You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'technical' category.
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.
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
Spent a happy hour this morning in the sunshine photographing half a dozen of my parents’ South Devon cows with their week old calves in the field. This is my favourite of the bunch. Got home and promptly dropped and broke my lovely, expensive, Canon 75-300 IS lens that I used to take it. Will have to see what the insurers say about it. Such a silly thing. Picked up the camera daybag by the top handle having failed to notice the centre zip was undone and out toppled camera with lens onto the floor. Thankfully the camera itself survived. A long lens is sort of quite a good idea in this sort of situation because even very placid cows like South Devons can get rather touchy when they have very young calves around. A respectful distance is wise with over a tonne of potentially upset mother around. 
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.
Thankfully the credit for my HP printer is now in my bank account. No doubt HP will tell me in due course what they would actually like me to do with the printer. Spent a very cold and not very artistically productive couple of hours up at Haldon first thing this morning. This one has a bit of atmosphere but rather lacking either a focal point or sufficient uniformity of pattern to catch the eye, or even a lower viewpoint might have sparked it up. Frankly I was too cold to care much! I wanted to get the granite cross in the picture as well but would have had to wait another half hour for the sun to come round to it I think. Must give some attention to buying a new tripod. The one I was using is tiny, flimsy and impossible to actually move into the position you want.
Windy Cross
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.
. 
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
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.
