52:2013 Week 23

OK so its been a while since I posted an entry to my blog, probably reflects my struggles with my photography in recent months - work has been all consuming and the lack of time to spend on my photos has lead to a drop in enthusiasm, if it wasn't for the 52 weeks group I doubt my camera would have been out of it's bag.

Anyway, to this week's shot. The theme this week was Composites.  Decided to go with Focus Stacking which I have only tried once or twice in the past.  A couple of years ago when doing my 365 project I tried for hours to get the DOF right on a shot of this chess set, since then I discovered Focus Stacking.

For this week's shot I took eight images, each taken with focus progressed through the shot. The resulting shots were the merged and blended in Photoshop to bring all of the important part of the image into focus. If you want to find out more about this technique there is a good tutorial here.

After merging in Photoshop I converted the image to black and white and here is the result...

If you came directly to this blog you can catch my Flicker Photostream here.

52:2013 Week 15

 There was no blog last week as there was really nothing to say but this week the theme was "Like a painting". I've been thinking about photographing this bay near our house for a while now and I decided it was time to make it the subject of this weeks photo. Here is the original shot:

The conversion was all done in Photoshop. First step was to take the background layer and duplicate it and convert that layer into a smart object. Then that smart object layer was duplicated again. In the first layer I used the Filter Gallery Cutout filter and in the second layer the Median filter. with the overall image looking how I wanted it the final step was to merge the layers into a new layer and apply the oil painting filter to it.
If you came directly to this page you can see a larger version on my Flicker site here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwallace/8645713395/in/photostream

52:2013 Week 13

Week 13 and this weeks theme was Shadows. My original idea was a shot of a sun dial. Been another very busy week at work so yesterday was my first chance to get the shot - and it was cloudy for the first time in a long while. Today started out cloudy but cleared in the afternoon. Set out in the car to the botanical gardens in Wellington almost 30 minutes away only to find some pine trees had grown completely shading the sun dial from about half an hour before.

So, it was time to come up with plan B and as I was drying the dishes a wooden spoon inspired me that it's shadow would look like a knife. Took a few shots of me taking photos of the shadows  and then set the 2 second timer to take shots of me with the wooden spoon. Use manual exposure and focussing to keep the shots a close to the same as possible.

Post processing involved darkening the shots in Lightroom, converting to black and white and increasing the contrast. Got the first one how I wanted it and then just copied and pasted the processing to the others.

Then I loaded the images into Photoshop as layers and set the blend mode to darken. I selected the two images that make up this shot and the shot was done.

52:2013 Week 12

Week 12 and the theme was food. A very simple set up this week using available light. I set up the shot and then microwaved the food to heat it and provide the sheen. Here is the set up:

52:2013 Week 11

The theme this week was Street Photography. Street Photography is not a genre that I have done a lot of with the following shot from New York featuring in my Project 365 two years ago one of only a few...

Whilst I have always admired this style I also hadn't thought much about until a couple of weeks ago when I attended the Wellington Meetup Group Portrait session where it came up in discussion and there were very strong views against doing it by a significant portion of the group. It was therefore no surprise with the comments in the 52 Weeks group  theme discussion indicating it was not something that many members of the group were looking forward too.

With that in mind I ventured out this morning to visit the local market that sets up in the local shopping centre car park each week. I found I had arrived a little late as many of the stalls were already packing up. I did feel self conscious and out of my comfort zone and only took three shots before heading home feeling good with the featured shot.

The shot I took was of a section that was still active and I was drawn to the three people at the bottom right of the shot. One of the lessons I had in mind was the photo should tell a story and I felt those people did so. Here is the original shot:

Processing was initially in Lightroom as I cropped very slightly to get rid of a bright area on the left of the image and adjusted contrast and dodged and burnt the image to lighten the three people and darken the rest of the image to make them stand out more. I wasn't happy with the black and white conversion in Lightroom so took the image into Silver Effects Pro which better rendered the image how I envisioned it.

I am not sure I will do a lot of street photography going forward but I do keep threatening to do a strangers project at some point to get me more comfortable with photographing strangers. If you came to the blog directly you can see the larger version of the photo here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulwallace/8559974819/

52:2013 Week 10

The blog is short this week - the theme being was "What is it?" and after exploring a number of options reverted to this shot of the chains in our Grandmother Clock. Here are a couple of wider shots

52:2013 Week 9

Apologies for anyone who was looking for last weeks blog - given it was a SOOC shot of our cat there wasn't much to say, so as the wise man once said, if you don't have anything to say don't say anything!

I spent the work week in Sydney and was sitting in the plane on Monday morning and thought of photographing Gollum, a feature hanging from the roof in the Wellington Airport. Initial processing was in Lightroom and was white balancing and contrast adjustments. From there I loaded them as layers into Photoshop, increasing the canvas size to cover the size of the stacked photos and positioned them one below the other. I then added a black fill layer behind the two images to provide the frame. Visitors direct to this blog can view a larger version of the image on Flicker here.