Post Production

And when the day arrives I’ll become the sky and I’ll become the sea and the sea will come to kiss me for I am going home. Nothing can stop me now” Trent Reznor

Ballydowane Cove is part of the copper coast UNESCO geopark in Co Waterford, Ireland.  This section of the Irish coastline get its name for the mines along the coast which not only mined copper but also lead and silver.

I used a medium telephoto lens to isolate the sea stack with a 10 Stop ND and a 2 stop soft grad to get the shot.  The photo is a 5 shot panoramic which I combined in PTgui pro to get the stitch.  I had to be very careful  when composing the shot to ensure a bit of the sea stack was in each frame to enable the stitching software to be able to do its magic.  This is normally pretty simple but as you cannot see through a 10 stop ND filter I had to eye in each frame by looking over the top of the eye piece on the camera.  You could take the filter off between each frame but this has the risk of knocking the focus ring or accidentally moving the zoom barrel.  Both of these I managed to do when first trying to set up the shot requiring to take all the filters off and start again.  Worse if you don’t realise you have done it.

I would normally just output the blended image from PTgui but for this shot I chose to have both the blended image and individual layers as a single PSD file.  PTgui is great at aligning images but sometimes doesn’t blend as good as photoshop which was the case with the clouds in this pano.  I opened the image in photoshop and then used auto-blend to blend the individual layers.  The important step here is to select seamless tones and colours to adjust the color and tonality for blending. Once I had this new images I used layer masks to keep the sea from the PTgui pano and then bring in the sky from the photoshop blend.  For comparison purposes, I used tried the same pano in photoshop using photomerge but ended up with a distinct curve in the horizon.

Following on from the pleasing results of my macro flower experimentation a few weeks back, I decided to head out into the garden to capture the emerging crocuses bringing the first burst of colour to the garden.

The difficulty in shooting in the garden is isolating the flower from the background which can tend to be messy with fences and other plants.  To get this shot I had to mount the central column of my tripod upside down to enable the camera to sit a inch or so off the grass to get down level with the flower.  This meant the camera was actually upside down and the first task in post was to rotate the image back through 180 degrees.  I used a very shallow depth of field to blur the background but shot at a few different f-stops from f/4 up to f/11 to try and get the balance between the sharpness of the flower and the out-of-focus background.  I really liked the dreamy feel the f/4 image gave me but I was a little concerned over the sharpness of the stem which rapidly fell out of focus.  My next apperture at f/6.3 had the sharpness in the stem, but a a line from the fence started to appear as a thick blurry dark line.  I decided to bring both images into photoshop as layers on a single image.  With the f/4 on the bottom and f/6.3 on the top, I applied a black layer mask and used a soft brush at very low opacity to bring in the stem from the f/6.3 image.  In the end it only required a few brush strokes at 10% opacity to get the look I was after.  The remainder of the processing including the toning was finished off in lightroom.

Autumn is well and truely upon us now.

 

Last weekend I visited our photography’s club (South Kildare Photography Club) new exhibition which  was being held in the Newbridge Credit Union to coincide with a local festival celebrating the  200th birthday of the town.  It was fantastic to the great work from the members of the club in print.  It is credit to the members that we have such a variety of talented photographers in the club and the print quality of the photos was brilliant.  Thanks especially to the members who organised the event and spent a number of days erecting the images in the Credit Union.  A big thanks also to Newbridge Credit Union for hosting the event.

On my way home I stopped off at Victoria Bridge which is a small piece of natural woodland next to the River Liffey in County Kildare.  This strip of woodland, probably no more than 10m wide, sandwiched between the river and a road and contains an inherent beauty.  However, it is extemely difficult to capture this beauty in a photograph.  I have tried and failed and so have other members in my club.

My mindset for this shoot was clear from the start.  I was inspired by a macro image of a frosted golden maple leaf covered in the morning dew by the wonderful Varina Patel.  The leaf was isolated from the golden background using a very shallow depth of field.  Today I was going to look at the smaller picture rather than the big picture.  This is another slight deviation for my normal photography but a worthwhile challenge nonetheless. It would also provided me with an opportunity to get a shot for my  competition entry for the South Kildare Photography Club October competition which had the theme of nature.

 It didn’t take me long to find a nice patch of mushrooms which I thought I could make a a feature of.  I started with a bit of gardening to make the scene more Autumnal. The mushrooms were growing in a thick patch of  green moss which ordinarily would have been nice but shooting with the seasons I wanted more.  I grabbed a handfull of the fallen leaves and started to spread them out.  I am starting to learn that while photoshop is an amazing tool, sometimes it is easier to spend 5 minutes cloning out at source rather than 15 minutes on the mac at a later time.  I removed a few blades of grass and ‘tided’ the natural scene, but of course there were one or two items that I missed that I sorted later.

I tried to isolate a mushroom the best I could while choosing a specimen that looked good with no rough edges or chunks missing.  To get the stem of the mushroom I had to use a really low composition with my camera nearly on the ground.  This is where I got lazy.  I had my tripod with me but decided not use it which is pretty important if not essential for macro.  To capture this shot with my tripod I would of need to invert my centre column and mount my camera upside down to get it so low to the ground.  I decided not to and the result is probably not as sharp as it could have been.  However, I heard a great tip recently for making autumn colours in photoshop for watching a Kelby Training Webcast on youtube called ‘A Walk in Paris‘.

Change the colour space to LAB mode by going to the image menu, mode then LAB colour.  Then go back to the image menu and click apply image.  Change the channel to b and then then blending mode to soft light. Click ok and you are done!

For my second image, I isolated an autumn leave on a mossy green bed.  I used another handy trick which is to bring a bottle of water with use and use it for creating water droplets on subjects.  The wind was starting to pick up which proved difficult as it can create the smallest of flutterings in the subjects you are trying to capture, so it a case of being patient and getting your timing right.

The following day would provide an early start but an opportunity to seems some wild stags in the Wicklow mountains.  A chance I was not going to miss!

 

 

This is not a food blog, but like my passion for photography, I also have a deep love of food.  I blog about photography, my wife blogs about food, we enjoy our love of food together and have had the pleasure of sharing many a beautiful meal at restaurants across the world.

Adrienne, through her social media food blogging friends, learned of a new exhibition called Edible: The Taste of Things to Come running at the Science Gallery, Dublin.   The event which caught Adrienne’s eye and thought would be perfect for me was a Food Photography Workshop run by Seattle Food Geek AKA Scott Heimendinger.

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