7-point photoshop starting to pay off

I've been working through the Scott Kelby's 7-point system for photoshop and it's starting to make sense after nine ofthe twenty one practical lessons. Somethings are still not intuitive, but some are making sense so obviously it's time to branch out and try some of my own images. The landscape above is a nice example of the power of the Lab mode technique that Scott advocates. Before processing the image was a little flat and lacking in contrast, and my intended strength of colour wasn't quite there. A little bit of the learnings applied and it's a much better picture. Right now I'm still not sure photoshop gurus will find much new in Scott's book, but if your still wondering how other photographers seem to get nicer images from files than you do it's worth reading and definitely working through.

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Jump start for picture management

Earlier I wrote the article [Taking care of the little things now] on image management inspired by the What the Duck comic strip. I also mentioned that for me picture management was simplified by the use of Chris Breeze excellent Downloader Pro, as the first step of my workflow. But Downloader Pro costs money - not very much, but how about almost the same for free?

Canon's CPN website has a new article by Nick Wilcox-Brown explaining how you can do much of the necessary image management for free using the Canon software EOS Utility, you know the one you only think is good for tethered shooting or is still laying on the disk you tossed in the corner in the rush to get at your new camera. Heck it may even be still in the shrink wrapped manual pack you thought you'd open when it was a rainy day. Go to the pages on CPN, then jump to the page 4 of the article it's the bit you need.

Duly inspired I tried to make EOS Utility work like to sort out pictures like I do with Downloader Pro. My sorted files go in a folder called 4-DVD, it's kind of historical from when I planned to burn all the pictures to DVD. The advent of 1GB CF cards broke that thinking but the name remains. So for me I make a folder for the year as the top level folder, then I have a folder for the month and under that I have folders for the camera I used, a bit like this:

E:\4-DVD\2008\2008-06\EOS 40D

You'll right away notice that the month folder has the year too, this means if I mistakenly drag the month folder out of place with either finder or explorer I know where to put it back. The next part is making the file name more helpful, and for this I use the year, month, original name and a serial number like this

0806IMG_0001_001.CR2

This means that the file name includes the month, I can put it straight back in the right folder if it gets lost, I keep the original filename and for safety sake the _001 at the end is sequential so should cope with the problem of all cameras except EOS-1D models using the IMG prefix as standard. You shoot with an EOS 40D and an EOS 450D and both can make an IMG_0001.CR2 file on the same day, sure they may end up in different camera folders but you'd have a duplicated filename. I also make 3 more folders in the month folder so that it has:

2008-06\01-final
2008-06\02-process
2008-06\03-delete

I go through all the pictures, and move the rubbish stuff - much of it - to the 03-delete folder, kind of a get out of jail free card step before the recycle bin or trash. Then I process all the pictures and the output files from digital photo professional (DPP) go in the 02-process folder. From there photoshop takes over an the finished final files end up in 01-final. If I need to find my final pictures from this year at worst I only need to look in 12 folders.

So can it replace Downloader Pro, well for me not quite since I also have Downloader Pro automatically add metadata to my images. Things I add are copyright information, photographer info, country and location, and often I add other things like animals, zoo, model, macro, blue all the kinds of tags and keyowrds I might need for the group of images. The exact keywords and amount of information varies. Downloader Pro also makes the three working folders 01-final, 02-process and 03-delete for me too using the directory maker feature.

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Littlest strobist

Meet the littlest strobist. I found him in my garden after getting back from an experimental landscape shoot with some B+W ND filters. I just grabbed a camera, my trusty Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Macro lens and a flash with off-camera cord. Remarkably the little toad was unphased by the blinding light and after letting me grab a few normal poses hopped off to make sure I was doing it all the right way; hence the shot here. Then once he was happy it was a hop on to the flash itself as a stepping stone on to the next step and the wide open garden. He then hopped away to post on strobist no doubt!

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Formula One testing at Silverstone 24-26 June

Last year I went to the Formula One test at Silverstone, I had some success with pictures as you can see in this article. However for this year I planned to go again, but a combined set of circumstances means I can't be there. So for anyone who's reading, and planning to go then here's some top tips for setting up your EOS-1D Mark III custom functions for F1 cars.

• Cfn III-2 AI Servo Tracking sensitivity, set this to Normal ie 0
• Cfn III-3 AI Servo 1st / 2nd image priority, set this to 0 if you want more well focussed frames, set to 1 if you want 10fps all the time
• Cfn III-4 AI Servo AF tracking method, set to 1 continuous AF track priority
• Cfn III-8 AF expansion with selected AF point, set this to 1 to enable the left right assist AF points

For me I tend to use manual mode for racetrack pictures, you can take an exposure reading from the track surface, just remember to re-check it every 10-20 minutes as the random appearance of the sun can make a big difference. If the sun keeps appearing then check more often. You could've been there too this year, but already the limited tickets are sold out and there's no option to pay on the day at the gate.

