The MBCC Members' Photoblog
Images and the stories behind them from club members
This page features stories behind images produced by members that takes the editor's fancy for aesthetic or technical reasons or because they have interesting content.
This is a summary of a short club demonstration to show that everyday household items can be used to make and light a simple still-life.
Camera Equipment and Lighting
Digital or compact or DSLR cameras can by used. To avoid camera shake, use the camera timer setting rather the pressing the shutter button. You will need a tripod or beanbag to hold camera steady. You can use natural light, a table lamp with tungsten bulb, LED etc, or torches to shine into dark areas. The light can be softened, by shining it through a diffuser such as tissue or material. But be very careful not to risk fire - keep the diffuser well away from the light-bulb. To reflect the light into the darker areas of the set or to highlight details, use crumpled kitchen foil, mirrors and white card. On-camera or off-camera flash, or combinations of these.
Best kept simple. Try a length of material, or use a curtain, plain card etc. It is best to keep the still life uncomplicated. At the club demonstration night we used - a ceramic vase with reflective surface, a translucent glass vase, and a metal jug with surface detail (shown above). For a second set-up, we used tulips in a glass vase.
Making a Start
Start by taking a photo without any lighting, then look at the image. Move the objects around till you are satisfied with their positions. Try all sorts of lighting to see what suits the arrangement, bringing out detail. Place the light sources to throw light - on the front, side or back of the objects, also from above and below, or light the background. If using a digital camera, it is helpful to take the SD card out of the camera at each stage and check on the computer to see how the positions of the objects and the lighting appear. It is often quite different to what you expected, so be prepared to change the set-up until you get a good result. Clean any glass - you can see I didn't! If photographing a flower, choose one as perfect as possible, although damaged areas can be repaired in Photoshop.
A few practical points - dust and folds show on the background material. If possible throw those out of focus, or remove spots in Photoshop etc. It helps to keep some space between background and subject.
Points to Consider after Preliminary Shots
The lighting angle
Softening the light
Contrast and shadow fill
Concentrating the light
Try to apply lighting in a way that shows the following qualities of your still-life:
Shape - by outlining the edges
Form - giving an impression of the volume of the objects
Weight - by using shadows
Texture - showing surface detail
Translucency - by using backlighting
I have selected below 4 of our test images, with no adjustments, to show some of the lighting effects used by members participating in the demonstration.
Montage of Member Images by M. Campbell
Please note: none of these have been retouched in Photoshop.
At home, to show how further simple adjustments can be made, I replicated, as far as possible, the set-up and lighting effects used in the club demonstration. My original image and a cropped version on which adjustments were subsequently made are shown below.
1) To soften the overexposed reflections of the lights, a feathered selection at slightly reduced opacity was taken from another part of the vase and moved over the highlight.
2) To lighten the top left curve of the vase by using a selection from an earlier image.
3) Using the Hue & Saturation palette in Photoshop, I slightly desaturated Red.
My home reconstruction of the club demonstration with the addition of a window light. M. Campbell
Firework Photography Guide by Euan Fraser
An image from the extensive Firework Photography Guide by Euan Fraser.
Euan has published other great pictures of fireworks in Glasgow in 2005, 2006, 2009 and 2010 .
Other members have also produced some firework images on Flickr
Image by: M. De Ridder
To learn more about how this intriguing image was created by one of our new members, Marc De Ridder, please visit his very well illustrated web page that reveals the secret click here >.
1. Calibrate your monitor using a ‘Spyder, Color Munki, or similar device.
2. Calibration includes reducing the brightness and contrast to match reflected light on paper.
3. Use indirect daylight or a ‘daylight’ balanced lamp to evaluate your prints.
4. Profile the printer/paper combination. There are a number of solutions available. These are set out below in ascending order of accuracy.
First select ‘Let Photoshop manage colours’ in the Print dialogue box – Not let Printer Manage colours.
A. Use the Printer Manufacturer’s standard profiles supplied with the print driver.
B . Use the generic paper manufactures profiles. Down load from their web site.
C. Use custom profiles created specifically for your own printer/paper combination.
(i) Either pay for this by using one of the available commercial services, or as some paper suppliers, for free if you buy their paper.
(ii) Create your own using, for example the Colour Munki tool. This is only viable if the monitor calibration tool you already have has the ability to create custom paper profiles. The purchase of paper profiling equipment on its own is hardly justifiable for invividual amateur use.
Go to Permajet web site http://www.permajet.com/30/ICC_Profiles.html and access the ‘How to use ICC profiles?’ link for a fairly thorough guide to downloading and using profiles. A further link will lead you to full details on how to obtain custom profiles. N.McNab
For a fuller description of how to make good prints go the PRINT PROFILING NOTES from which this summary is drawn. This Summary is also avialable as a PDF.
