These long exposure photos where taken at the Monash Gallery of Art after a Talk And workshop about the project Syzygy/Shadows of Heaven (work-in-progress). Which was an interesting idea, where photographic plates are contact printed under other photographic “templates” (other photographic plates, including original startfield photoplates from Mount Stromlo ) used as negatives under just start light. The plates where laid out on tarpaline on Lake Tyrrell in the mallee, on nights that had no moon or no significant planet light, so it was just start light exposing the film. The resulting images are beautifully detailed.
So what can be done about it? there are many despeckling filters, often they will be supplied with the software you got with your camera. These generally look for out of place coloured specks and average (blur) them using the tones of adjacent pixels, trouble is this smart blurring often gets a bit over enthusiastic. Luckily I have found the Noiseware’'s Community Edition program very useful in “filtering” out this noise, but avoiding the over blurred look.
Remember Higher ISO,Low Light and Long Exposures will increase noise in your digital photos.
I big issue, largely a secret unknown by most new camera purchases, is that digital cameras have a limited dynamic range compared with film cameras. The problem often leads to washed out highlights (eg often leadfing to the sky will be a bleached white) and no shadow detail (big black areas) which can leave a print from a digital photo looking flat. It is also in past made worse by the cameras light meter which when confronted by with high contrast lighting must choose to what to expose correctly and usually its decision is to try and make an over all "average", which is seldom the right choice. The poor digital photographer has had to choose between correct exposure of the sky or the foreground.
I am often asked why I don't take all my photos in RAW format. I do take a few, usually experimental shots in RAW format often enough but generally I just take JPEG. Originally the main reasons were the vastly bigger file size and the limited number of programs I used that could read the early propriety formats (different for each camera manufacturer and often even different camera models by the same camera manufacturer) and the fact that the conversion and tweaks took time (actually it was tedious wasted time when trying to review a large set of shots). Further a lot of "part time" photo enthusiast just got scared off trying to even understand what RAW was and how to use it.
Having access to the "pre-developed" image does give powerful software, like Photoshop CS or Lightroom, the ability to "fix" existing shots by reprocessing them. However I suspect most new digital cameras users will not see these improvements or even know how to do such post processing. To them RAW files are still just way bigger, require special conversion and/or processing, compare with the compact, quick and easy to use jpeg format that is compatible with most software, website, photo processors.
Shooting in RAW format is likely to remain the domain of the perfectionists and those that loved working in the darkroom, for a little while to come. Those with less time to fiddle will lag back in JPEGland.
The one area that might just force DNA's popularity is in the long term archiving. Future generations may greatly appreciate that they can easily enhance your old photos using a fancy new piece of software or service. The problem being that will so many different formats around, will yours still be processable in the future? (probably not!) So converting now to a "standard" RAW format could be desirable. Adobe have recognized this and provided a free format converter(Windows, Mac) Their logic being if you camera doesn't itself support the DNA format you can easily convert to this format now and possibly "future proof" your digital photos.
David Crandall, of Cornell University has analysed the 35 million geotagged photos already uploaded to Flickr and produced a gallery of photos organised into maps, created accurate global and city maps and identified popular snapping sites.
I have been geotagging a selection my photos since back in 2005 and was an early member of the flickr geotagging group/community. This is probably the best place still to find out how to tag your photos and what's new. Even if you don't use flickr other sites like picas web albums and photobucket let you make your own maps.
I was scanning some older photos, colour prints, taken on film on a Cannon compact camera. Whilst this one was a fraction ”misty” I saw it had potential but falls down, as so many holiday snaps do, compositionally.
“Good composition gets the viewer to look into the picture, not scan across it”
….quote from my upcoming workshop
Cropping is one of the easiest ways to improve the composition of a photo, and typically that means identifying the areas of interest, and placing then is a good place for the eye to settle. The rule of thirds is often quotes a the gospel for photographers, but it is just a simplification of the golden ratio used by artist for centuries. The idea is to put the most important compositional elements, like the shore of the lake , the villa and the silhouetted trees, onto or straddling the imaginary lines dividing the image into thirds. Some digital cameras now even come with a mode to display these lines on the LCD “viewfinder”.
