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Took my camera in to Devon Camera Centre yesterday where they were as helpful as usual and said the problem was definitely sensor dirt. Choice of leaving it with them for £35 collect on Monday or pay £30 for a kit to do it myself (several times). Opted for the Introductory Digital SLR Cleaning Kit and all seemed fairly straightforward. Photographed a piece of white paper (aperture shut down and with the telephoto lens where the problem had been most obvious) and can’t find any marks. So here’s hoping. What I should have done was take the same photo before the exercise to check before/after and that my test photo was indeed picking up the problem. Anyway, will keep an eye open.
Spent an absorbing few hours on the footpath from Forder to Dogmarsh. My head says this one of birch trunks isn’t especially interesting, but something keeps bringing me back to it. Maybe the softness of the atmosphere.
The fungi really caught my eye clustered in the centre of a beautiful rotting tree stump. The stump was in shade with rather bright light behind so I had to frame in really close. It’s beautiful quality printed up but the complexity of it makes it not so easy on the eye.
Was taken on a 6 hour trial walk on Dartmoor with a fundraising challenge in mind. Great weather. Took my Fuji compact as I wanted to grab some flavour shots but knew I wouldn’t have time to hang about taking careful shots and didn’t want to carry a bigger camera anyway. Most of them do the job, but had a look through to see if any have artistic merit. The carpet of gold sycamore leaves caught my eye on the one above.
I quite like the moodiness of this one (and it’s always easier to get a shot when pausing to admire the view than walking at full speed!
This one is my homage to the iconic Buzz Aldrin moonboot print – the bootprints of my two walking companions. Although as I (think I) know from the lecture last night it’s an iconic sign in that it bears a resemblance to the boot, but it’s an indexical sign because it is caused by the action of the boot, and maybe a sinsign because it’s a singular instance rather than created according to a rule. Or something like that. It was late. But very interesting!
Scanniclift Copse
The copse is utterly lush with bluebells and wild garlic. Spent another 4 hours there today. Decided on wellies and waterproof trousers after getting so wet last week, but still got just as wet. Not that it mattered. Focused on the deadwood as focal points. This one printed up quite well. Even though it was overcast the bluebells rather washed out in the pictures. In the RAW conversion I reduced the lumninance and increased the saturation of the blues and greens. Am slowly learning to love the histogram and believe that rather than the screen. Played with the menu of my camera while I was sheltering from a downpour and discovered I have a mirror lock-up on my Canon 350D. Buried deep in the menu so I didn’t know it was there. Also darkened the preview screen a little to better tally with the histogram. Tried with some of the pictures to take several with a different focal point for each in the hope I would blend them in photoshop and get a full foreground-background sharpness. But each movement of the focus ring slightly jogged the zoom as well so they don’t match well enough.
Ramson and fallen sycamore
Not sure if the dead tree trunk is Sycamore, but I liked the unusal markings and used it to contrast with and give depth to the carpet of Ransoms. Fairly pleased with the focus and depth of field in this one.
Lone orchid in Scanniclift Copse
Spent a happy 4 hours moseying round Scanniclift Copse yesterday. Quite hard to pull a satisfying image out of the lushness, wildness, clutter. Sort of had a hunch that I wasn’t getting focusing quite right. I love the vibrance of this picture put it is spoiled by not having the pieces of wood pin sharp. In fact they are slightly less sharp than the tree trunk behind which misses the purpose of the picture. What I was seeing at the time was the orchid framed by the bits of rotten trunk. Now I see that the pieces of wood look like a pair of hares and that shoudl have been the focus. It looks very different printed out. My printer has rendered the blues of the bluebells much closer to the purple of the orchid. I took a lot of variants but it was quite tricky as my tripod and I were perched on a steep slope that was fragile and cumbly. Really need to go back in a week’s time when things are in fuller bloom – the flowers were only out in patches and in another week or two it will be a sea of colour. Hopefully by then my nice long lens will be repaired and back. Delighted to get the cheque through today from the insurers – very prompt thankyou!
Bluebells and log in Scanniclift Copse
This was the other one I liked best – the simplicity of it - and it has printed up well.
I also found this rather wonderfully grumpy face in the rocks.
Scanniclift rock face
A week later and HP still not re-collected the old printer, nor refunded the money into my account. Saqi at HP tells me it could take up to 14 working days for the money to arrive (=31st December) and they will advise what to do with the printer after that. In the meantime it’s okay to take it out of its ginormous box so at least it’s not cluttering up the place. £100 worth of inks sold on ebay. Maybe a printer to follow. Meanwhile spending time getting acquainted with the Canon. Discovering that pictures which look good on screen don’t necessarily print up well. Sometimes for reasons I still don’t understand. Managed to print a lovely version of this photo from the steep hanging woods above Fingle Bridge. Sharp detail, good colours etc.