Printing 'Difficult' Colours and Soft Proofing
Click for Larger 6x4 Test Image >
This test has been made using selections from various gradients, e.g. red to yellow, as well as the Black to White gradient. I find this useful as it is sometimes very difficult to know how some shades, which seem alright on the monitor, actually print, especially when using a new type of paper. M. Campbell
A screen grab of the same image after the Loxley Colour Fuji Paper Profile was applied as a soft proof in Photoshop.
Small Test Image For Printing
The image above can be used at the top of a page when printing a small version of your image to check for colour and brightness reproduction (don't waste ink by printing a full size image until you know that all adjustments have been made).
Crossing Lochy Bridge
This picture was taken on 3rd October about 13.30hrs in terrible weather. Fortunately a watery sun made a brief appearance at the right moment. This shot is of a special charter at the end of the Jacobite season. It is actually a composite.The camera was on a tripod and a sequence of bracketed pictures taken with 400 ISO selected. The locomotive and most of the picture was taken at F8 at 1/180, which produced a little motion blur on the train. The upper background was taken again. The area at the top right was overexposed and so that area was replaced the with same part of a second image taken at F8 at 1/750right. There was no tonal adjustment made, other than using the mid-grey picker in curves dialogue box Adobe Photoshop.
The locomotive, which was built by the North British Locomotive Company in Glasgow, is Peppercorn K1 6200 (renumbered as 62034). It is regularly used on the Jacobite steam train service on the Mallaig extension of the West Highland Line.
Approaching Arrochar and Tarbet station
The 156 Diesel Motor Unit above is approaching Arrochar and Tarbet station with a snow capped Ben Lomond in the background was a very challenging picture. It was taken with my medium format film camera using Velvia 100. It is also an HDR blend since I took the foreground at 1/4 sec (it was in deep shadow) and then took a separate pictures at 1/500 of the Ben and then set the shutter to 1/60 for the train which arrived 5mins later. Several pictures were taken as the train passed and this allowed me to 'remove' vegetation and reinsert the missing pieces with appropriate sections from the carriages. Liberal use of the transform tool was also required to retain the correct scale and perspective. It would be a little easier now with a digital camera, but would still require a lot of work. N. McNAb
I took this image in the 'Architects of Light' show called Mirazozo at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe. This is what is called a Luminarium. To the un-initiated, it is a large unusually shaped 'tent' with transparent coloured panels which creates the lighting effect. It is held up by air and it it is like walking inside a bouncy castle with soothing music in the background. Very relaxing ... but at it's best when the sun is shining outside to create the effects. I liked this angle and used the shapes to create this pattern shot. I had to wait until there was no one in shot as well and until the light created the effect shown. The file was converted from RAW, sharpened and the levels adjusted, however I did little more than that. Without people in the shot it is difficult for the viewer to gauge the size or understand what it is. That is what makes this sort of photography intriguing. M. Boddie
__________________________________________________
Light painting is not new; it's a technique that has been used for over 100 years.
Equipment and Settings:
1. A tripod is usually necessary due to the long exposure times involved.
2. A shutter release cable or self timer is generally employed in order to minimize camera shake.
3. Color Gels can also be used to color the light sources.
4. Photographers often use a slow film speed or low ISO setting on a digital sensor to minimize grain (or digital noise).
5. Aperture is also an important variable in light painting.
Smaller apertures such as f16 or f22 generate a sharper image and preserve a large depth of field, creating deep focus. This technique requires longer exposure times but creates interesting results. Larger apertures such as f5.6 or f2.8 often blur the lines drawn by a light pen or LED source.
Techniques: Light Trails
One of the techniques involves moving a light around in the frame during a long exposure. Make sure you have properly composed the frame, this is important. Now, start the exposure. DO NOT enter the frame yet, wait for it to run for a while. Towards the end of the exposure briskly walk into the frame (as fast as possible to prevent any ghosting) and then start light painting.
Simply take a torch and trace round a object, while the camera is set on a long exposure. This shot was taken again by tracing round a willing subject. Or you can just write in the air, or attach a torch to a piece of string and spin it round
Instead of creating light trails you light an object or area in the frame with the flash or diffused light source. Some times colored gels / filters are put over the light source to further increase the dynamic feel of the image.
For this example I took of the Glasgow Necropolis I used a large halogen torch to light the John Knox Statue.
