Rolling Katie

I'm often guilty of automatically defaulting to my favourite wide-angle lens (the Olympus 9-18mm) and using slower shutter speeds but when I'd made an early morning trip to Millendreath after Storm Katie the waves were too big for me to dare get the part of the beach I was aiming for (I love photography, but not enough to risk getting washed out to sea!)

On this morning I took a different approach and used my telephoto lens and a fast shutter speed (1/800 sec) to freeze the waves, just waiting for the waves to be just crashing and making a nice lead-in line into the image, on towards the rocks and cliffs in the distance.

Sometimes it's good to stray a little outside your own personal box!

Lightroom vs. Photoshop

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:

Date Taken
Camera Used
Lens Used
Focal Length
ISO Used
Facial Recognition
Map (where the image was taken)
Rating (1-5 stars)
Colour Labels
Flags
Keywords
Collections (manually grouping images, regardless of where they are stored on the hard-drive)
Images that have been published to external websites such as Flickr and 500px

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:

Tony Briard Trophy

Well done to the winners of the Tony Briard Trophy! First place was take by John with "Leadenhall market roof detail", second place goes to Roger with "Cape Town" while third place went to Janet with "St Paul's Reflections".

Ken Beard Trophy

Congratulations to Andy for winning the Ken Beard Trophy with his excellent black and white shot, second place went to Janet while third place was taken by Richard.

The Orton Effect

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:

Before

After

The team or the star

When choosing a new camera it's easy to fall into the trap of simply buying the best camera you can afford, when in reality it's often more important to save money to put towards lenses, accessories or travel to get you to new locations where you can create the images you want.

In today's scene, high-ISO is the current technological buzzword taking over from the number of megapixels from years gone by, but there are often many other factors to take into consideration when buying a camera as highlighted by Robin Wong in his recent blog post:

http://robinwong.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/5-important-camera-capabilities-to.html

Visit to Launceston Camera Club

We would like to pass our thanks on to the Launceston Camera Club for making us feel so welcome at the meeting, a thoroughly enjoyable evening showcasing the best from both clubs!

Google Nik Collection

Google has released it's Nik Collection of filters for free, including 7 modules such as Analog Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, Dfine and Sharpener Pro... well worth a download, go and grab them while you can!

https://www.google.com/nikcollection/

Saltash-Ivybridge-Liskeard Battle - 14th March 2016

Six of us went along to support our Club and a very enjoyable evening was had. It’s always nice to meet up with other clubs and see different work and find out what clubs are up to.

The judge was David Snowdon from Exeter Club and he did a good job. He made positive comments about all the images and some useful observations suggesting improvements. Overall Liskeard came 3rd with 230 points – Ivybridge won with 242 points and Saltash was in the middle with 239 points. However, in the projected images we tied first with Ivybridge, both clubs getting 121 points, with Saltash scoring 120.

As is usual in this sort of competition it only takes a couple of images to score highly for a club to take them to the winning position. This is what happened in the print section with Ivybridge scoring an 18 and two 17’s and Saltash getting one 18 and three 16’s. The remaining individual scores were all in the 13 to 15 bracket (highest score possible was 20 which no-one received).

Liskeard’s best scoring prints were “Motocross” and “The Long Journey” – both scoring 15. In the projected section our highest scores of 17 were given to “One Man and His Dog” and “Time By the Sea”.

An enjoyable evening of “friendly rivalry”.

Haworth Cup

Congratulations to the winners of the Haworth Cup, with a deserving first place entry from Ted with his Serval image.