Life Observed

What do these two pictures have in Common? Well. They are in fact the same picture. I tried to take a three shot panorama of St Nic's church in Newbury as an experiment. I used my ultrawide angle lens but I was still far too close really. I passed the three files to Photoshop and started the autoalignment routine. I cannot imagine the maths involved to make these transformations. I can report that my attempts to do it at 16 bit resolution brought the PC to its knees and I had to abort the process. Photoshop creates various new layers and the image quickly grows to 570Mb. Task manager showed that 2.5Gb of memory was commited at one point. I guess the attempt to carry out these transformations on that much data proved too much.So, I started again at 8 bit resolution and eventually those two different projections came out. Here is my attempt at joining the three shots without maths. As you see it is less than optimum...

Some more secret corners from Wisley Gardens: The Paleolithic comes to Surrey. I thought I would give this an enigmatic look with the selective monochrome. See how it changes the spatial dynamic and provides emotional linkage between the "Now" and the "Other". There:  I can talk pretentious artistic rubbish with the best of them...   Scarey primordial Tree Fern thing. Odd stone art...

Roses: These are photographed so often they have become a cliche (along with pictures of swans). Here for example, is a recent rose picture that I have given the works to add some impact. I wanted to show the depth of the scene, with the roses, the hedge and the gravestones at different distances. Firstly I arranged to set the red roses against a darker background. This is a matter of moving your viewpoint until you start to see the image in your mind. It is also said that red tends to catch the attention and come to the front of an image, due to the way we see things.  I used a long lens to separate the Roses from the hedge by making the background go slightly out of focus. This also requires some thought about shutter speed and ISO setting if you wish to avoid camera shake. I used exposure compensation (as I often do in these circumstances) to keep the hedge darker. Now we move to tricks in the computer. Firstly I gave the image the Orton Sandwich look w...

Curious, I never noticed before. Is this stylised Angel thumbing a lift to Heaven? Actually Angels must be scary. Usually, the first thing they say when they appear are the words "Fear Not..." And this is your average stone angels environment. The Victorian Graveyard. Both of these images from film were processed using an ethereal Orton Sandwich effect I created in Photoshop...

Well, dear reader, after an almost unbroken run approaching 140 posts, I will take a short pause to recover and develop some new views and new attitudes.... All being well, I should be back in a few days. If however you need a daily dose of my ramblings, then you could have a wander around my posts. They start .. here BTW, this isn't a large Moon, its a dwarf horse.

Does this moon look big to you?* Apparently the Moon has popped round to visit us this week, and is closer that it will be for decades. This just underlines my general distrust of the Moon. In the winter the Sun is low, in the Summer it is high in the sky and these are facts you can depend on. The same does not apply to the Moon, it seems to be all over the place, sometimes its almost over head, even in Winter.  Every now and then it wanders in front of the Sun, to the consternation of all concerned. In fact our Moon is the largest in relation to its mother planet of all in the Solar System, and looks spookily similar in size to the Sun, from our perspective. Solar eclipses are non events on Mars. So, now I discover we can't even trust it to stay where it's supposed to. This is all rather odd behaviour for our closest neighbour, and I do wonder if a sattellite so capricious should be allowed control of our tides.. *BTW It should look bigger in this picture,...

Here we are, about a thousand feet up on the Pennines with a spendid sunset. The hills recede towards Lancashire and the clouds reflected in the reservoir. Aaah... Another summer evening. This time looking towards Shalbourne over the Kennet Valley. Ranks of trees march westwards over the hidden village of Speen. Both of these images are mangled and partly faked. There never was a lake in the first one. I flipped the sky and drew in the shoreline to create the illusion. The right hand third of the second image is a reflection, added to make the picture wider. I merely adjusted the trees in places to destroy the giveaway symmetry. To quote the Moody Blues: Red is grey and yellow, white . But we decide which is right, and which is an illusion.

This "toytown trick" is becoming quite popular. Its even appearing in TV titles these days. The image processing emulates those expensive tilt/shift lenes that no-one can afford and gives a strange miniature look to a carefully selected full size image. The trick is to force a very narrow line of focus onto an image and put the rest out of focus. Your image takes on the appearance of a macro lens shot, and the brain therefore requires that the objects in the image must be small. This creates the odd and strangely compelling toytown look. There are other refinements that are often applied. It works best with bright sunny shots, and if you raise the colour saturation it also improves the illusion. I am happy with the mechanics of the trick, what concerns me is the psychology of it. Why does the brain interpret it as a small scale image. Is the idea that "shallow focus equals small" something we have learned through exposure to such images? Do...

