Sussex Photographer Bernie Greene scratching out a tune while trying not to fall off the roof

room pano

This is an experimental picture of one of the more exotic rooms at ARTS House in Sharpthorne. It was made for day 32 of the 365 but never got posted.

I have decided to stop the 365 after 76 days. I loved doing it and it did me a lot of good creatively but it was also distracting me far too much from my business as a photographer.

One thing I found detrimental about it was that I am not a good instant editor. Editing is a very different hat to image making. Both are important. I found my editing job was suffering because of the daily deadline. To edit correctly I need at least 24 hours to go by after a shoot before I put on the editor’s hat. There were many times in the 365 when I made a bunch of shots and chose one that looked good at the time only to find a day or so later there was a much better one I had overlooked. This is obviously not good for clients or promotion of my work.

But I still want to post more or less daily. Well there are a lot of pictures that haven’t had an audience purely because they were made in the past that can now have that audience. The picture above for example.

This was made about 6 weeks ago as an experiment. I wanted to see if distortion was a necessarily “bad thing”. The cheap kit lens that came with my camera creates distortion at wide angles that other, more expensive, lenses I have don’t. Lines that are meant to be straight come out bent to a slight degree. I don’t use it when straight lines are important but that isn’t that often and I still like and frequently use the kit lens. But the above pic was distorted in a different and far more exagerated way.

This image is made up of nine seperate images using a relatively long focal length instead of one wide angle shot. The nine images were then “stiched” together with specialist and very time consuming software.  The software is called Hugin and you can get it for free on the internet if you want to have a play with it.

First CS/5 Pic

Working on that Bogey grimace.

Back to shooting the same lousy model again. Sorry about that. But hey. This was processed using Photoshop CS/5. Not that there’s any difference from what would have been produced in CS/3 as I didn’t use any of the new features. There is some processing but what you see was mostly done in camera.

Hillary

Hillary is a teacher. She is staying at ARTS House for the weekend up from Devon. At first she approached the sitting with all the enthusiasm of a trip to the dentist. So we chatted about teaching and football for a bit and she relaxed considerably and I got this which I’m really pleased with. I hope she will be too.

I processed it to adjust the palette and contrast

Chair

You might not believe this but this pic took about 5 hours to make. If I had set out to make the image above it would have taken maybe half an hour. But this is in fact a failure. Of great magnitude.

I had set out to make an experiment. It was to be an image that would have allowed you to zoom into it and move around in a similar way to how you can zoom in and move around with Google Earth or Google satelite maps. It began with 23 separate images. But I won’t bore you with the whole story. Suffice to say that Photoshop crashed several times in trying to merge those images properly and that in my haste to get an image up I selected the preview jpg images instead of the raw files to get the job done. The preview images were only a fraction of the size of the originals and so it turned out to be far too small for zooming around in.

But I still like it. I made a painting in 1988 that was very similar. I can now add chairs to my extremely short list of things I love to shoot. So the list now consists of people and chairs. I’m sure someone will see a connection even if I don’t.

Liz Lets Loose

Yesterday you saw Liz on one of her few and far between better days. Today I’m aftraid she reverted to form after drinking some camomile tea.

And today is day 50 of the project. It has gone remarkably fast. I’m very glad I started the project. It has so far been the very best creativity exercise I’ve ever done. I am much more familiar with my kit and with the whole process of image making. It is amazing how fast I can now go from the idea to the shot in the can. I can place lights and get their settings right in about the same time a waiter can lay a table with cutlery. Well maybe a little slower but not that much.

I have learnt many things in the last 50 days. One of which is that I am pretty much uninspired by inanimate objects. I can shoot them but I have to work at it. Whereas with people it comes very easily.

I have also found that scenes are a lot of fun. Noir lighting is great fun. Lighting on two or more planes in the picture gives great depth and separation of image elements. I often like to restrict the colour palette and go for comic book type images.

If you’re a shooter and have wondered about doing a 365 but haven’t I can heartily recommend it.

Edit: Just found out that 48/365 was chosen as 1 out of 2 favourites for the month on the Digital Photo Experience blog. The guys that run that blog are way up there so this is a pretty cool thing for me. You can see the post here.

tomas and car

I wanted to test the new noise reduction capabilities of Lightroom 3.2 and this was partly for that purpose. Shot at 1600 iso then processed first in Lightroom and then in Photoshop. The NR is amazing. Truly amazing.

In other news my previous post about editing a shoot is coming back to haunt me. In that post I wrote about coming back to the pictures from a session at least a week after they were shot so as to be able to stand back and get a more objective look at them. Doing this I can often see shots that worked that I had previously overlooked. Well by the same process you can also see shots that don’t work. I think yesterday’s was one of them. Adding Max to the picture did not help it and should not have been done. Wondering about an aspect of a picture is part of what keeps a viewer interested so providing an answer to a viewer’s question isn’t always a good thing.

Jasmine is back.

Red Hot

This was one of those times when the idea came in a flash, the setup took about 5 minutes, the shoot took less than 5 minutes and the processing took two hours.

For those who might not know what processing is it is a bit like sculpting. You know the image you want is in there. You just have to chip away at it toning down certain parts, toning up other parts, adjusting the colours and contrast and level of sharpness and blur and light and dark, etc. until it finally comes right.

This was always going to be a composite image, meaning there were two images shot that had to be put together for the final image. The hands were to be disembodied so the body had to be removed. (Don’t ask where I put it. Nobody has to know. And besides that if there isn’t a body there isn’t a case against me.)

These two guys looked okay in the studio shot, which is straight out of camera, but I felt they needed to be somewhere grittier. I also wanted more of a documentary style and more of a film look. This is the before.

A bit too cute for my liking.

Here’s the after

What d’ya reckon?

I’ve been told to put my before and after images in that order so here is the before first.

It isn’t particularly exciting. But I’d been imagining the end result for about a week before we did the shoot which, I might add, took place this very morning at about 7:15 AM. An outrageous time to be up and about let alone after having got up, splashed some water, got dressed, then driven to pick up Aled, then driven to the site. I was amazed at how easy I found it even without coffee.

I like the pose, the expression and the light. The face is a bit burnt out and the background lacks detail in some places and has too much in others. It also lacks the essential rock star punch for an image of this sort.

So after a little processing, actually quite a bit and I didn’t note all the details, we come to this.

Way more than I’d normally use but I think it works in this context. What say you?

Above is the finished result and it took a bit of work. It started with simple removal of dirt marks on the background and general cleanup. There were curves, colour balance and saturation adjustments.  Lots of dodging and burning. Noise removal after the crop and a final high pass filter to add more pop. I’m quite happy with the result but it also shows how a little on axis fill would have saved some work in post.

Below is the straight out of camera image.

I’m just done with the processing on the above image of Alex. I like it. I hope he does too.

Below you can see the image as it appeared straight out of camera. So rather than describe everything I did in the processing I’ll let the two images speak for themselves.

I knew what I wanted the final result to look like and I also knew that I would need to remove a bunch of distracting detail from the original. The result is pretty close to what I had in mind.  I don’t mind using photoshop to get the result I wanted but it would have been faster if he had just changed his clothes in the first place.