Woods above Fingle Bridge
But this photo – which on screen I like just as well – simply isn’t printing up okay. The main problem is the grass and moss blur into a fudgy fluffy mess. I guess it is down to lack of focus or movement blur, but that doesn’t really account for the lack of quality.
Woods near Merrivale
Obviously there are hardly any pixels in these versions compared to the original (shot with RAW) that I’m printing from. I will have another look in daylight tomorrow and see if I can get to the bottom of it.
Very annoyingly just wrote a post and promptly lost it. Whereditgo?!
Suffice to summarise that finally lost confidence in HP’s ability and/or willingness to sort the problem so asked for my money back. 14 days inside the 1 year warranty deadline. Collected by DHL today and with a bit of luck might see my money back by the end of the week. Ordered a Cannon Pixma 9500 to replace it.
In the meantime not taking many photos despite fantastic morning skies and mists, hoar frosts etc. But did find a wonderful rusting barn at Leign Farm, so here’s a few rusty pictures. Not all in sharp focus unfortunately and suffering a bit of motion blur. But I loved the patterns and colours.
Started this out as a 6 month project. Haven’t posted for a couple of months. Got bored with putting stuff “out there” for no particular reason. But the focus has carried on quietly. Haven’t achieved a single one of the targets I originally set, but have done some that weren’t there to start with. Done a lot more software learning than I expected, and branched off into Flash, Audition and Premier Pro. Have printed and hung some decent size pictures. Become more dissatisfied with the quality of my photo taking but not done much about it. Haven’t made as much time as I intended to get out taking pictures, but it has been very good to have a default option for days off. I have learned to value and enjoy more the creative arts aspects of my job such as book, poster and website design. To look for them and enjoy them in their own right in a new way – that has certainly been helpful. I’ve also got better kit than I had 6 months ago (part personal part work) but have yet to really make full enough use of it. I have been taking my art more seriously and putting money behind doing stuff to the best quality I can rather than trying to skimp on costs and do things on the cheap. Don’t know at this point whether I will bother to continue with the blog or even the project as a specific focus – need to think about that. Here’s from a recent trip to Steps Bridge. Wild daffodils
Fabulous effects this morning with mist rolling up the Exe. Only had a pocket camera with me when I was out for an early walk so went back with SLR later. I love the way a mist pulls trees out from the clutter of the landscape. I drastically over-exposed this one (by accident) but rescued it in photoshop.
In the last month as I’ve been busy getting the server set up, moving all my images into one place and installing and starting to get to grips with CS3. Have had several abortive attempts at image filing in a way I have a chance of finding what I want when I want. Anybody got any good ideas?
Collected the canvas today (see Nov 10), and it is not as successful as I had hoped. We had obviously crossed wires on what I was actually expecting by way of finish. It was a stretched canvas, but had staples all round the edges and bulky corners. Alan expected that it would be going into a wooden frame, but I was expecting it to be ready to hang. Anyway, I extracted the problem staples, gave the edges a steam iron, and sliced out and glued the corners which made the whole thing look neat and ready to hang. And it’s a good picture to look at even if the print has come up with less green than appeared on the screen. But it simply doesn’t cut the mustard in the location I had planned it for – the end wall of a rather square, low ceilinged meeting room. It is too small in the space, the wrong shape for the space (needs to be longer and thinner) and the wall lights are unflattering. So I have to find a suitable alternative home for this picture, and go back to the drawing room for the Long Barn end wall. I’m thinking maybe something much simpler and graphic but with a natural theme. Like a set of 3 different blades of grass? Hmm.
In the meantime the book arrives on Wednesday. Pre-publication sales have been a bit slow, so we’re hoping it will fly off the shelves once people have the actual copy to handle. I’m hoping the photos in that have been reproduced to a decent quality. We’ve also placed the order for the server with heaps of storage space and proper backup mechanisms so I can spend some time over the Christmas holidays having a good sort out of all my digital archives. Have also pushed the boat out and ordered Adobe CS3 Master Suite so there will be lots of playing and learning!
Remembered I had finally got round to ordering web and mail services for my personal domain a couple of weeks ago, but hadn’t then done anything further. Wowee. Actually got my pages uploaded. It’s only a very basic 4 photos, all I’ve been doing so far is playing with the coding. Now that it’s live I guess I shall have to get on with the content. Anyway, here it is folks. www.sarah.uk.net
