/lens to an expensive body/lens, in actual fact, expensive bodies/lenses *ARE* clearly better.

It’s a potentially never ending spiral, as better devices are made, and our addiction to the detail gets worse – where are we going to end up ?

Destitute ?

Frustrated ?

I guess that would depend on whether one thinks that the better, and seriously more expensive lenses are actually worth the money – the *Is it worth it* question ?

Honestly, the frustration is the biggest thing for me, as I can definitely see the benefit of the expensive glass attached to the front of my camera.

And there lies a potential danger of the addiction.