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| Monday, 9-Apr-2007 17:40 |
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Brighton
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Salams everyone. This Easter holiday has brought us to a place I had always wanted to go to; Brighton. Now, Brighton is located in Sussex and, among others, is famous for Brighton Pier.
It was a very sunny weekend, excellent weather and guaranteed to attract lots of people. In fact, the beach was jam packed, making it ironically claustrophobic.
These pictures were all taken with the 400D paired with the new lens. A circular polarizer was also used, the polarizing effect turned to maximum. The sun was extremely harsh, so I used the 580EX as damage control for minimising harsh shadows. The first two pictures above were edited only in Picasa 2 (malas! and life is too short)
Amar, who spent the first few hours in my wife's arms finally let loose and started to enjoy playing with the pebbles (Brighton is not a sandy beach). What I liked about this picture are the layers. Actually I induced an artificial layer in the pebbles by making the lowermost bit darker than the middle bit. It's subtle but there's an extra layer on the pebbles if you look closely.
Puan Mama Sarah and Amar - I actually attempted to copy Bazuki's shot of his holiday in Thailand for this picture (failed miserably!). In this picture I shot the two with the sun directly behind, causing the reflections on the sea. I dialed flash +3 on the 580EX to avoid underexposure (however, I think I over did it) and dialed EV -2 on the camera. The result I was aiming for was for the subjects to be highlighted against the background, with the sun reflecting a trail to the end of the picture on the water. Instead, I got the picture above!
This is my family - Puan Mama Sarah, Sarah & Amar. Don't you just love how a circular polarizer could make the sky stand out? Due to the sheer number of people on the beach, I found it really hard to avoid clutter. I really hate seeing people's limbs and bodies sticking out of heads like the picture above ...
... the only solution is to take pictures away from the shore, like the one above. I love the warm quality of the picture above. I wish Puan Mama Sarah had been more ready for the picture. It's a mother-son theme though, so just imagine that the picture has Puan Mama Sarah's eyes closed to symbolise blind love, okay?
PS
1. One weird thing about me is, I could spend hours on fixing (err, I mean editing) a photo in Photoshop, but I'm lazy to spend the extra few minutes to make borders.
2. While I was taking the pictures, I wished I had something like Rosli's ST-E2 flash wireless transmitter so that I could fire flash off axis.
3. One thing I realised about the 24-105mm F4L, it is simply just not WIDE ENOUGH! It's frustrating having 24mm at the wide end when I'm used to 18mm while using the kit lens. Probably the Sigma 18-200mm is the better choice, especially in non-full frame sensors like the 400D eh?
4. D'oh! I forgot to clone out dust spots. Too late now ... just try and ignore them okay? Grrr.
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| Saturday, 7-Apr-2007 09:03 |
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Toddler in Legoland
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Salams everyone. It has been a while. At the moment I'm here in Essex enjoying a relaxing Easter holiday off. Yesterday saw us in Legoland Windsor. While waiting in the massive queue to enter I sneakily took the picture of this beautiful baby. Taken at 105mm at F7.1, I'm astounded by the detail captured by the L lens. Minimal editing using Picasa 2: just saturation, crop & sharpening. (If I had more time I would have done selective sharpening - just the eyes & jumper - and keep the face smooth).
Have a good (holi)day!
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| Friday, 30-Mar-2007 22:29 |
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Hello, can we help?
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| Wednesday, 28-Mar-2007 19:54 |
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Friendly Althorp Ward
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Introducing my colleagues and some of my best friends on the endocrinology ward I currently work in. Seriously, I feel so lucky being part of this great team where the doctors and nurses are friendly, hardworking and very intelligent indeed. It's a pleasure coming to work everyday.
These photos were taken this morning and these pictures highlight the best thing about the Canon + L lens system: the photos are vivid and true to life, as if the viewers are taken to the scene when the pictures were taken. Pictures 1 and 3 were taken with flash fired, but balanced to the scene.
PS
My friends were all understandably shocked seeing my huge camera & lens but all were kind enough to join in the picture - thank you guys!
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| Sunday, 25-Mar-2007 21:18 |
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Waterloo Encounter
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I've been reading quite an interesting book over the weekend titled: The best of wedding photography, techniques and images from the pros - 2nd Ed (yeah I know, long title). The editor is Bill Hurter and it is by Amherst Media. It costs around 20 pounds (but Puan Mama Sarah borrowed it from the library for me - thank you PMS).
Wedding photography is not really my interest, but the book is extremely inspirational. I really learnt alot. Two of the key things I learnt are:
1. Wedding photography nowadays are moving away from the traditional formal shots to a more photojournalistic approach. Absolutely perfect lighting, poses and techniques are pushed second to capturing the key moments, emotions and subtleties spontaneously.
2. More and more wedding photographers are using digital nowadays. The book illustrates many Photoshop techniques used to enhance the photos which I really find interesting. I would say the above image is the culmination of most techniques that I have learnt from looking at photos in the book.
The original photo:
This picture was taken while I was taking my friend Momad around Waterloo train station in London. We I taking pictures around there when these two kids (if I were to guess I would say they're around 15 years old) interrupted and asked me to take a picture of them. The result was the photo above. These are the new techniques I have learnt and adopted:
1. Creating a soft-glow effect to enhance the mood:
- duplicate the original layer, then change the blending mode to screen. This will significantly lighten the original picture.
