Want to shoot wildlife then get a Canon

The Natual History Museum is sponsoring the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, I was reading some news on the BBC website earlier and they listed the winners of the 2008 competition. It's worth a look as there's some stunning images here, but along with each image is a description of the cameras used. I was surprised to see that of the top five images four were shot with Canon cameras an EOS Rebel XT (EOS 450D in Europe), EOS 400D, EOS 40D and EOS-1Ds Mark II.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see the use of some real world lenses in use, EF-S 10-22mm for the winner, EF 300mm f/4L IS + 1.4x extender for the young wildlife photographer of the year winner and 100mm macro and the ideal wildlife lens the EF 500mm f/4L IS USM.

You can see the images in an exhibition near you in the coming yyear as it tours the UK and other countries. If you like wildlife photography it's got to be almost essential viewing. Find out when and where on the Natural History Museum site here.

Want more? The Guardian newpaper has a gallery of some of the highly commended entries and here three of the five images were taken with Canon cameras. I was wondering if the image of the called Sandpiper congregation, by Arthur Morris, USA is the same Arthur Morris as the www.birdsasart.com one?

At least 2009 competition entries start in January so plenty of time to shoot your cat with a Canon...

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I wonder where it leads to...?

It's been an interesting few weeks since my last post. Life is crazy busy and seems to be on a spiral of ever more busy for the near future - certainly to the end of the year. So it's nice to view a few pictures of old, and maybe apply some new things to them. You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but you can give an old photo an interesting new presentation with some new photoshop techniques.

 

My first effort is an old shot that I made many years ago with a PowerShot S30 digital camera, some 3.2 megapixels of great camera in the days of microdrives, 128MB CF cards and such things. What i've done is to crop the image to the presentation you see, then make duplicate layers of it. For the first I then worked with the channel mixer to give me some contrasty black and white of the reeds and the lake surface - almost like a lith film look. Secondly I punched the blue reflection of the sky with a little of the Scott Kelby 7-point photoshop LAB mode trick. The some judicious blending and here you have an unrepeatable alternative view of what was once a landscape image of some plants on the edge of a lake.

Then for something rather different and using a technique found in a post on the dpreview.com EOS-1D forums. Here the original image has been duped to a new layer and then the photoshop reduce noise filter used with full strength, and zero details preserevd and zero details sharpened. You run this filter 3 or maybe 4 times in succession then sharpen with an unsharp mask using a mid-range 100 amount and 200 radius and say 7-15 threshold. Then I blended the newly adjusted layer in using a hard light and lowered the opacity a bit. A bit more masked levels and a vignette completed the results. Here's the original so called straight image.

I quite like this pictorial look. Art it isn't but I'm really keen to see how it looks in print. I also think the opening image could use a bit of this painterly technique to bring it up from the mere record shot category.

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Preparing for a digital slide competition

My local camera club has been asked to put together it's best images to enter in the regions photo competition. It's a chance for each club in the area to showcase their ability and also to see how they stack up against others. For this year we need digital images that will be projected instead of prints or slides. The standards say 1024 x 768 pixels maximum resolution, JPEG images, sRGB colour profile. Trouble is that makes for a small image with few pixels. Scaling images down for projection is something that needs a bit more than just resize in Photoshop.

Resize in Photoshop will get an image the right size, but when you downsize an image a lot then you also lose detail and sharpness. You also hide noise so it's not all bad.

The next tough part is the contrast, most projectors have quite a high contrast ratio and also a tough approach to shadow detail. A lot of grey and black areas in images tend to be rendered dark grey. In terms of highlights there's also a good chance that your images will blow out the highlights when projected too. It's a bit like putting quite a steep S curve on your images in Photoshop. You can see the effect your self on your images by applying an S-curve and moving the ends of the curve up and down the vertical axes. Something like this one below is an idea of a particularly bad condition projector.

Here I made the input level of 0 give me 20 on the output and the input level of 255 give me 240 on the output as the starting points to cover the restricted range of black and white the projector displays.

So create a curve adjustment layer over your image and call it Projector. It's important that this is a layer since you will need it to be the top layer of any work you do to the file, effectively giving you a preview of how the image may project. From there I often duplicate the background and then use the shadow highlight tool to recover an image to look good with the Projector curve over the top. Turn off the Projector curve layer from time to time to see how the image is looking.

The next part is sharpening, it's important to sharpen the image again compared to what sharpening you may have done on a full resolution image. Remember downsizing the resolution will weaken the sharpening you may have applied before. So now look at the image at 100% on your monitor and sharpen with the unsharp mask some more. Typically amount of 70, radius 0.8 and threshold of 2 is a good place to start but you'll need to adapt this for different images. I also like to do this and then use the fade unsharp mask and select luminosity to try and avoid sharpening colours just edges.

Now let's hope that none of my camera club colleagues read this before the submission deadline

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Apple broke my Windows computer!

Today I have suffered at the hands of Apple on my Windows machine. Something was a bit odd when Adobe Photoshop CS3 started complaining about a licensing issue and needing to re-install. Then Photoshop CS (CS1) randomly wouldn't save a file and locked up big time when trying to browse to another drive.

Strange how it all worked fine yesterday, before I installed the new iTunes update from Apple

Today I've uninstalled iTunes, MobileMe, ipod drivers, apple update, bonjour and now Photoshop loves me enough to remember it's licensed so I can get on with pictures. Then my old and venerable Nero pointed out another issue with the DVD burner that it fixed and required another reboot.

Apple your products are quite nice in general - and I happily use both PC and MAC almost every day - but this is simply sloppy to wipe out your good buddies at Adobe and a heap of my time. Oh and uninstalling Bonjour didn't take the service out either, I needed to rename / delete the C:\Program Files\Bonjour folder.

Dear Steve.Jobs@apple.com,
I suggest you think carefully about your desires to make us all have iTunes and Safari on our Windows PC when all we wanted was QuickTime. Keep pulling stunts like this and you will hurt QuickTime itself.

Some stuff that I found helpful on the road to system repair - thank you kind souls.

• ZDNET
• Forensic Photoshop

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Big cats are back

It's been a great day, I've been to the local Whipsnade Wild Animal Park or zoo for short. I took a limited number of pictures, around eight rolls of film worth, some 250+ shots; hello storage another 5GB to swallow. Even though the lions were doing what they do best, resting, there were some nice pictures to be had and the usual technique of putting the lens up to the glass with a big lens hood on the front lets you shoot as if there is no glass there. Quite a strange thing when the lions are chewing over the bones of some meat and they happen to be around 3 metres away.

Duly refreshed from the day to the zoo I remembered that the TV guide had said Big Cat live was due back TV on BBC1 from Sunday. If you have access to this then watch it for i'm sure you'll find something interesting. I found the website is already active on the BBC page and you can see the scale of the production - as you'd think it's a bit more than a few presenters a film crew or two and some sound engineers. Check out the number of tentss they have at the base camp for this production... http://www.bbc.co.uk/bigcat/video/ and follow the Camp Report 1 - camp tour video.

They have a lion kill on webcam to watch - possibly the first ever capture of this on a webcam. I'm getting the feeling that the TV coverage will be as impressive as ever and make me want to go back to the Masai Mara in Kenya again soon myself.

Ah well back to sorting out the zoo pictures and some imagination for now.


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