weekly pjm1's TP52 in 2016 - week 31 Fauna

[pjm1]

Hi Paul, I like the colours and the compo too, think the other have covered some of the other points but I like it .

Thanks Nigel, sometimes the picture has to trump the theme and I've opted for that get out this week

One week I'm gonna make that the theme
Cracking seascape Paul

Where I lead others follow

( who is more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him? )

Thanks Chris... I think it's the first landscape shot I've taken which I'm actually reasonably happy with!!

Gorgeous photo but obviously its not forgotten But still, great photo!

Cheers Sam... this 52 thing has themes?!?

 

[Carl Ayling]

Beautiful sunset Paul. I've read all the comments and responses but to be honest I cannot quite follow ... all I know is that I would be over the moon taking a shot like that. Beautiful.

 

[pjm1]

Beautiful sunset Paul. I've read all the comments and responses but to be honest I cannot quite follow ... all I know is that I would be over the moon taking a shot like that. Beautiful.

Thank you very much, Carl... you're very kind.

I'm happy with the shot as a picture but I have to agree with anyone who's saying it isn't remotely on theme But I really didn't care... I would call it "doing a Cobra"

 

[Carl Ayling]

I'm happy with the shot as a picture but I have to agree with anyone who's saying it isn't remotely on theme But I really didn't care... I would call it "doing a Cobra"

Yeah, I'm behind you Paul ... no I mean, when the Cobra strikes, I'll be hiding behind you ha ha. You could always say that you'd Forgotten to keep track of the time when you out shooting that sunset.

 

[pjm1]

To be fair I had lost track of time... I got a call from the missus telling me to get back home as our gates were broken and she couldn't get in!

 

[Emja]

A gorgeous shot Paul - you're completely forgiven for abandoning the theme so unrepentantly (is that even a word?!) Thanks for posting the two unblended shots - it's fascinating to see the effect of the LE on the colour of the foreground rocks. What program did you blend the shots in? I've used LR to blend a few shots for exposure - I've been happy with some but not all.

 

[pjm1]

Thank you Emma, that's very kind of you to say so.

I was really interested in the effect the big stopper had on the foreground rocks - it's quite literally night and day I just used Photoshop to blend them. My workflow was:

1. Auto-align layers in Photoshop using its Edit menu tool
2. Use a simple black-to-white gradient fill and a bit of brushwork on a mask on the LE layer to allow the short exposure to show through the black areas. In the attached screenshot I've shown with the selection what doesn't show through (i.e. where the LE "sticks") and because I've used a soft brush and a gradient it's not a hard edge transition but a gradual one.
3. Merge visible layers to a new layer so that I can then apply noise reduction (since I've lifted highlights so much) selectively - again using a mask...
4. ... and some sharpening, again selectively using a mask and high pass filter sharpening
5. Finally some glitch correction using the healing brush to remove dust spots, lens flare etc.

Hope that helps!

Edited to add: on further inspection you can clearly see where some of the boats have moved between exposures because their masts are disjointed!! Oops

 

[pjm1]

Week 23: Stone.

Well that's not very interesting is it. Let's add a "D" and see what we get...


Week 23: Stone(d) by Paul M, on Flickr

Yes, that's a bit more fun

I'll add a bit of text around the setup with a pullback shot etc. after dinner... need to get the BBQ on!

 

[Carl Ayling]

Another brilliant shot Paul - great idea and the lighting is just magical. (Hard to discern where the glass ends and the reflection begins). Looking forward to seeing the set-up and settings.

 

[chrispp]

Forgotten Tend to agree Paul with a few others, one which won't be forgotten that easy. I like the colours and especially the front rocks with the yellow flowers

Stone, Nice idea. I really like the smoke against the black background

 

[sirch]

Very good job with stoned Paul, as Carl says the lighting seems spot on with the whole of the glass and the smoke being picked out and a nice reflection.

 

[Cobra]

Yes, that's a bit more fun

Well, I just hope you have brought enough for everyone thats all!

Great idea Paul ( although not totally unexpected from some where )
Great lighting great reflection, if I have a criticism, at all, it would be that you cut the bottom ( top) of the reflection.

 

[pjm1]

Another brilliant shot Paul - great idea and the lighting is just magical. (Hard to discern where the glass ends and the reflection begins). Looking forward to seeing the set-up and settings.