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Longest day - wet and grey what sun!

So today is the longest day, and it dawned early and has been mostly a fine rain and grey overcast skies. Even the brave souls who went to Stonehenge for the sunrise were disappointed with a grey sky, one of the people interviewed on the TV said that there had only been a glorious sunrise once in 35 years she'd been going. If this weather persists then i'll be shooting in the rain later.



I've been reading Scott Kelby's latest book 7-point system for photoshop which has examples to download, so i've been working through some of Scott's images. After a few of the example pictures I've had a quick experiment with some techniques on my pictures from a recent shoot with a few local photographers who are members of the Imagez camera club. With one or two of the other photographers the shoot went a bit off-camera flash tastic.



Thanks to our ever patient model. Every time I try this flash stuff outside I get a bit more inspired, only issue is that using E-TTL II infrared outside is the limiting factor, you end up putting flash where it operates rather than works.

Threat of a blog post changes the weather: well it seems to be getting lighter outside now.

Rambling over for now...

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Shoot the longest day

The 21st of June is the longest day in the Northern Hemisphere with the UK having the earliest sunrise 04:43 and latest sunset 21:22. Times provided by www.timeanddate.com.

For photographers this means many things; you have to get up earlier to catch the best light in the morning, you can shoot more pictures in daylight than any other day, and you can be out shooting later in the evening than any other day.

In reality if you were shooting an EOS-1D Mark III at maximum frame rate for all 16 hours, 38 minutes and 23 seconds of the day then you could shoot almost 600,000 frames, or enough to wear the shutter out twice! Doesn't look like being the best weather though.

So best of luck to all those planning to do some special photography. One of the most famous sites that links with the longest day is Stonehenge in Wiltshire, once again English Heritage is making provision for visitors to be there for sunrise.

I'm planning to be out with my new B+W ND filters for some long time exposures, just need to find the right place to let the really long exposures I'm planning give me a different kind of image.

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A photo shoot i'd love to do

Image by pbeens on flickr.com.

There is this old video clip from the StillMotionBlog.com that I keep returning to. It's a trash the dress shoot where basically a bride or model trashes a wedding dress getting it dirty and or wet. I'm thinking this is kind of reserved for places with warmer water than in the UK, but I'm open to ideas. However whilst i'm still someway from a TTD shoot myself, I must admit that the useful comments on the video cost me money. I had to go and buy the album by Frou Frou for the Let Go track that was added on to the video. If the one track interests you, then the rest of the album is worth listening too. What's more you could always check out the lady behind the vocals; Imogen Heap.

Sorry for the short post to old material, but I was back at the site again, and that's the fourth time in six months to go searching for this particular link. Now at least I can check back in my own blog for it!

If anyone wants to get in touch or take on this kind of trash the dress shoot then leave some comments on the post and maybe we can make it happen.

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Firefox Download Day good for photographers

You can hardly miss all the stuff on the web about Firefox download day and the attempt to set world records for the most downloads in a single 24 hour period. Did you download yet, you have less than six hours left to do so; click here to download.

One of the best things Firefox does for image and photo centric people is make colour management of your web browser straightforward, even on Windows. Thanks to the good people at Rob Gallbraith's site here's how to make Firefox colour managed. In fact Rob's article talks mainly about Apple MAC, but I tried the same trick on Windows and it also works just the same too.

What's more all of the Firefox extensions that I used in version Firefox 2 have been updated for version 3.0 already that's some cool development and thanks to all for that.

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Petrol can it get to two pounds a litre?

I'm reading with some shock the story on the BBC website about a petrol station charging 199.9 pence for a litre of fuel. They say it's to stop panic buying during the tanker drivers strike, and help them conserve their stock - sounds like a plan to make some money at motorists expense.

Consider for a moment that at that price it's more than nine pounds for a UK gallon, so for our US cousins that's 7.56 UK pounds for a US gallon, or more than 14 US dollars for a US gallon of regular unleaded fuel. My three hundred miles a week to get to and from the office each day would increase from over fifty three pounds at current prices, to over ninety three pounds at 1.999 pence per litre. Maybe someone needs to increase my salary so that net it works out I take home an extra 2,000 pounds per year to cover getting to work. Though of course if fuel goes that far then so will all the other costs like energy and food for the family.

Another thought; if the UK government made some changes to employment law to make home working more the norm they could cut emissions from all those journeys, employees would be better off and more likely better motivated too. Of course the government would be up a creek with no paddle loosing all that revenue from the fuel taxes.

