Tell him he’s dreaming

This was one of those good ideas at the time that took much more effort than I anticipated. I’m going to blame google for changing its deep dream geneator, It just took a long time to do something I concieved in a flash. That was to redo my week of photos as abstract deep dreams

Day 7 :: Getting ready for the next Endless Summer Project

Repacking my camera bag in preparation for my next trip. Rather than pack on the last day I repack a couple of weeks out so I have time to realise if I am missing something important. During my year long art project travels I have been progressively trimming down the stuff I carry around.

My revised camera bag packing list has, starting at the top right and moving clockwise.

1. My Pentax K20 (my favourite camera, with my favourite lens a Tamron 18 to 200mml zoom Note this camera now has a wrist strap, rather than cumbersome neck strap.
2. In the side pocket of the camera bag I have cables, spare batteries etc in a zip up mesh bag.
3. My Sigma 70-300 Zoom Lens
4. A couple of white "Face washers" (to clean the cameras not the lenses)
5. Blower Brush
6. Lens pen (microfiber cleaner and brush)
7. Business cards & pen
8. My home made string monopod
9. My ThinkTank Mirrorless Mover 30i Camera Bag. Although it is designed to carry a mirrorless camera system & Ipad mini I find to perfect for my gear in a relatively small shoulder bag. I also a small kit of sketching gear in the Ipad slot (not shown here but includes an A5 sketch book, couple of pencils & pens, waterbrush & small Cotman's watercolour Sketchers Box)
10. Sealed packets of alcohol lens wipes (I haven't used these for a while prefer the lens pen)
11. Spare SD cards (I'm taking 4 16GB cards & 6 8GB cards of my next trip, 20 days)
12. An old Smartphone (with no SIMS card, but the camera and GPS still work fine)
13. A polarizing filter
14. Tone Reference cards

Day 6 :: Motion

Today I was testing out my new camera wrist strap (I really don’t like or ever use the neck strap) for comfort and suitability when panning. I chose this image because it was the slowest and showed the best motion blur associated with panning on the ibis. I also liked the composition.

 

There where several other decent candidates, and a fair few blurred rejects. So the wrist strap was comfy but didn't guarantee panning success, which I still but down mainly to luck.

Day 5 :: Foggy Afternoon in Olinda

The theme for today’s Photos was together. But the inclement weather meant photographic opportunites where not together. Such is life

Day 4 :: Quiet

This was fairly straight forward, a tripod, remote trigger and 2 second self timer. Just enjoying a leisurely saturday morning.

Day 3 :: Wet

The photo I posted today for the week of daily photos was a HDR image created with Nik Software’s HDR Pro from a three photo bracketed set. I also selected the RAW version of the mid exposure (EV=0) and took it through the Window’s Beta Version of Lunimar, and it just two clicks (Bright Day Preset and then Accent AI Enhancer Filter) had almost the same image much faster.

Day 2 :: Playing

The concept behind todays photo for this week of daily photos, was to be playing an older style or board/card game but with a little participant movement to make the playing aspect obvious. Getting the board/game in sharp focus but having moving hands was easy enough with a long exposure and the camera on a tripod but moving the hands during the exposure. I took a couple of images but decided I needed the hands to be recognizable not just totally blurry. I though a bracketed set and HDR processing might be perfect but it look that surreal unnatural (and a little sinister) effect HDR so often suffers from.

It was not hard to reset the three EV steps back to roughly the same exposure, then I used OnOne’s Layers module to blend the three images according to the amount I wanted to either highlight or blur the hands and then merge them down using normal Blend mode. A final run though  dynamic contrast and finally cropping.

Day 1 in a week of daily photos

Along with other listeners to the Family Photographer Podcast I am undertaking to post one photo a day on flickr.

My first photo beat the gun a little and was about my finishing up my current painting project. A semi Abstract Canvas painted in watercolour (That’s not an obvious thing to do by the way) Whereas the theme for the first day was beginning, oh well I got that wrong.

Even before most other folks had has a chance to post something interesting (actually interestingness might be a better term) started to happen. The notification system (which I hate and keep trying to disable) started beeping and  most where from Instagram where I also posted a slightly different phot in three parts. Soon there where ten likes  Then I noticed a different beep and now some of the notification where from flickr people favouriting this image. The next 20 minutes saw them equally adding likes and favourites and even comments. I suspected I was on explorer on flickr and I was soon able to confirm this (see screen capture on the right). It didn’t take long to reach 1000 views and 40 favourites. Instagram activity soon fell away. My conclusion is fame last about half and hour on Instagram if your lucky but scoring interestingness in explorer on flickr with last a day or so.