Where I work, up on the Hampshire downs, we get to see a lot of Red Kites. I'm sure these used to be a rare species, but now they almost as common as crows. We regularly get them circling low over the village peering intently on the ground below. Given a nice Westerley breeze, they sail silently, effortlessly over the scene below without so much of a flap of the wings. You would think it would be easy to get a really great shot of this magnificent bird, but it is proving very difficult. Generally I fail to notice them pass overhead. If I do spot them, they seem to sense when I have finished swapping from wide angle lens to telephoto and glide gently away, effortlessly....

Big shots. There are times I can't resist the temptation to take a sequence of pictures with the intention of making a panorama out of them at some point in the future. They usually spend months as near neighbours on the disk without being stitched together,awaiting that time when I feel motivated enough to do the work. Here's a simple two image panorama of Coverack harbour from last spring. The Coverack pano was stitched using the picture merge feature of Photoshop CS3. This seems to work rather well, and in fact does a better job than I can manage with manual methods. This next image of Tarn Hows contains around five images. The extra width has created an aspect ratio that would prove difficult to print and display. Now this next pano is formed from eight images from an Olympus 8080. It shows the west Berkshire countryside from one of by favourite vantage points near Coombe Gibbet. The original is around eighteen thousand pixels wide an...

One of the curses of the wide angle lenses is the damage you can do to verticals, as discussed recently. You can bend your pictures just as much by aiming the camera downwards, and here's an example from the Tate Gallery in St Ives. This modernist building is worth a visit for the minimalist interior. I'm not so certain about the Art, but the building is nice... I am willing to accept this example of converging verticals as it stands because it represents the view down the stairs.  However I have also straightened it using the excellent PTlens plug in. This can correct perspective distortion as we see here, plus it can sort out Pincushion and Barrel distortion and Chromatic aberration and Vignetting. I'm glad to report the Zuiko 11-22mm wide zoom suffers from very little of these failings, but nothing can prevent the photographer from tilting the camera... Here is the straight version. Which do you prefer?

Happy New Year! My New Year's Resolution: I have decided to finally give up Tobacco. I have seen the evidence and the damage that can't be reversed. So, I have decided to give it up.  There! But wait, I am a lifetime non smoker, so what's going on here?  Well I have devoted these long dark evenings to scanning decade old slides , giving them their correct historical timestamp and backing up the results. (At this point can I recommend Xnview, a really useful free image sorter and viewer. You can launch your photo editor from Xnview with a single key, make and save a slide show, create a photo web page and also, change the time stamp of your pictures and an awful lot more. A great piece of software. Plug over). So, here's the first evidence of a tobacco habit: Here we have splendid Salisbury Cathedral. This is an early example of tobacco abuse. It all started so simply: I bought an ND grad filter. You know, the plastic rectangle you hold in fron...

... or Going all Soft. One of the nice effects you can make in Photoshop is this recreation of the Michael Orton slide sandwich. It attempts to replicate his remarkable technique for creating soft and ethereal images by combining two individual slides, one sharp and one soft. These days you can create and combine layers in Photoshop with great ease and there are many different versions of this method, but the result should have a hint of sharpness in with the soft look. I aim for a nice high saturation too, this gives the picture a certain richness. This is a method that works well with flowers and subjects from Nature. However, you can also apply it to man made scenes like this one, and it can add a certain nostalgia to the image. In years gone by this could have been done with a smear of Vaseline on an old filter on the front of the lens - but the Photoshop method is reversible and a whole lot less messy.. (Discarded tractor on Kerrera island, Scotland)

If it is there in the photograph, it must have been like that, because the camera cannot lie. Oh dear, how times change. So, here for your consideration are four striking images. I rather like them, what do you think?. Kite and Moth The Red Kite and the Tiger Moth were photographed from the same position with the same lens within a minute. Try as I might I couldn't get them in the same shot. So, I combined two image layers seamlessly using the "darken" option. So the question is: Does the picture now seem less striking now that you know that the camera lies in this case? Sunrise over Donnington Castle, Newbury If you have driven along the Newbury bypass, then you will have passed under the place this image was taken. I used the Photographer's Ephemeris to get the right time and place for a sunrise, but the local geography meant that I couldn't get the sun positioned next to the castle as I would wish. So this image is the castle moments befo...