Images of Russia

I came across this set of images of Russia from Aleksey Petrosian - a Russian photographer. They are just a fantastic set of images - some moving, some tragic, and some that make you smile.  But all of them stunning.  Many of them are very reminiscent  of Henri Cartier Bresson (including this one to the right).

I love this style of photography where the photographer has capture images of what would appear to be just everyday life.  The results though are anything but just ordinary!

Olympus Advert

How could I resist this? Courtesy of the Fire Wire.

Nikon Coolpix P6000

I have been a big fan of Nikon cameras for many years - all my 35mm cameras are Nikon and my F90x and F5 are amongst my most favourite cameras. Like Nokia mobile phones, Nikon cameras are operate in a similar way - the Coolpix P6000 is no exception. This camera definitely owes much of it's heritage to the Nikon SLRs - both 35mm and digital - that have gone before it.

Form factor
It was the form of the P6000 that initially drew me to it. It has a kind of retro appearance with a large knurled knob and a hot shoe on top. Very reminiscent of my FM2 (another Nikon 35mm favourite).

If you are looking for an ultra compact digital camera, this is NOT the one for you. I have an Olympus FE-300 which I use for work. It is a 12MB compact and fits easily into my bag without me noticing it. I use it for recording whiteboards during meetings etc. For this purpose, it works really well. However, it is just too slow to use on the move (I tried, unsuccessfully, to photograph an otter swimming underwater while at the Seattle aquarium recently - the delay between the button being depressed and the shutter firing made it just about impossible). The lack of a viewfinder does not help either.

The P6000 is small enough to fit into a large pocket and has a great solid "chunky" feel to it. It feels like an F5 version of a digital compact. The body is made of magnesium alloy and is covered in part by a coarse rubber grip (which probably explains the similarity with the F5!).

The good bits
It is a well designed camera. The layout of the controls will feel familiar to a Nikon SLR user. The command wheel is used to great advantage. The layout feels as if it really has been thoroughly thought through. For example, if you are in playback mode (viewing images) and half press the shutter button, the camera flips back into camera mode. Pressing the "Delete" key immediately after taking a picture will delete it without the need to go into playback mode. Although just small touches, these do make a difference to the overall handling of the camera.

Most of the camera's settings can be set manually and there are a features that you would not expect on a compact (e.g. real curtain sync, auto bracketing, manual focus). There are even a couple of user definable user modes that can be configured.

Power up. The camera seems to power up almost immediately and, in use, there is negligible delay between depressing the button and the shutter firing.

Lens. This works really well, particularly in macro mode. It could probably do with a slightly longer focal length (x4 optical zoom), but works well as is.

Picture quality. Both picture resolution (13MB) and colour rendition is absolutely stunning (which is probably what you would expect).

Face recognition. This works well in "portrait" mode and instantly detected faces. I could even get it to recognise a face from a print on my desk. See ?????. The camera focuses on the face, even if it is off centre.

GPS. This took a while, probably 30-40 minutes, to locate the satellites once it was initially powered up. But after this, it worked well. Obviously, outdoors will produce the best results, but it still managed to find a satellite signal while sat at my desk next to the window. It seems pretty accurate. However, when moving from location to location, it can take up to 10 minutes to locate the satellites. This gets a bit annoying after a while.

All in all a great little camera. Solidly built and really easy to use.

Digital negatives

I came across this book recently (ISBN:0240808541) and it has turned out to be really useful. It takes you through the process of producing high quality digital negatives (i.e. negatives created using an inkjet printer and OHP media) which are the cornerstone of alternative process photography (e.g. palladium prints, cyanotypes).

Since most alternative processes require that you contact print the image, the image is ultimately limited by the size of the negative. Thus, many of the traditional photographers who use alternative processes are using large format cameras. The size of digital negatives, however, are only limited by the capability of the printer and many of today's photoprinters are capable of up to A3.