Perhaps the only thing good in this story is that I noticed that 199.9 is the most the sign on the garage forecourt can display, the first digit only has the space for a 1. No doubt that the government would step in with a grant for petrol retailers to revamp their signage should government tax increases push the price over the two pounds per litre mark.

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Taking care of the little things now

Prompted by a well timed cartoon from What the Duck on Friday 13th, is it time to think of your answer now..



With so many pictures taken now, it's quite a task for everyone to keep up with the location of those family pictures; you know the ones of the kids as they grow up, and the important moments in family life. Many professional photographers also have the similar problems and there are many ways to solve this.

I faced this very same question some years ago when my wife asked, have you still got those pics of the kids from a few years ago... my response was oh yes of course I have there on the computer, then a dawning realisation that she'd probably never seen the pictures either. So then I realised that digital had done two things to my photo audience; made it me and the PC, and cut out mostly everybody else. Sometimes you need these kind of prompts to come up with a course of action. Here's mine.

• Organise all the pictures now, and do it always in the future
• Find a way to share photos again like you did with prints from films
• Hard disks crash more often that photo albums got burnt so back it up

In my case the photo organisation came in the shape of iView Media Pro, now called Microsoft Expression Media and an almost unhealthy addiction to Chris Breeze's downloader pro. So now I import all the images I take in one machine through downloader pro. It puts them in a structured folder based on dates, cameras and adds metadata (kind of like notes and comments scrawled on the back of photos in the past) to the image files. Then Expression Media looks at the structure and catalogues it all. I can go through my stuff filter out the rubbish - and delete it - then add extra metadata to images that are important to me. Important can mean they're good images or they mark some valuable point in time.

The way to share means things like making it simple for my new and best pictures to be copied to an SD card and put in the LCD photoframe in lounge, and also to make prints. I think I printed more picutres in the last two years than I had in the previous six. This doesn't mean making big prints, but it does mean making prints even 6x4 inch ones, or several on a larger A4 sheet. In these cases the all out quality is not important, but the speed of getting the prints to the audience is. If you use Canon printers try a bit of software that probably comes with your printer called Easy Photo Print - it does what it's name says. Most other brands will have something similar. Actually it in the printer companies interests to help you make more prints since then you buy more ink and paper. You can get latest versions of the Canon software from their software center: http://software.canon-europe.com.

I then backup the images and Expression media catalogues to an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ which sits on my network at home. I use four 320GB disks in mine, and also have it set to automatically back up to a USB external hard drive so I can do something I couldn't do with film. Have it stored in another place; simply taking the disk to my office and leaving it in the draw works for me.

So if the cartoon makes you think, then it's a good thing, if it makes you do something about the problem and reduce or eliminate the gap in your family photo history it's even better.

If you want to take a detailed view of the problem and books are your thing then the almost industry standard bible is Peter Krogh's The DAM book.


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Insomniacs and the best light

Some days you just can't sleep in, and as I get older that seems to be the case more and more. Maybe it's related to the onset of children that adults change their sleep patterns from late nights and later morning, particularly at weekends, to the early morning and early nights that seems to be the norm for me. I was reading some of the flickr comments made by flickr famous Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir from Iceland, particularly the image departure, which features her standing in the water at 3am caught my eye and brain.

However one great thing with waking up early - it's 05:30 as I type - is you get to experience some of the best early morning light that you missed when you were younger. In fact I can almost see the appeal of the great landscape photographers who go out before daybreak, sleep during the middle of the day and then back out in the early evening for sunset. Is that why this early and later periods are known as golden hours, since they are mostly seen by people in their later years? Of course younger people will claim they can approach this from the other tack, ie wake up later, go out to catch sunset, party some, stay out to catch sunrise and then sleep.

The other thing for bloggers is there's a certain stillness and open thoughts before the pressure of the day takes it's toll and then later it all becomes just work.

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Time lapse movies

I was pointed in the direction of Ross Ching's website and more specifically his Eclectic 2.0 movie recently. It's stunning, and then you read the making of section. It's shot on EOS digital SLR cameras, the images are cropped to full HD resolution 1920x1080 and turned into a movie with Apple Quicktime Pro. All you need is a Canon DSLR a way to trigger the camera on a regular basis and some patience.

I tried using a Canon EOS-1D Mark III and the TC-80N3 timer controller, the results were pretty interesting - as far as clouds moving across the sky over a couple of hours can be. I found some practical tips. Use aperture priority mode to keep the depth of field consistent from shot to shot and batch process the images to the required 1920 x 1080 size using some tools - photoshop and actions is a tough one to swallow. I used an automator action on a MAC, though the Faststone resizer on a PC would also do fine. One thing I found was some cases of flicker in the movies I made using Quicktime on the mac. I was speaking to a colleague who had seen similar problems when he had tried. Our consensus is that you want to split the sequences in to around 950 images or so and do them in Quicktime to make the clips and join the clips together later. Looks like quicktime has some problem around the 1000 images in a sequence mark.

