On Tuesday we had a real treat for the club, a visit from Hugh Letheren who is shall we say, jsut a little enthusiastic about water-droplet photography!
Not only did he talk us through his own journey and set ups he has used, along with some of the history around this style of photography, he was also brave enough to bring his equipment and perform a live demonstration!
More of Hugh's work can be seen on his website: http://hugh.letheren.org/
Some of the images captured on the evening:
We were fortunate enough to be joined for the evening by the very talented girls from the Geraldine Lamb School of Dance.
The evening was planned around the use of second-curtain flash, this allowed us to capture some movement along with freezing the action and thus adding some dynamic aspects to the shot.
Of course, with multiple photographers all lining up for a shot we could not use the obvious approach of controlling the flash with the camera as this would only allow one person to shoot at a time. To get around this, we decided to use some good old-fashioned time management, with one person in control of the flash... a shout to ask the girls to start their dance move, at this point the photographers would also start their exposures, and at the agreed point we would fire the flash.
While this is certainly not a perfect solution, we had it timed well enough by the end of the evening so that everyone was getting shots they were happy with!
Another fun-filled practical evening at the Liskeard Camera Club! This week we were taking a closer look at long-exposure photography, with a practical emphasis on using lights to create patterns within the scene... it was great seeing everyone getting stuck in and thinking how they could use the lights to create their own unique images.
It's amazing what you can achieve with some cheap finger-lights, combined with bits of string and a stick of bamboo!
A great tutorial last night by Richard showing how you can create 3D images with a standard camera and a little Photoshop knowledge, get your 3D glasses at the ready!
Another cracking evening at the club, Richard bought in his lighting set up to show us how he approaches lighting for shooting portraits and while he has some good equipment the same logic can still be applied when using simpler gear.
We used two lighting set up during the evening, starting with a high-key configuration using all four flashes, and then switching to a simpler two flash setup for low-key portraits.
Any camera with interchangeable lenses has the potential for dust to stick on the sensor, and even with modern anti-dust self-cleaning sensor occasionally the inevitable happens.
Recently I rather foolishly managed to pick up my GX7 with no lens and managed to get a finger-print right on the sensor itself; some gentle wafting with a lint-free cloth just proceeded to move the print around and while some progress was made there was plenty of evidence of the residue when taking shots with a small aperture (f16-f22).
Here I shot a blank wall at f22 and the evidence is clear:
before
Shooting at a small aperture makes the spots far more noticeable, while a large aperture (f2-f4) hides the problem, it’s not always possible or desirable to shoot with the lens open.
After much investigation I settled on green swabs from Visible Dust; while a little expensive (£20 for 4 swabs) they seemed to have a good reputation.
These turned out to be a really simple solution, a small amount of the cleaning fluid is added to the swab and with a smooth wipe most of the dust was removed. One particularly obvious mark actually turned out to be a piece of dust on the rear element of the lens which was cleaned with a lint-free cloth.
The final results seems much better, there are still a few spots so I may have another try in a few days to get the last few stubborn leftovers.
It's great to catch a water droplet sitting on or dripping from a flower, with another reflection in the droplet. Its much easier if you slow the action down, or keep the droplet exactly where you want it by adding glycerin to the water or even just using glycerin on its own. This may seem like a bit of a cheat, but sometimes mother nature needs a little helping hand to get the shot you want.
For my first top tip, I have used my lovely daughter Jasmine, one of our chickens and our old Massey 35 as you do.
This is just a fun little experiment to see the affect that increasing the focal length of that lens can have on the background. Think very carefully about the focal length you use when deciding on a shot, as the results can be drastically different, as can be seen in the series of three shots. Jasmine did not move from her position, the tractor stayed where it was, the only change was the distance between me and Jasmine and the focal length of the lens. It's amazing how much the distance between Jasmine and the tractor has seemingly decreased.
35mm
100mm
200mm
Lightroom often seems to be overlooked as Photoshop’s odd little sibling and while it doesn’t offer Photoshop’s in-depth image editing capabilities there’s still plenty it can do to make your photographic life easier.
The main difference to remember is that Lightroom is a catalog of all your images and as such offers many ways to locate images far beyond which folder it is stored in, other search criteria can involve:
And there are plenty more search options to choose from beyond these. Some of these will require you to tag images as you process them, but some are automatically maintained such as date taken, camera used, lens used etc.
The Metadata flag in the "Library Filter" is a good place to start learning some of the standard options that are available:
The Orton Effect was originally developed by Michael Orton in the mid-1980s and uses 2 variations of the same exposure to give a scene a dream-like glow while still holding onto fine details.
Although there are multiple ways to achieve this kind of look I recently came across a great youtube video by Michael Shainblum explaining his recipe:
Applying this to one my own images gave a subtle but pleasing outcome:
