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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
I’m very good at spending money on magazines that turn out to be poor value for money – telling me lots of things I know already or don’t want to know. But a couple of weeks ago I hit the jackpot with Focus Guide Photoshop Raw Photo Editing £7.99 from WHSmith, published by www.futurenet.co.uk . I had been shooting RAW for some time and getting better results than JPEGs, but without any real idea of what all the ACR options did apart from just seeing what the sliders did. But this guide told me practically nothing that I knew already, and everything it tells me I want to know! Everything from the difference between vibrance and contrast to how to use the histogram and clipping warnings and how to open 16bit images for further editing in photoshop. Best £7.99 I’ve spent for a long time. Now I’m going back through old digital negatives and improving on the conversion.
Noticed in the garden today a row of bricks ontop of a wall with little lines of moss filaments glowing in the sun. Photographed into the light with a 300mm lens with image stablisation but hand held. Not 100% sharp, but the composition was better than the ones I took with the tripod – the filaments a bit more separated. Not sure whether it actually makes a picture or not, but printed and framed it and see whether I enjoy living with it.
Oak tree (HDR)
Family duties done and the sun obligingly shone for a camera walk in the woods above Fingle Bridge. Got lost, tore my trousers, broke my tripod. The most atmospheric shots were taken with the sun placed behind the trunk of a tree for a contre-jour lighting effect. I knew I would need to do some post processing because of the high contrast. Without a tripod, I leaned the camera against another tree and held as still as possible for a series of exposures. Had a go at the Photoshop “merge to HDR” (File/Automate) from the RAW files of the two thumbnails below. The merged image is 32bit so has to be converted to 16 bit (Image/Mode) and I used the “local adaptation” option. The file looks good on the screen I think, but first print doesn’t look too great – rather dull compared to the screen version. Tried using the paper profile in the View/Proof setup/Custom, but that shows far too little red on the screen. Correcting to look good on screen gave me a rather lurid red print. Part of the joy of the Natural Soft Textured paper is its subtlety, but that’s different from dull. There is something different about the actual file created from HDR because there was no option to save as JPEG (and quite a few other options missing also). To upload it to my blog I had to use the Save for Web and Devices instead. For a third print I have just given it a touch of extra curves and saturation in the red and blue channels.
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Obvious really. It boils down to the quality of the original image when it comes to high quality printing. I suppose most of what I’ve been doing so far has remained on screen which is far more forgiving. When I started this project 18 months ago a key target was getting more stuff out and printed. It’s taken me until now to get the printing sufficiently reliable (choosing a printer, choosing paper, learning some colour management, getting ICC profiles, buying frames, troubleshooting then replacing printer, starting again with a new printer …), and that’s the stage where failings in the actual photos start being the only thing left to blame! I have 6 printed and framed so far. Have also discovered, very disappointingly, that I’ve lost some decent digital files from a few years ago despite my rigorous backing up efforts. There was a whole series of bluebells and ramson in Scanniclift Copse that I can’t find anywhere. The odd thing is that I had some photographically printed up and usually that means several duplicates in different places. Here’s the best of my 2008 ones, but I left it several days beyond the peak of the bluebells. I love woodlands and take a lot of photos in them. They are very cluttered places and it takes some searching to find a simple composition, lead in lines, a good focal point etc. I think the ingredients that help this one are the trio of trees, the V-shape badger-paths leading in from the foreground, and the soft late sunshine.
Scanniclift Copse
Spoke to HP support again this morning. At least speaking to a human being who sounds vaguely interested in and sympathetic about the problem – thanks Muneeb! But more fossiking and further delay as the problem has now been “escalated to level 3″ and I won’t hear back before middle of next week. In the meantime ran the test sheets using the custom ICC profiles and they are dramatically different on this printer than the previous one it replaced – much lighter, and the greens much brighter and yellower. Makes a bit difference in landscapes. Also intermittent woolly/fudgy prints that really aren’t as they should be. At first I thought it was probably me not getting all the settings correct but I’m reasonably confident it’s not that. On its own a “bad” print just looks “disappointing”. But trying to analyse it next to a “good” one there is definitely loss of definition, sort of pixelated, sort of dull, muddy, loss of vibrance and clarity. One photo I printed out in 6 sizes and different papers through the HP 9180 and one just on the photocopier. Sad to say the photocopier performed best. Apart from burning lots of expensive paper and ink I’m really at a loss how to progress. Just have to wait for HP next week. I think I’ve got to the stage of saying I want my money refunded and start again with another make. I’ve generally got on well with HP with a lot of our laptops and printers, but they’ll have to do well to keep me loyal after all this. They’re only snapped under artificial light at ISO 800, but here are the test sheets: Left = new printer, right = old printer. Top = Fotospeed Natural Soft Textured, bottom = Fotospeed Platinum Lustre.
Test sheets
After days of increasingly annoying emails to HP support, waiting in for a promised phone call and then being told I was the wrong side of the world to receive such a call, I eventually spoke to HP UK and within 5 minutes there was a new printer on its way. Looking forward to getting that on Wednesday and hoping that it feeds paper nice and straight. Wonder if I need to get the ICC profiles re-done, or should they stay the same as the old one? Splashed out on a set of 24″ x 18″ frames from Frame Warehouse in Exeter. Cost me just over £400 for 20 – nice mount, backing board and plain glass but will do the mounts myself. Have put in the first two pictures of the collection (Ben Tianavaig and Poppies & Irises from the previous post) – both look really good. I enjoy doing the framing, but the logistics of doing large frames and glass are a bit tedious on my fairly small kitchen floor. Also, I’m not a production line – individually crafted = good, several the same = bad. So as soon as the new printer arrives I will knuckle down and get a set of favourite photos printed up and framed. Then see what I do with them next.
Three week old Greyface Dartmoor twin ewe lambs
One task I did manage to progress over the summer was starting to get to grips with colour management. Very tired of using expensive paper and inks and running too many dud copies. Bought a large pack of A4 platinum lustre Fineart paper by Fotospeed. Not cheap, but took advantage of their free custom ICC profiles. The problem is that although in other respects it is a very good printer, the HP photosmart pro B9180 printer appears to have no way of switching off the colour management in order to run the test print. HP’s helpdesk were hopeless. Googling the problem turned up Neil Snape’s website wich includes handy instructions for fixing the B9180’s photoshop plugin to work in Photoshop CS3 when it was only released to work in CS2. I liked the plugin before I upgraded, so did the fix, and hey presto! what a bonus – it also enabled me to turn off the colour management and get my test page printed. Sent it off to Fotospeed who swiftly emailed back the ICC profile which was then easy to install. The only disappointment is that the profile can’t be selected from the printer’s photoshop plugin print menu, so it’s back to the more cumbersome original. However, I am very pleased with the quality and colour accuracy of the prints I’m now getting. It has given me confidence to invest in some more Fotospeed papers (just ordered this evening) – a pack each of A4 and A3+ of their Natural Soft Texutred Natural Soft Texutred315gsm. The handy swatch they sent was also a help and I’m looking forward to seeing it in big sheets. I tend to print on paper too thin with larger sizes so it ripples a bit in the frame. The other thing I must do is buy some fresh glass. I got the current stock from a friend and it had been kept in a shed and appears to have been very finely randomly etched by insects – impossible to clean off by all means I’ve tried. Keeping and handling large sheets of glass is not easy with space very limited. More than once I’ve “bent” a 36″ x 48″ sheet sliding out from behind other things only to be rewarded with an impressive bang and a pile of diagnonal mishapes that are completely useless. Maybe I should decide on a standard size for framing A3 pictures and buy some sheets of glass ready cut.
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!