I looked into digital negatives last year when I was doing some Cyanotype printing, however, this book has provided a few clues about how I can improve the images. I used an old laser printer (HP1300) to produce a couple of digital negatives using OHP media. You will find my attempts here. The images were simply inverted in Photoshop to produce a negative and then printed. The images were OK, but weren't exactly stunning - the lack a full black and the tonal range did not match the original image.

In hindsight, the "negatives" produced on a laser printer probably lacked enough optical density to completely block out the light during the exposure to produce a pure white. These OHP negatives are not as dense as a real negative. The other issue is that I had not used a correction curve in Photoshop to map the tonal range of the digital image onto the tonal range of the cyanotype print. This is where this book really helps.

It takes you through the step-by-step process for producing a correction curve for a particular alternative process and then shows you how to use this curve to produce a high quality digital negative. While some of the technology referred to in the book is slightly out of date now, the process of producing and applying the correction curves remains the same.

It is a really useful little book, although it is a little expensive and I do wish it was in a larger format with more gallery images. The associated website (where you can download some of the digital material) could be a little more aspiring and I do think the authors missed a bit of a trick in that it could have been used as a repository for readers to upload their own correction curves for others to use.

Retouching tips in Photoshop

Came across this blog entry today which seems to cover some really useful Photoshop material, particularly for portrait work. Judging from the number of comments on the page and I am not the only one that thinks this is useful material!

The thing that I find amazing is how difficult many of these tips would be in the traditional darkroom.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/15/70-beauty-retouching-photoshop-tutorials/

More tone mapping

Just for the sheer hell of it! More tone mapping. These are shot in Osterley Park, West London earlier today. They consist of 3 images - one stop over exposed, one stop underexposed and one image correctly exposed. Shot using a Nikon D100 and auto bracketing. As you can see from the images, I only had a wide angle lens!

In terms of the settings, they are way over the top producing rather weird graphic type images. I am using Photomatix Pro 3.0 to produce these. You don't need any other software to produce these although I have resized these in Photoshop (click on any of the images to see a slightly larger version).

Tone mapping using HDR

HDR is a technique for producing a digital image with High Dynamic Range. Digital cameras unfortunately can only capture a limited range of exposures. So, if you take a picture in a room with light streaming through the windows, the camera often struggles to capture the scene outside. Here's an example I took in my living room - the image of the street outside is largely over exposed and parts of the room inside are underexposed (e.g. the shadow area of the chair in front of us). And even if we could capture such a wide dynamic range, an LCD monitor would struggle to display it!

On film, the situation is slightly different. Film has a much wider dynamic range and if I had shot the same image as above on a film camera, if we looked at the negative we would see that the details of the street outside would have been recorded as well as the details in the room (assuming I had exposed it properly!). However, photographic paper (required to make a print)- just like an LCD monitor - is not capable of displaying such a wide dynamic range. This is why traditional photographers end up dodging and burning prints in the darkroom - "burning" refers to exposing the highlights for additional amounts of time under the enlarger to bring out the details. In the example above, the details of the road outside would have been "burnt in" to have produced any detail on the print. Anyway, I have digressed, back to HDR.

HDR is a digital technique for combining images of the same scene that have different exposures in order to capture a wider dynamic range. In other words, you might take three images - one over exposed (to capture the darker areas), one under exposed (to capture the brighter areas) and a normally exposed image. Using HDR software, you can combine these images and effectively "flatten" out or compress the dynamic range. This will add detail to the darker shadows and bring out the detail in the over exposed highlights. It is a pretty handy technique and something where digital photography just beats traditional methods hands down.

Now, often when you see a HDR image, it has often been "tone mapped". Tone mapping is the process of associating a set of approximate tones with an image. Wikipedia covers the topic if you want more details. The resulting images have an almost graphic feel to them. It is possible to adjust the effects in the HDR software, so find something that you like.

Here's a test image I produced using Photomatix (you can see it is the trial version by the watermark) with three images - one exposed normally, one over exposed by 1 stop, one under exposed by 1 stop. I have made the effect pretty extreme in this example, but it is possible to turn down effects. You can download the trial software from here on the HDRsoft website. If you want to purchase a license (which allows you to produce images without the watermark), it will set you back around £50.