__________________________________________________
Mannequin with Living Eyes
The human eyes make interpretation of the image harder
After removal of the background clutter in the shop window
The original image
I captured this image of a mannequin in a shop window in Barrowland, Glasgow. As a result of it position, the background was quite cluttered. I therefore replaced the background with a simpler image of a threatening sky which was part of my stock of sky images that I keep on my computer. I chose one that was already quite dark, but did not do anything else to make it look more dramatic. In order to create a disturbingly realistic element I then inserted my son's eyes. The picture was taken on film 25 years ago when Andrew was three. I had used a 100mm lens to take quite a standard portrait. I did a rough selection of the eyes on the portrait image, pasted them on to the 2 layered image and adjusted their scale to match the eyes on the mannequin. I then used the erasure tool at a low opacity to blend the eyes onto the mannequin. The inflamed look came from the underlying colours of the mannequin. It is a pity that I cannot find the original image. D. McCallum.
__________________________________________________
__________________________________________________
This picture of Dutch windmills was taken on a misty morning in early April before sunrise. The shot was taken from the window of my son's house in Nieuw-Lekkerland, Holland. He lives on a farm very close to the UNESCO World Heritage Site named Kinderdijk. The site has 19 Windmills dating back to 1740 and still working to drain the water from the Polder. There is a modern system now which drains the water into the nearby river Lek, but the mills are still used. These conditions produced a tonally subdued image (top left). It was captured on a Nikon D7000 with a setting of 450 ISO at F4.8 at 1/1,000 of a second. The lens was set at a focal length of 56 mm (or 84 mm at 35 mm). P. Buchanan
.
These frogs come to our pond in the garden - regular as clockwork - around the 21st of February. Between 50 and100 of them are present in the pond. This year they could not get in because the pond was frozen for another two weeks. The picture was taken with Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX2 set to focus in less than 50 cm. They were close to the edge, I may add. One or two straws were removed with command (or control) J in Photoshop. J. Jakobsson
 |
 |
The picture above is from the coast of South of Iceland where over thousands of years the sea shoreline has been pushed further south by lava flows and glacial erosion. From a picture taken in 2006, I wanted to visualize what the landscape might have looked like back in the ice age. Two shots were combined in Photoshop using 'photomerge' to create the scene. I then inserted water and gentle ripples as a separate layer. I 'created' the water from instructions on the Net. In order to do this I merged an upside down copy image of the sky and background glaciers, suitably reduced in opacity and reduced brightness to create the sea reflection. The picture was finished by adding a masked image of a couple of seeds from a cone of a Noble Pine found in the garden. To me they look like an extinct species of bird.
This shot was taken in Edinburgh during the Festival in 2011. The artists are from Dance Ihayami danceihayami.org. I asked them to pose, which they kindly did.
Back on the computer I decided to select the dancers, so I could desaturate the background, blur it and sharpen the main subjects. I used a brush and mask to paint round the dancers, which took ages (over 1 hour). Even though I did this carefully, I could still see a bright edge round the dancers, once selected. Help? What did I do wrong? How do I select subjects so I do not get a unsightly border? What is the best way to select subjects and separate from a background?
I am hoping the blog can be used to instruct others. It would be nice to have detailed advice on the above, so we can all share knowledge. E. Fraser
__________________________________________________
This picture is a combination of three originals. While walking round RSPB Lochwinnoch and feeling a bit disgusted at the lack of birds my wife Elaine suddenly said there is "Geese". I managed to get two shots; one of two "geese" and one of a single bird. Unfortunately there was almost a pure white sky which made the pictures as they stood pretty useless. I delved into my stock of sky pictures and thought the evening light sky, taken in Tenerife, looked suitable. I cut out the swans, not geese, from the two originals and pasted them into the sky. I merged the two swan layers and colour balanced them to match the sky before flattening the picture. The procedure was not very complicated but the I think the final result shows the usefulness of having a bank of various types of skies. Web site: houstoncolour.com M. Johnston.
__________________________________________________
This photo was taken on the night of the winter solstice. It was a icy cold with the temperature -15 below, December 2010 was the coldest December in 100 years. A bone chilling freezing fog shrouded everything, just the sort of night to go out taking photos, my logic - well it was so dam cold no zombie, ned's or undead creatures of the night would be seen out on an evening like this.
I headed up to the Necropolis and noticed the lights from Glasgow Cathedral, gave the impression of an ethereal ice palace, the fog away from the cathedral picked up the warm street lights.
