Life Observed

... with this picture? Surely I should be proud of such a startling image that demonstrates the photographers art at its best. It is all about observation and timing. Stand in the right place for a few years and eventually something remarkable will present itself. In this case a flotilla of small boats dance across the waves under the harvest moon at the end of the day.

A lovely midsummer sunrise for you. Faked. It's the old flip and paste thing to make a scene look bigger. A little bit of cloning to nibble away at the symmetry and the mind is left with suspicions but not enough proof. Funny thing, the mind.

What a strange idea. After freeing ourselves from the shackles of film with its expense, its grain and its general failings, we now take time to make software to re-create that film look from our digital images. Surely I would never stoop so low as to do that kind of thing... Yes I would: So here are a couple of digital Velvia film images.

Here's a dramatic picture that has almost everything possible done to it.  Normally I restrict my photo processing to some light adjustment of shadows and highlights, and perhaps the removal of unwanted items from the view, such as aerials, wires, signs, people... Anyway: Here we start with a fairly strong picture. The tonal range has been pushed a long way, the contrast stretched and the image cropped. Even those blurred rotors are fake..

Here's the decision list for the ordinary man: Enjoy your job.  Make lots of money.  Work within the Law.  (Choose any two...) Now the decision list for a Banking Executive Flout the law Be paid a fortune Get away with it and keep the money (Choose all three...)

Aaah, moisture. That's what we get in Britain.  "After the Sun, the rain. After the rain, the Sun. This is the way of life, Till the work be done" to quote the hymn. An overcast day in the Lakes with mist on the field. Meanwhile, its pouring down in Hampshire The problem is: Neither the mist not the rain are real. They both came out of Photoshop.  Beware what you see in print.

There is a current photographic fad for lo fi pictures. These are digital images processed to look like bad examples of film images. Once upon a time all our pictures were lo fi. All we had was a box brownie or a Halina Paulette and the results were poor by today's standards. Enter the 21st Century and you find folks searching out Lomo cameras specifically for their bad results.  Open that box full of nineteen eighties colour prints and I'm sure you will find something like this*. The dynamic range has gone and the picture has started the slow drift towards magenta. Still, you can always scan the negatives and get the picture of Auntie Doris back in its original glory. You did keep the negatives didn't you? *This is a digital shot from last year that I lo-fi converted with my own special brew of curves.

While out for my perambulation yesterday lunchtime I had to do some mild photographic trespassing. There in a private field were a couple of mushrooms the size of dinner plates.  No, really:  They were about eight inches diameter and were part of a thirty foot fairy ring in the grass. I spent a couple of minutes trying to get a nice wide shot but came away with mushroom and dull sky. So I cheated . Here is the mushroom and field with a much better sky I shot last year. That's more like it. I should sell this picture to the Mushroom Marketing Council. Now, where's that frying pan?

I am hopeless at bird photography. The local Kites laugh at me wandering aimlessly below, always with the wrong lens on the camera, missing the critical moment. I can't even get a decent shot of the Pigeons on our lawn. Other photographers take fantastic bird images, but then again they spend all day dressed in camouflage gear in a hide somewhere waiting for the momentary appearance of the Lesser Spotted Snoffit. None of that for me thank you.  Here's my secret. If you want a fantastic wild Heron picture like this one... ... Just go to Birdworld in the afternoon when they feed the Penguins, and wait for the wild Heron to arrive.  Snap. Job done. (Just avoid getting the crowds or the penguins in the shot as it ruins the effect)

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....

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...