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Up on the Downs

Spent the evening up on the Dunstable Downs with a few of the members of Imagez camera club. All looked good as I set off, no rain, sun, blue sky. In fact I was only slightly late arriving on site.

I'd gone to try and force my brain to think wide angle, and so started out with the Canon 17-40mm lens, and a 2 stop graduated ND filter. Even more on message I finished the evening on a 14mm lens. Still think the sunset looked better through someone elses 70-200 at 200mm though. Reviewing the pictures earlier and I found that the 2stop graduated ND filter was a bit too good on the sky, nice blue sky but the foreground looks strange in comparison. Also the paragliders were a bit dark where the ND had got them in the sky.

It seems that a lot of photographers whose work I'm enjoying in recent months have either completely mastered the use of wide angle - without making it look so obvious, or must shoot from some crazy distance with a longer lens. I guess I'm still in the close-crop-is-best group, and specifically the crop as much as possible in camera section.


Some pictures.

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Strobist techniques need models

Over many recent months I've been reading all the cool things you can do with small off camera flashes on the strobist blog, I've even tried my hand at making some of the drinking straw grids for my flashes.

However all this off camera flash stuff is really great, but often it works best if you use some people in the pictures, and from a photographers point of view it is always better to try out stuff for real. How many pictures can you take as tests on a teddy bear!

Still you can find models on the internet, and with film costs being zero for digital then strobist techniques maybe a way to maintain a high expenditure on photography related items; models specifically.

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EOS 1000D

Update - picture added

Just arrived in the office, switch on the computer and lo... EOS 1000D appears on the front page of dpreview.com. So 10MP, self-cleaning sensor, live view, slightly better viewfinder than the EOS 400D it replaces, but not as nice as the EOS 450D. Maybe not a camera for me... but certainly one for many people looking to a DSLR at an even more bargain price. Hope it ships in time to meet everyone's holiday schedule.

What's more there's an update for the Speedlite 430EX to a 430EX II, basically adding the ability to control the flash from the recent EOS camera models like you can do with a Speedlite 580EX II. Still not a master gun, but would work nicely as a slave. Oh it's got that metal foot and easier locking mechanism.

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Blog post #1

Welcome to the new blog of p4pictures, i'm starting out with this blogging thing after reading and subscribing to far too many other photo related blogs.

How to start?
I've been interested in photography since I was as a kid and started with a 110 format film camera, progressing through to an old Agfa Silette with 35mm film and then on to the Practika MTL-3 that so many of my generation of photographers used. The switch to interchangeable lenses, albeit with an M42 threaded mount, opened up all kinds of new options including wider angles and longer lenses. I can't recall any of the lenses I owned for that camera except a 28mm that one day stopped working - the aperture stuck. I disassembled it to find that it would no longer reassemble. Lesson 1 of photography, most of the bits are highly complicated.

With 35mm films, mostly slides, starting to be shot and college beckoning a change to a full featured Yashica FX103 Program called with it's TTL off the film flash metering. I used this for most of college, shooting a variety of films from Ilford HP5, FP4 plus lots of cheap stuff from supermarkets. However in the mid 80s then Canon launched the EOS line of cameras. I can still visualise the in-store displays for the Electro Optical System, great big rotating bits of cardboard with the EOS logo. Somehow I ended up with my first EOS and EOS 650 with the 35-70mm zoom lens. Motordrive, autofocus, automatic rewind - it had everything.

Maybe not everything...
The EOS 650 was updated and turned in to an EOS 600 for faster shooting, better AF, I was hooked and needed one. Somehow I found the money and it was mine, helped a bit by some peer pressure as one of my friends had a 600, and it was so much better than the 650 I had. The EOS 600 lasted for many years and had a lot of film put through it. I'd found motorsport and studio glamour photography - plus a job in engineering to pay for it all.

So it was destined that when the EOS 5 was launched that it would be mine, eye controlled autofocus, faster, bigger, stronger you know the drill... with the days being before internet as a mainstream it was a tour through the photography magazines to find a best price. Eventually based on a search of dealers close to a junction of the M6 motorway I ended up in St Helens to buy the EOS 5 and vertical grip. This camera was the start of my increased expenditure on EOS and also on film. A regular trip to a dealer in Bolton for films and batteries was then the order of the day. I kept the EOS 5 until almost 2002, but since 1995 it had only had limited use. I found digital early.... and expensive!

Time to dig out a slide/neg scanner and relive some of those old images that I carefully archived, now in the loft.

Currently I'm using EOS digital SLR cameras and a growing selection of EF lenses.

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