Thanks Carl... The lighting was quite deliberate and more about that in a minute

Forgotten Tend to agree Paul with a few others, one which won't be forgotten that easy. I like the colours and especially the front rocks with the yellow flowers

Stone, Nice idea. I really like the smoke against the black background

Thanks Chris - the smoke required a fairly specific lighting setup to catch it properly

Very good job with stoned Paul, as Carl says the lighting seems spot on with the whole of the glass and the smoke being picked out and a nice reflection.

Thanks Chris

Well, I just hope you have brought enough for everyone thats all!

Great idea Paul ( although not totally unexpected from some where )
Great lighting great reflection, if I have a criticism, at all, it would be that you cut the bottom ( top) of the reflection.

No sorry, I had them all for myself - hence the flying whales and clouds on the ceiling

And it was made out of baking parchment at A4 paper, so pretty uninspiring really!

Ok, so the setup: "darkfield lighting" from behind the subject pointing at the camera. This consisted of a large softbox with a black rectangle in front of it to cut out the light which shines directly at the camera. The trick here is to ensure looking through the viewfiender you just see the black rectangle and the surrounding light is out of frame. This then lights the edges of the glass leaving the rest dark - perfect.

Unfortunately this would leave the spliff and smoke completely underexposed. The smoke looks best when it is cross lit - two lights (or a light and a reflector) pointing 90 degrees to the camera, i.e. frame left to frame right and vice versa. Again, it's important not to get the light actually hitting the lens otherwise you get glare. This lighting setup also lights the spliff pretty well (flat boring light but it works)... but unfortunately it fires far too much light onto the glass. There are ways around it but for such a small setup with large lights it's way easier to do two exposures: one for the smoke and spliff and one for the glass.

Finally the black shiny surface. I don't yet have a painted black sheet of glass (you just paint one side) so the only thing I had to give that dark reflection was my wife's iPad. Carefully polishing it meant it was nice and clean and made a decent enough surface, if very small

So the pullback:

As you can see this is not a specialist studio setup or anything! It's a regular room with lots of light pouring in. However, by using f/11, 1/200s and ISO100 the shot without flashes was basically a black frame. So ambient wasn't affecting the scene to all intents and purposes. I apologise for the poor quality of the pic (it's from my phone) but hopefully you can make out the camera on a tripod, the two mains heads with reflectors left and right of the subject, the subject itself sitting on the ipod atop slightly wobbly boxes (very Heath Robinson!) and then the softbox behind the black barrier which is actually a piece of MDF sitting on a rocking chair covered with black material!

So to get the glass shot as I wanted I simply turned off the crosslights leaving just the softbox pointing back towards the camera, behind the big black "gobo". This created this shot on the left, which I then followed quickly with a crosslit shot turning those two extra lights back on, which produced the shot on the right:

This needed a bit of touchup on the left to remove the last traces of "iPad" but was pretty close. I then just blended in the spliff and ash (which was from my BBQ) from the image to the right using a second layer with a mask in PS. Finally, I wanted more smoke so I shot another image with loads of smoke coming off and just used the smoke from this picture:

So basically all shot in camera (and these images are 100% SOOC) but just combined to get the lighting effect I wanted. As you can see the iPad wasn't long enough to get the whole reflection in, which is why I decided to (had to) go for a more aggressive crop

Hope that's interesting... the flash heads were all at pretty much minimum power, give or take a stop.

 

[Emja]

Thank you Emma, that's very kind of you to say so.

I was really interested in the effect the big stopper had on the foreground rocks - it's quite literally night and day I just used Photoshop to blend them. My workflow was:

Thanks so much for taking the time to do that Paul - I can't say I understood it all, but I think my summer mission will be to learn some Photoshop basics so hopefully it will all become much clearer!

Lovely job on the exposure and lighting of stoned and again so interesting to see the process. I can almost smell the...oh....burning baking parchment Like Cobra I'm not quite sure about the cropping of the reflection, but I can see why you chose it given the size of the i-pad. I do love the effect of the darkfield lighting.

 

[Cobra]

Ok, so the setup:

Bloody Hell Paul, you certainly put a lot of effort into your images!
Excellent stuff!

 

[sparrow]

Forgotten - beautiful image with stunning colours certainly not one to forget.
Stone - Brilliant shot and explanation of how you achieved it

 

[LC2]

Forgotten - There are many horns to your show Paul. To be fair I would have been happy with either. but that is a good composite, keeping the clouds sharp whilst smoothing the water.
Stone(d) - Woah, that is some serious lighting to get the image you achieved. Isn't it funny how something that looks so simple and effective is actually difficult to capture.