I positioned the tripod in a location where the four gravestones added foreground interest. I decided to take three shots (+2, 0 -2 exposures, middle aperture was f8) and then later using HDR (High Dynamic Range) software combine them. I also took a separate shot of the moon and added this in Photoshop later on. Camera was a Canon 40D with Sigma 10-22mm lens, set at 13mm. This is one of my favourite shots. No zombies were hurt during the taking of this shot. E. Fraser
|
||
 |
||
I noticed this location on several occasions coming back from climbing various Munros in the area. I was struck by the quality of the woodwork and the detail in the decoration that the proprietor had put in, as well as the great light. I had decided to come back equipped to take some internal views. I pre-visualised a fairly formal shot with the proprietor and staff in front of the counter, with perhaps a monochrome conversion to give an old world feel however that is not what I ended up with. The space inside the building is very small so I decided to try a canon 17-40mm f4L lens I had recently purchased to widen the view. The proprietor was quite happy about pictures being taken and I set up on a tripod with lens set at 17mm in order to take in as much of the interior as possible. It was immediately apparent that the dynamic range of the shot was extreme, with blocked out dark areas due to the sunshine streaming in, so I elected to bracket my shots for possible HDR conversion later. I took a few shots and the people fairly quickly forgot I was shooting. Luckily the lady in black came in. She was quite a live wire and caught everyone's attention as she regaled them with her cycling stories. This was the critical moment to catch the shot, which is the basis of the image as presented. On processing the shots in Lightroom, it was clear that a single image could not fully capture the scene as I wanted so I elected to convert my three bracketed images (base image +/- 2 stops) into an HDR file. I did this in Photoshop as it has good layer alignment tools, then transferred the file into PhotomatixPro to carry out tone mapping of the image to bring all of the image into a printable range. I was quite pleased with the result, however since the people in the scene had moved between image captures, there was significant ghosting around several of the figures, so further work was required. I transferred the blended image and the base image back into Photoshop as separate layers of the same image, aligned the layers and created a separate layer copy of the base image for each person in the shot. I then masked each of the layers for the individual people and cloned and painted them back into the HDR layer to eliminate the ghosted edges around each person. An adjustment layer was required to blend each person back into the HDR image at the correct hue and luminosity to look "real". I've included the final reconstructed HDR image, and the original base image so that you can compare. You can judge whether it was worth the trouble! Link to the location J. Keightley
|
||
 |
5) I wanted this Still Life to have warm colours, so used a gold-coloured vase and plate. The lighting was with a 500 watt tungsten bulb which also gives a warm orange light. I set it against a piece of black velvet material. The vase had a shiny surface and so the light from the 500 watt bulb burned out an area in the middle of the vase. I sorted this by standing in front, holding a piece of dark material, which helped contrast with the reflection of the plate. The plate had some water poured into it to help with reflections - you may be able to see the tiny bubbles and the darker mark where I accidentally touched the plate with my finger and lost some of the bubbles. The orchid flower was very carefully placed in the predetermined position. I took several photos at exposures ranging from +2 for the orchid, to -2 for
the darker parts, and blended them manually in Photoshop, selecting the best
parts of each image. This was long before HDR, which wouldn't have given |
|
| Editors note: HDR means High Dynamic Range Imaging. For more information on this subject click here > | ||
__________________________________________________
The photo of the Gravestones was taken on an overcast day, the resulting image was flat and uninteresting. After reading the Digital Photo Magazine's article on how to produce a stunning silhouette image , I thought the gravestones photo would be an ideal subject. In Photoshop, I removed the sky, darkened the gravestones in levels to create the silhouette, added a sunset sky and adjusted saturation. F. Gibson
Editors Note: See Location on Google maps
Murrayfield Panorama
I set set the Tamron 17-50 zoom at around 50mm on APS-C camera (Pentax K20D). I used a slight zoom setting to get as big an image as was reasonably possible. Setting it at 17mm would have needed fewer images but would result in a smaller file at the end. I wanted a very big file to wow my clients and to allow them to fill a wall with the image.
There were three rows of twelve images: middle row level, top row tilted up and bottom row tilted down. Each image overlapped around 30% with those adjacent. This allowed the software to detect common parts and to merge them seamlessly. I opened the shots in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and adjusted basic colours and tones, saved the changes and closed ACR. In Photoshop it's possible to merge images into panoramas from the RAW shots and that's what I did. After joining them I made further adjustments to colours and tones: it was raining heavily when I took the shots and the background stands were a bit faded so I increased contrast (following a suggestion from Steve, thanks). I also added a pale blue sky to replace the pale grey originals. G. Saunders
I shot shot two models on a hillside near Kinross. They are posed on a rocky outcrop about twenty feet above the meadow below. They are looking slightly to the left of the sun. I added an overall on-camera flash fill to open up the shadows on them and to put some light on the foreground rocks which were partly in shadow.
The lens was an 8mm Samyang manual fisheye. I changed various tones and colours in Adobe Camera Raw to darken the sky, lighten some rocks and boost the models' clothing colours and tones. G. Saunders