The only remaining unanswered question is how many likes on Instagram equal a favourite on flikr?

Third in the Series

 

My Third Photobook (the third 100) in the series of this year Daily Photo Project arrived today. I love these little 20cm square books from Snapfish (especially when I can get them at a discount).They are easy to share and have the benefit of being physical, compared with Instagram or a flickr album. However they were made directly from my Daily Photo flickr album (so the process was easy).

If you haven’t made a photobook yet, Put together some favourite photos now (that’s the hardest part) and Then drop hints or even directly ask for a gift voucher to create a photobook for Christmas. Starting with the small economical books like my 20 by 20cm size from snapfish is a great way to start.

Time for a coffee & creative ideas

Its later in the afternoon and not a daily photo taken yet. So I was finishing a coffee and contemplating what to do. I had an idea to try a series of my self looking at the camera and painting as if it was a self portrait, perhaps to make into a time series collage. So I set up my canon on my tripod and set it to take a series of images. I finished my coffee and then played with the brush.

However it was one of those session where nothing worked as planned. Just as the cameras started firing the sun came out, brilliantly, casting unfortunate shadows. The camera was still manually focused, and everything turned out  blurry. There where many other problems especially that I had other more urgent duties to attend to, so I didn’t get a chance to repeat the photos. All I had was 12 terrible exposures, normally they would be deleted BUT I often tell people to keep a few rejects to experiment on. These were terrible and thus perfect for an experiment. My first thoughts was to try some simple dreamscope transforms and build the collage, but the three initial images of me finishing my coffee told the best story. Yet the simple transforms didn’t exactly look creative enough.

I decided to build three layers, The painting ground I made by leaving the image blurry by increased luminance and saturation. Next I made a simple stipple pattern and used it back in dreamscope as my custom filter, and created some line work. Then I recreated the the final patterned overall with the watercolour cartoon filter. I finally I experimented with OnOne Layers and different blend modes to give a composite image, that was once a rejected photograph.

Looking @ Nothing

Its 9:30pm on the last day of February and looking at nothing again! 

No Daily Photo yet!

PhotoFriday :: White

Sometimes the choice is made for you!

 

For PhotoFriday‘s topic White

Letting myself have a more creative eye

I have been thinking more about what I might do creatively than about the themes of my daily photos. This week’s Friday photo is about eyes and the subject is very predictable. My eye is already in lots of photos so I was trying to think outside the oval/almond, or whatever shape my eye is. I began by using my camera on a tripod teathered to my computer via lightroom amd taking photos a regular intervals so all I had to do is get close to the camera and look deeply into its lens. This is a pretty simple way to get a self portrait, that I hadn’t tried before. Its easy ad works well. None of the photos where all that remarkable but I like a couple with me looking over my glasses, I enhance this one in the develop moduloe since I was already in lightroom. The only unusual step was I reduced clarity (so as not to make the skin to crunchy). I then loaded this image into the web version of dreamscope and played with a few likely looking filters.

Once I had the original photo and a set of “arty” renderings built from it. I then loaded the seleceted photo and a few of the better filtered imaged into OnOne Layers. the filtered on top of the photo. It was then just a case of loading a mask, inverting it and then painting out around eyes. so the eyes are phoyograpohic while the rest of the portrait becomes an artwork. Finally adding a border, lots of fun and not hard to do.

See the PhotoFriday contribution below.

A last minute Photo Idea

I had wasted a lot of time and angst trying to get my scanner working, and had neglected taking and choosing my daily photo. I had taken the sunset (was good) but felt a bit like yesterday’s post. beside wher I park my lapop I now have a small aquarium, I am fish-sitting, and the fish come excitedly when I am there, Expecting a feed I suppose. They looked fine in the light of an overhead desk lamp so I figured they might make a perfect photo to end the day.Well photgraphing fast fish in low light at close range, is more of a challange than you might expect. Its like photographing birds in flight at the end of the day (high ISO and/or low stop and trying to get the shutter speed as low as possible) to which you can add the marco focus and very narrow depth of field with the low f-stop. Then there is also the issue of reflection off the glass.

Can you see all these issues in this photo, otherwsie I was quiet pleased.