 

[Allan.H]

Hi Paul, besides the few technical issues with the spliff, I fail to see how you are going to get a good pull on that twisted end

Have to admire your effort and it is lit really well, especially the glass just that alone makes the image for me

 

[pjm1]

Thanks so much for taking the time to do that Paul - I can't say I understood it all, but I think my summer mission will be to learn some Photoshop basics so hopefully it will all become much clearer!

Lovely job on the exposure and lighting of stoned and again so interesting to see the process. I can almost smell the...oh....burning baking parchment Like Cobra I'm not quite sure about the cropping of the reflection, but I can see why you chose it given the size of the i-pad. I do love the effect of the darkfield lighting.

Thanks Emma... I post info up for my benefit as well so I can remember what I did later on!

Bloody Hell Paul, you certainly put a lot of effort into your images!
Excellent stuff!

It wasn't a big effort to be honest - packing and unpacking the lighting gear was the longest and it was the first time I managed to use a couple of my new heads so I wanted to check them out!

Forgotten - beautiful image with stunning colours certainly not one to forget.
Stone - Brilliant shot and explanation of how you achieved it

Cheers Liz - glad you liked them both!

Forgotten - There are many horns to your show Paul. To be fair I would have been happy with either. but that is a good composite, keeping the clouds sharp whilst smoothing the water.
Stone(d) - Woah, that is some serious lighting to get the image you achieved. Isn't it funny how something that looks so simple and effective is actually difficult to capture.

Thanks Tim - glad you saw what I was trying to achieve in Forgotten and although it didn't make a massive difference it lifted the image for me. Stone was a bit OTT on the lighting used - I could easily have got away with two off camera flashes and a reflector but I wanted to test out some new kit I'd bought a while back so wheeled out the "heavy guns" pretty unnecessarily!

Hi Paul, besides the few technical issues with the spliff, I fail to see how you are going to get a good pull on that twisted end

Have to admire your effort and it is lit really well, especially the glass just that alone makes the image for me

Hi Allan - I'm disappointed to say my youth wasn't as misspent as I might have liked, so I have little experience of such things Glad you like the lighting and result - I had hoped to be able to do it all in a single exposure but I need to get a bit better at controlling the lights before I'll be able to manage that!

 

[CliveH]

Great picture, on theme and thank you for the tutorial on how to do it. Well done.

 

[CliveH]

Stunning forgotten, beautiful shot

 

[pjm1]

Great picture, on theme and thank you for the tutorial on how to do it. Well done.

Stunning forgotten, beautiful shot

Thanks Clive

 

[d00d]

Forgotten ... nice work with filters and all the shoppery. I like the version showing the ripples in the water.

Stone ... cool idea, creatively carried out. But not sure the reflection adds ...

 

[pjm1]

Forgotten ... nice work with filters and all the shoppery. I like the version showing the ripples in the water.

Thanks David... each to his/her own and that's half the fun I definitely prefer the smoothed water but more than that, I just wanted to try out the 10stop!

Stone ... cool idea, creatively carried out. But not sure the reflection adds ...

Thanks again - I was somewhat pleased with the picture and definitely learnt a bit more about lighting and my new lights in particular. The reflection was really just to avoid the floating look, but I'll agree it's an added element which maybe isn't needed for an ultra-simplistic image (which I usually find are the best)

Cheers

 

[DowntonMini]

Very clever take on the theme Paul love the lighting.

 

[pjm1]

Very clever take on the theme Paul love the lighting.

Thanks Mark - I was pleased with the glass "ashtray", albeit slightly less so with the spliff itself. Fortunately we had a bbq later that evening, so the smell of burnt baking parchment was quickly overpowered!

 

[posiview]

Like it. Base has been mentioned but the detail in the smoke and spliff are great. Nice clean BG and side lighting on the glass

Cheers.

 

[pjm1]

Like it. Base has been mentioned but the detail in the smoke and spliff are great. Nice clean BG and side lighting on the glass

Cheers.