Not quite what I was planning

Here's a great little book. It consists of 1,000 autobiographies - all in 6 words. It is the result of an article in the US Smith magazine where readers submitted their own 6 word biographies. Allegedly inspired by Ernest Hemingway who was once challenged to write a story in six words. He came up with "For sale: baby shoes, never worn".

My favourites?

• Occasionally wrong but never in doubt;


• Tried everything once, few things twice;
  
• Found true love, married someone else;


• Educated too much, lived too little;
  
• Lucky in everything else but love;


• Cursed with cancer. Blessed with friends;


• Never really finished anything, but cake.

It is possible to read it from cover to cover in an hour. It is inspiring and thought provoking. The thought that went through my mind is that many of these autobiographies would make great themes for photos.

I don't think it is out yet in the UK, but you can find imports on Amazon.

Classic photos in Lego

Ever come across something and I think "I wish I thought of that!"?

Well, here is an example of a photographer taking classic photographs and re-staging them using Lego. Sounds a bit weird (which great ideas don't?), but it works extremely well. You can view the complete set on Flickr here: Lego

Bob Carlos Clarke - The Dark Summer

I have managed to pick up a second hand copy of Bob Carlos Clarke's The Dark Summer. It seems to becoming pretty hard to get hold of. I can't believe that it is 20 years since I went to his exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society in Bath. I always regretted not buying the book at the time and it seems really weird to buy it 20 years later!

The images are stunning and looking back on these images you can see how far this genre of photography has come in the last twenty years - much of it due to the BCC influences.

The images are deep and dark with definite Goth style overtones. What makes this book even more remarkable is that many of the images are either hand coloured or the result of multiple negative printing. Today, such images would be easily replicated using digital techniques and this book underlines BCC's skill as a traditional printer although he will be remembered for his skills as a photographer foremost.

Tim Rudman - World of Lith printing

I have experimented with Lith printing and you will find examples on my website as well as some more detail information on the technical pages.

I admit that my initial interest was stimulated after reading Tim Rudman's "The Master Photographer's Lith Printing Courser" and I was excited to find this new book. The original book is a great handbook to Lith printing and is about all you need to get started (except papers and chemicals!).

This new book (published in 2006) contains some basic information to get you started, but is not a substitute in any way for the original text. Once past the first 30-40 pages of the instruction book, there are a series of example images from a number of guest photographer's portfolios together with technical notes. I find this really useful as it provides inspiration and explores the different styles and subject matter being used by a variety of photographers. I really liked the work from Margaret Ball, Cece Wheeler, Richar Clegg and Skip Smith.

The final part of the book is dedicated to using digital techniques to produce lith prints. I must admit that first time around, I skipped this section (as I have a habit of skipping anything that says "digital" in photography books). But having subsequently read it, I have to admit that I actually found it not only interesting, but useful!

All in all, a nice book. If you are looking to get start with Lith printing I would suggest starting with Tim Rudman's "Master Photographer's Lith Printing Course" and follow up with this book. ISBN: 978 1 902538457.

Sante D'Orazio - Private Life

Just bought this book while shopping in Edinburgh at the weekend. I really like Sante D'Orazio's work and this book is just fantastic. The layout and style of the presentation just suits the imagery so well - the book follows a sort of scrapbook style presentation and just has page after page of fantastic images. As you read through the pages, you feel as if you are reading Sante's private diary.

Most of the photographs seem to date from the early and mid 1990's and it is the monochrome images that really grabbed me. The photographs of Kim Bassinger, Drew Barrymore, Naomi Campbell and Raquel Welch are simply stunning.

For me, it is one of those books that I wish I could have produced (if only I had the talent!).