- blur the duplicated layer using Gaussian blur, for the above photo I used 15%
- then Layer > merge down
2. Creating a radial blur to draw viewers into the photo:
- duplicate the background layer
- use filter > blur > radial blur
- choose zoom blur
- I set amount as 15 then choose OK
- add a layer mask
- paint a radial gradient from white to black on the layer mask
done properly, this will make the centre sharp but the edges blurred inwards.
3. Contrast
- adjustment layer > brightness/contrast
- Increase contrast to +20
- I then painted varying degrees of black on the parts I didn't want the contrast to be so high.
4. Dodge and burn
this is the difficult bit. I basically burned the areas I wanted to darken. In this picture I darkened every other person in the picture apart from the two kids. This is so that other people in the photo doesn't draw away attention from the two kids, but the viewer would be aware that the station is crowded with people.
- add new layer
- change blend mode to overlay
- change brush opacity to around 3-5%
- paint black to darken (burn)
- paint white to lighten (dodge)
5. Add grain
- filter > noise > add noise
- I put 5 as the amount
6. Vignette effect - another favourite of mine
- adjustment layer > levels
- make the picture really2 dark
- on the layer mask, paint a radial gradient from black to white from the centre to the edge.
Done properly, you'll get darkening of the edges but the subjects will remain light. This will also hopefully subtly draw viewers' eyes into the photo.
That's basically it - phew! long process wasn't it?
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| Saturday, 24-Mar-2007 02:23 |
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Night Portraits, Mixing Light Sources
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Tonight, I was experimenting with taking pictures of the little ones outside on the street. I placed them under one of the street lights but also used flash at the same time. The flash was bounced off a white folded A4 paper fixed on the 580EX.
For the portraits I used settings loosely as follows: around 80mm at F4 1/10 ISO 1600. The cool thing was, because of Image Stabilisation, despite using a slow shutter speed of 1/10 the pictures still turned out quite sharp. The background blur is quite nice as well with the new lens. It's a pity that - probably because it was very cold outside (3 degrees!) - my two children seemed not in the mood for posing.
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| Thursday, 22-Mar-2007 22:04 |
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Goodbye Winter Days
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A cold, wintry day - wide angle - i was lying flat on the pavement taking this picture of Puan Mama Sarah. I wished I had used flash that day to highlight PMS but thankfully the photo is still somewhat salvageable using Photoshop's powerful shadow/highlight tool (my current favourite tool in PS).
Rescued from this picture:
1. Adjustment > Shadow/highlight
2. Saturation +25, for the building and PMS' jacket only
-- curves to remove green colour cast
3. Unsharp mask at full size: Amount 150% Radius 0.5 Threshold 1
4. Resize to 800 pixels
5. Unsharp mask: amount 50% radius 0.5 threshold 1
PS
did you guys know, some modern DSLRs *ehem*400D*ehem* "intentionally" underexposes pictures? The reason for this some people say is that detail is still extractable from underexposed shadowy areas but are unrecoverable in blown highlights. As the experiment above shows, it is quite true.
It still irritates me that the camera doesn't expose properly though.
*updated*
This is the version where I did use daylight flash. To me this picture is better, but I didn't use this one as PMS had such a bored expression!
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| Wednesday, 21-Mar-2007 23:09 |
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Banana Cake and Sparkly Eyes
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Argh, I couldn't resist but to put up two updates for my Fotopages tonight.
Recently while I was busy with work and oncalls, Puan Mama Sarah and her friend D met up at our house for a tea party (yeah, thanks for not inviting me guys!) The highlight of the day was D's banana cake, above.
Anyway, I love this picture of D's children - they have beautiful eyes which lights up in photographs. Do note that all these pictures were taken by Puan Mama Sarah (but edited by me  )
The original photo was a bit blurry (here's the original:)
What I did to the photo was:
1. Saturation +14
2. Warming filter 85 applied to the skin
3. Adjustment - shadow/highlight: I extracted details from the highlights by 30%
4. Unsharp mask at full size: Amount 200% Radius 4 Threshold 2
5. cropped to 800 pixels
6. Unsharp mask again: amount 100% radius 0.5 treshold 2
The double unsharp mask somewhat saved the blurry image, but I feel that like Ikelah commented before - the subjects look slightly plastic. I have yet to find the optimum balance for sharpening my subjects : pointers appreciated.
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| Wednesday, 21-Mar-2007 21:50 |
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Accidents Happen
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I cannot lay claim to have taken this photo or to have visualised this photo - it was all my wife, Puan Mama Sarah who did... but to me it proves that sometimes even accidents could produce interesting results.
Minimally edited using Picasa2, just "I'm feeling lucky" and sharpen.
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| Tuesday, 20-Mar-2007 20:26 |
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Coventry Cathedral
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Picture of the Coventry Cathedral taken on a very cold windy day, just this weekend. I included the people at the bus stop just to give a sense of scale. The cathedrals are located just at the Coventry city centre, opposite to where we do our shopping.
Well anyway, apart from the enjoyment of taking photos I also enjoy working on them in Photoshop.This is the original:
What I've done to the picture was:
1. Levels and curves
2. Duplicate layer & set layer to overlay to saturate the sky
3. Saturation +14
4. Warming filter 81 to the cathedral
5. Resize image to 800 pixels
6. Unsharp mask. Amount 85% - Radius 0.5 - Threshold 0.
7. Crop
8. Added a vignette effect:
-duplicate layer, overlay
-layer mask
-on the mask: radial fill from black to white.
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