Thanks Andy - comments very much appreciated and glad it's pretty much worked for you. I was surprised at how little light spill there was from the two side lights with just standard reflectors on - nada falling on that black background (which was also horrible creased) so the reflectors do a good job at constraining it to a spot. Perfect for the smoke and spliff. Side lighting on the glass was the easy bit - I knew how that needed to be setup, just had to wheel out one of the big softboxes

 

[susiejb]

Forgotten and Stoned two technically excellent and eye catching shots Paul sunset is a real beauty.​

 

[Dark Knight]

Got to agree with the crowd here mate, great image and as always love seeing how you got to the end result - top marks

 

[pjm1]

Forgotten and Stoned two technically excellent and eye catching shots Paul sunset is a real beauty.​

Got to agree with the crowd here mate, great image and as always love seeing how you got to the end result - top marks

Thank you Susie and Dean... very kind of you both. The sunset was just something I had to squeeze in when I saw it And I can always fall back on a "product" shot if I want to prove to myself I can still take photos... at least I can just keep reshooting until I get it unlike with some other subjects!!

Thanks again and looking forward to this week's theme...

 

[Bruja]

Loving stoned and perhaps good that you did it at the start of the spliff and not at the end :sleep:

 

[pjm1]

Loving stoned and perhaps good that you did it at the start of the spliff and not at the end :sleep:

Thanks Jill For some reason the prospect of burnt baking parchment was just a bit... well, maybe next time

 

[Minx]

Forgotten - so you forgot about theme but it is a great shot I love the colour tones certainly worth the effort put in to it
stone(d) - good twist on the theme well composed and intereting ot see how you did it.

 

[pjm1]

Forgotten - so you forgot about theme but it is a great shot I love the colour tones certainly worth the effort put in to it
stone(d) - good twist on the theme well composed and intereting ot see how you did it.

Thanks Alison Glad there was something in there for you!

Ok... so week 24. Simple.

Or, in my case, Not So Simple. Plans were for my new telephoto lens to arrive in time for my daughter's first dancing display. She was the youngest in the troupe by quite a bit, but she loves dancing so gets on with all the bigger girls. We obviously wanted to record it...

Unfortunately, a few things conspired against us: (1) the show had a "no video or photography" ban. They had an "official" photographer and videographer but judging from the fact the tog spent more time chimping than actually shooting, I wasn't exactly convinced of what he'd deliver. (2) the conditions were bad - indoors, almost no ambient light and quite a long distance from the stage. Just as well I'd invested in a reasonably fast, constant-aperture 300mm prime (3) But my "fully functioning" lens turned out to have a non-functioning AF motor which meant I had to manually focus, which in the light and trying to be surreptitious because of the "no photos" ban and the official tog loitering, was tricky to say the least.

Well, I got one fairly strong stare from him, but I put that down to girth envy It is hard to be discreet when you're sporting such an unwieldy weapon.

Everybody else seemed to be ignoring the ban too, but they were shooting video on their camera phones, so I guess that's easier to hide. What really annoyed me though was one person was taking pictures using their camera phone but had the flash on... talk about distracting and also interfering with the videography... very inconsiderate. At least I limited myself to whacking people with a kilo of glass and metal.

I managed maybe 10 shots out of about 30 which I was happy enough with. Sadly our daughter clearly couldn't see us until the very end of the show, so she didn't look at us until probably the final frame. Which I guess was handy, because I'd refined my focusing a bit by then!

So - not so simple... this manual focusing in low light stuff:


Week 24: (Not so) Simple by Paul M, on Flickr

Yes, I know I've missed focus slightly - just in front of her ear is sharp rather than her eyes and eyelashes. But this was the nicest shot of her, so it had to do It was shot at 2500 ISO with +2 EV adjustment in LR which would have made it 10,000 ISO in reality... amazing you can make out anything really!

It's serious stuff, this dancing - as you can tell from her expression!

 

[Cobra]

It's serious stuff, this dancing - as you can tell from her expression!

LOL she really is concentrating isn't she?
Cracking image Paul

 

[chrispp]

Like this Paul, fits the theme really well. I like the lighting on her face, nice

 

[pjm1]

LOL she really is concentrating isn't she?
Cracking image Paul

Thanks Chris - yes, very focused (unlike some of my attempts!) Glad you like it and thanks for looking

Like this Paul, fits the theme really well. I like the lighting on her face, nice

Thought it was a bit of a different take on the theme... the lighting was dreadful in the place but the stage did have some directional light which helped. I did some night shots later that same day for a midnight marathon so ended up taking pretty much every picture that day at over 5000 ISO Phenomenal what these sensors are capable of these days!

 

[Dark Knight]

Aweee love that Paul, good effort with the manual focusing, much harder nowadays with the modern lenses not having the aid like in the old days

Your girl looks like she has is concentrating soooo much bless her

 

[Ian W]

'Not so simple' indeed! Good effort given the circumstances especially, Paul.

Does the D750 have any manual focusing aids?