Archive for Make Better Photographs – Page 6

A Photographer’s Diary, Opening the Door

The last couple of weeks I have been working very hard with myself at removing my doubts and fears about picking up the phone and selling my courses. I had already done some work on this however now I’m speaking to bigger companies and at director level, as I’ve realised that this is where major decisions get made, and it’s brought up a few more anxieties.

And you know what it’s like when doubts start to creep in if you don’t catch them they come down in a deluge. So just today before doing the research and picking up the phone to speak to perspective clients I did some EFT tapping to remove my fears of not only them not wanting to speak to me but them not having the money to cover my fees.

Oh it’s been quite a morning! It has though helped me to pick the phone up with confidence and find the most helpful people possible on the other end of it. I am just starting to use LinkedIn as a search tool, though I just don’t have the time to dedicate to putting out lots of material through that medium. In fact from what I can gather, it’s quite frowned on to sell your wares. It has many draconian warnings like Facebook about not contacting people that you don’t know, though I have found that because its business people are quite laid back about accepting your request to connect. Read More→

A Photographer’s Diary, Analogue and Digital

I’ve been conducting an experiment this last week of attaching analogue lenses to my digital camera though I have to say the weather has stopped a lot of the experimenting, so the research is still on going.

Instead of discarding analogue lenses my boyfriend and I have been using them with our digital cameras to see how well they work. I still have my analogue Canon lenses with my old SLR in a camera bag and I just can’t bring myself to throw them away when they work perfectly plus, it’s part of my history.

So we bought convertors and are busy attaching sigma lenses to the Panasonic Lumix cameras. The lens I have been trying out is an 80-200mm. Firstly after working with just a 14-42mm lens for a year it’s like starting photography all over again. I’m like a child in a sweet shop just pulling the zoom in and out and seeing the horizon suddenly come upon me; I always did use my canon 300 lens as much for being nosy as actually taking close ups! Read More→

Where’s The Fun? – Behind My Eyes

Sam having fun

For our son’s 6th birthday, we gave him a Nintendo 3DS and a Ben 10 Alien Force 3 Pack game. There was no doubt the game would be a big hit, but one thing I didn’t expect to go over so well was the built in camera on the DS. On occasion, when some of his friends are hanging around the house, he’ll bust out the DS camera and just start firing away, taking silly pics of his friends, or anything else that comes to mind – not for the intent of publishing them or selling them, just simply for the fun in taking them. That’s right, the fun!

It triggered something behind my eyes – sometimes we get so caught up in producing the best images possible that we forget that having fun in taking pictures is allowed. It’s OK! I think this is one of the reasons the cameras in our cellphones have become so popular – we can take instant images of life happening – you know that stuff we neglect so much – and can instantly see the results and share them with our friends and family. It’s not about how great the composition is or the quality of light, it’s about enjoying life and sharing it with one another. You know, fun! Read More→

A Photographer’s Diary, Face to Face With My Past

Earlier in the week I visited some hotels in the area local to the new premises, checking them out for perspective clients. As I walked into one and met with the reception manager, she began to tell me all about her anxiety problems. As I did my best to help she burst into tears explaining what I all to easily remembered, that when you have depression life is like a rollercoaster, some days you are up others you are down.

The following part of this article is something that I wrote this week for the people in my community, however, so many of us know or have experienced depression and I thought it was worth bringing to an ever wider audience. Even if you don’t consider this relevant to yourself, with one in three people suffering with depression, there’s a fair chance that someone around you might be, and hopefully this will help you to understand a bit more and support them. Read More→

A Photographer’s Diary, It’s Good to be Nosey

A Stormy Day at the Farm

Have you heard the one where you go out to find a venue for running courses and come back with a new office? Yep, that was me a little over a week ago.

I have some clients who I am going to need a new venue for, one where we can be undisturbed all day. I went out two weekends ago to look at village halls, plotted my journey on a map marking out a particular village as the furthest point, and found my piece of gold.

Without realising it, this tiny village that doesn’t even have a pub, was one I’d gone through a few months ago when I got lost going to pick up a camera. I’d been charmed by it then, yet didn’t have time to stop and hadn’t been back since. This time I wandered all around the country lanes in my car, then went back to check out a business centre on the village farm.

The signage once on the property was poor, though that was to my advantage; instead of seeing the business centre turn off to my right, I climbed the hill in my car and headed down a mud track. I knew I was wrong, however photographers’ instinct kicked in that it was worth driving slowly down this rickety track.

I passed ponds on my left and right hand side, cows and sheep and rolling fields either already harvested or full of crops, either side of the track. Eventually I came upon a wood some of which was being thinned out and before that, wide banks of wildflowers lining the fields. It was stunning. Read More→

To HDR, or Not To HDR – Behind My Eyes

The brief bio below for yours truly tells of HDR (High Dynamic Range) being my first love of photography. That will never change – the creative and artistic flexibility of the process allows a part of my brain that was fairly dormant for years to pop out now and then and say hello. There are also a few instances where HDR just works better (in my humble opinion) than any other processing method, like extreme contrasts in light and bringing out textures. At one time, every time the camera was pointed at something, brackets were collected and run through the tone mapping process, without much thought or consideration – it’s just what I did.

As time has moved on, I find myself moving out of the auto bracketing mode on the camera more often, and even choosing to process a single image out of a bracket set rather than processing all of them through the HDR software. This is likely a natural progression for HDR photographers. Maybe there’s some boredom involved or wanting to save some time, but there’s also other processes out there that I’m finding interesting and fun that produce some pretty cool results. Let’s take a look at an image and go through how the stuff behind my eyes is processing things these days.

Middle Bracket 0 EV

Take this image above. It’s the middle shot of a bracketed set of 5, ranging from -2 EV to +2 EV at 1 EV increments (this image is 0 EV). It was taken back in February 2010 and is a monument devoted to the Confederate dead buried in the historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, GA. Back in 2010, this set was immediately run through Photomatix and tone mapped. Looking at the stack now, my preferences have changed – here’s why. Read More→