To truly appreciate this book, you have to see beyond the pure technicalities of the photographs and just engage with the mood. I know some photographers are going to look at this book and say some of the images are blurred or not printed very well, but the atmosphere is just overwhelming. What strikes me most about Sante D'Orazio is the relationship that he must have established with the people that he shoots. Truly a magnificent book and one that I will cherish.

If you are looking for a copy of it, you will find it here on the UK Amazon site. I think there are a few different versions of this book around, some with different images on the cover. I have the paperback version published in 2006. ISBN: 978-3888149115.

Cyanotype experiments

Well, using the sun tanning lamp I tried some experiments a few weeks ago. I have finally found time to scan the results.

The objective of the experiments was to determine the amount of time required to reach maximum black (or rather in the case of Cyanotypes, blue) when exposed under a sun tan lamp. The contraption shown in one of my previous posts has allowed me to place the lamp at a consistent distance from the paper, so the experiments should be repeatable.

The first strip was exposed for 1, 2, 3 and 4 minutes. It was produced by shading parts of the paper just like exposing a test strip. The first strip shows that 1 minute is not enough and 2 minutes is too much. So I exposed a second strip to determine where between 1 and 2 minutes the correct exposure lies. The second strip is exposed in 15 seconds starting at 60 seconds. This time it is a bit more difficult to tell where the correct exposure lies, but it looks like it is around 90 seconds.

So now I know that 90 seconds is the least amount of time that it will take to produce maximum black (blue!) using the sun tan lamp. Now it is a case of producing negatives of the appropriate density to produce the required cyanotype.....

Bit more success with 5x4

Went to Osterley Park (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-osterleypark/) last Friday and shot some film just for fun. Shot 3 rolls of 35mm (one of them HIE) as well as some 5x4. All the 35mm films look good and of the 18 sheets of 5x4, there are only 4 blanks. Those that are exposed look pretty good. The 4 blanks were due to a "brainfart" with one darkslide (I took the darkslide out, turned it around, re-inserted it and then exposed the film!). The other darkslide was an unexposed one that got mixed up with the exposed sheets and I developed it just to be sure.

I will post some of the examples in the next few days once I get around to printing them.

Duh! Another large format setback. Or cockup!

Just went to develop the 5x4 sheets from last weekend and found that none of the sheet film holders were loaded with film!

What a doughnut! Just as well it was just personal work, but frustrating none the less. All that effort of getting out to the location, setting up the kit, taking all the notes...and all for nothing!

Argh! Never had this problem with 35mm! Or medium format! Well it was like this, I went out and shot all this film, but there was never any film in the camera!!

Oh well, let's just put it down to experience and move on.

Must find some time in the next couple of days to load up more of the test work that I did on cyanotypes.

Nikon lenses bounce!

Yep, it has been a while since I have dropped something!

Well, today was the day! Dropped a 105mm DAF while changing lenses in a local cemetery. Dropped it from about 3ft onto a concrete roadway and luckily it bounced. Most of the impact seemed to be taken on the side of the lens. No damage to the filter ring (otherwise, the filter would have shattered and it would have been a nightmare to get off). Otherwise, the lens seemed to survive. I used it for the rest of the session and, besides a couple of external scratches on the barrel, it worked a treat.

I guess this is partly why I use some much Nikon kit. :@)

Using a sun tan lamp as a UV source

Well after the last post, I twigged that I was thrashed around a bit and the best approach is going to be to take a more systematic approach to Cyanotype.

There seem three key steps in producing a good Cyanotype:

1. Coating the paper evenly;


2. Getting the amount of exposure on the print to produce dMax (maximum black, or in the case of a Cyanotype, maximum blue);


3. Using a negative of sufficient density to be able to produce the right tone in the highlights (without blocking up).

Well, I seem to have 1 under control. But 2 was causing a significant problem. The sun produces a very variable amount of UV, particularly at this time in the UK. I decided to try a small sun tan lamp as a UV source. I found a relatively inexpensive Philips sun tan lamp intended for facial tanning. I managed to find one locally for around £50. You can even buy them on Amazon!

