Musicien du Marché Cahors, France…
Ah! The Pied Piper is calling me to France… off in an hour or so and back mid June with, I hope, lots of images for your pleasure. There’ll be the odd post from France during my stay subject to wi-fi connections and there’s a few images queued. See you next month!
Au revoir, mes amis! Bonne lumière!
Railway Architecture #1
Canary Wharf Underground Station, London by Foster & Partners, 1999
SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS #5
Roseberry Topping, North Yorkshire UK also known as Yorkshire’s Matterhorn...
After my trip to Scotland I was set on buying Canon’s then new EOS 5D MkIII. However, when I got to play with one I was bitterly disappointed with the quality of the build. It felt light and “plastic-y” and somehow it didn’t feel comfortable in my hand. Now I had a dilemma; my entire kit was based on Canon stuff so if I was to change to another maker I would be spending significant money.
I narrowed the field down to the 5D and Nikon’s D700. As you’ll know, the Nikon won out and I’ve not been disappointed at all. What a camera!
It took me a little while to get my head around everything and even now I’m sure I’m only using it at a fraction of its capacity. The kit lens that came with the D700 was OK but not brilliant so I invested in the Nikkor 24-70 ƒ2.8G ED lens, which I use in almost all my landscape work.
This is the first image I was truly satisfied with using the new pro kit. It’s Roseberry Topping near Great Ayton in North Yorkshire and just seems to suit black and white on a warm summer afternoon.
Mersey Docks & Harbour Board Building, Liverpool…
Architects: Briggs & Wolstenholm and Hobbs & Thornely - 1903-07
Beautiful evening light gives the building the appearance of being floodlit.
And…ACTION!
Camera crew filming an advert, Waterloo Station, London
Banksy Behind Bars!
(In)famous street artist Banksy painted this piece of street art on the derelict Whitehouse Hotel on Berry Street, Liverpool to celebrate the city’s biennial in 2004. The building is now undergoing restoration and the iconic rat image is to be preserved - hurrah!
Experimental Processing (Going Out on a Limb!)…
I’ve enjoyed the wet plate collodian work of Ian Ruhter here on Tumblr and wondered if it was possible to replicate the process digitally. Well, I’ve been tinkering about with various “recipes” for a little while and this is the closest I’ve managed so far.
Using Silver Efex Pro 2 I converted to monochrome and used the tin type preset as a starting point lowering saturation and increasing contrast in Elements. I copied the resulting image and reprocessed it in SFX2 using a solarisation preset. The second image was used to create a new layer over the original and the opacity reduced to 15%. The levels were then merged.
Next I took a rust texture, converted it to mono and boosted the brightness to maximum before reprocessing in SFX2 using the same solarisation preset as before. The texture image was added as a new layer to the portrait and opacity reduced to about 15-20%.
Finally, I added a portrait finishing technique from Scott Selby’s excellent Elements 8 book.
Comments welcome! And if anyone wants to blag the “recipe” and improve on it I have no objections. If you do, please share your technique! Thanks…
Model photographed at Focus 2013 courtesy of the Olympus guys.
Steam Train Picture of the Month: Ready for the Road…
Jenbach, just east of Innsbrück, in Austria is a bit of a special place for steam train fans. The OBB (state railways) main line from east to west runs through the central part of the station while to the south is the mainly steam-hauled Zillertalbahn running to Mayerhofen. On the eastern side of the station is this little beauty; 100% steam-hauled rack railway, the Achenseebahn, which runs into the mountains then on to Achensee.
This one is for Shana…
La Grande Finalé…
But not everyone is interested!
Deserted (Canary Wharf, London)…
A First Look at Lightroom 5
Edited with Lightroom 5 Beta using the new (and excellent) Upright tool, which does away with converging verticals with a single click. From what I’ve found thus far, LR5 is looking pretty good.
No Time to Look…
Exhibition by Carmine Cuccuru at Format 13, Derby Museum & Art Gallery (a grab shot as the little girl raced into the gallery)
Find of the Week: A Derelict Factory…
I’m not going to be around today - it’s my (shhhhh!) 60th birthday!