Next trick was work out how to expose the print evenly. This was fairly straightforward to sort by suspending the lamp across the top of a plastic storage box. The print was in the bottom of the storage box under a sheet of thick glass.

Thus, the lamp is suspended about 25cms above the print. Next step is to work out how long the print needs to be exposed for.......

Frustration

Sometimes, I forget how frustrating photography can be! Every time you try a new technique, it is like trying to walk again. At the moment, I am struggling to produce half decent cyanotypes.

I gave up trying to use the sun to expose the contact prints. At this time of the year in the UK, it is too unreliable and when present, very variable. Some of the cyanotypes I was producing via this method were taking over an hour to expose. The alternative? A small sun tan lamp, intended for just your face, but it produces loads of UV. I tried it with the lamp stood upright and the contact print placed on the floor about 12 inches in front of the lamp. I exposed it for 20 minutes, moving the lamp around to make sure that it "cooked" evenly. The resulting print (shown below) is OK, but not evenly exposed or exposed enough. [This print has a second probably which is due to washing marks on the image side of the print. You can see these in the top left corner. Good news is that I have managed to work out how to dry the prints flat.]

I tried a second print with the lamp suspended horizontally over the contact print (about 4 inches above). I exposed it for 40 minutes. The results? Massive over exposure and almost no image at all. Didn't even both washing it. It went straight in the bin.

Now, I know better than this. I should have kept all the variables the same and just changed one. Changing the distance of the lamp from the contact print AND the amount of exposure time was bound not to work. Stupid mistake.

When all else fails, go back to first principles.

OK, next step to create a method of exposing the contact print in a constant manner and produces some test strips at different timings.

Ideas for image series

OK, so having set up the idea of shooting a series of images, here's some potential ideas:

• Cyantoypes - having played around with these recently, this seems appealing. I really like some of the images in the Eddie Ephraum's book. It would be possible to mock up some of these images by shooting them on 35mm, scanning a print, and then making a large "digital" negative from the scan. This should speed the process up as well as making experimentation a bit easier.
• Infrared - in the past I have gone through periods of shooting Kodak HIE and developing it in HC110. I currently have stocks of both.
• Lith prints - again went through a period of doing a lot of lith printing. I have both paper and chemicals (Fototspeed LD20). I am particularly tempted to combine infrared film and then lith print it.
• Pinhole images - I have previously made pinhole cameras out of 35mm film canisters. I also have a purpose made 5x4 pinhole camera. Biggest problem here is being able to preview the image.
• I have been toying with the idea of doing some still life work - I was recently impressed with Bob Carlos Clarke's spoon photos. I hadn't seen these for a long time.
• Polaroid Type 55 - This produces 5x4 negatives as well as a positive. I have a couple of boxes (20 sheets each) that expired in May 2006 but should still be OK. They will need to be used fairly shortly if they are going to be of any use.

In terms of subject matter:

• Re-purposed Welsh Churches. There always seems to be an over abundance of these and they are now being put to all sorts of purposes - carpet shops, art galleries, museums etc.
• Still life - I am always amazed at what washes up on the beaches on our trips to North Wales. Maybe a still life made up of things washed up on a beach.
• Graveyards - Really intrigued by one of the local Victorian grave yards in London. I always find the buildings and tombstones (which are usually in a state of decay) interesting.
• Nudes - Inspired by the Eddie Ephraums/Allan Jenkins book.

So now, it is just a case of combining one of the techniques with one of the subjects.......

Cyanotypes

Having had a certain amount of success with the Fotospeed Cyanotype kit, I decided that it was a technique worth exploring more. I particularly liked the idea of producing cyanotypes from a "digital negative". This option seems to open up a whole new realm of possibilities.

I have ordered the raw chemicals so that I can make up my own sensitizer. This is a lot cheaper than buying it ready made. It is a bit more hassle, but it will save a fortune. Well, let's see.

I have already acquired additional Watercolour paper from a local art shop, so that should be all that I need for now.