The Roaches

The Burton Photographic Society had a visit to the Roaches, a beautiful area near Leek, on Saturday 25th July, and Steve, Suzy, Eric and myself joined them for a ‘little walk’.

After picking up the team, Steve took us to the Priory Centre at Stretton where we met some of the others from the Society. After waiting for any others to join us we headed for the Roaches.

Julian was our guide and he took us up to see some amazing views from the Roaches, and then down to see a hidden church.

Below are some of my images from the day:

There are some characters you see on your travels

“What noise Eric ?, just move back a little more !”

Then it was a case of going from the highs of the Roaches, to the lows of Lud Church:

Thanks again to the team for another good day out with some good friends !

Course Review and Closure

Again I have enjoyed another photographic course at the college, working with a good team of people, having a few laughs along the way and learning new ideas, culminating with my final grades which are shown below.

This time I have been working in the photographic studio at the Burton College, which is very different to what I am used to, working on two projects one product photography and the other portrait photography.  I found both projects very interesting, and in particular with the portrait photography where I photographed the other photographers on the course, I enjoyed the challenges and I hope that sometime in the future, when some of my friends become more well known they can look back at my portraits of them.

With the receipt of my certificate for this course with the following results:

Module	Code	Grade
Photography	306	Distinction
Presentation	211	Credit

this closes this course.

Many thanks to Steve Davies (Mr Steve), Jim, Steve Bright, Suzy, Eric, Ruth, Rebecca, Pippa and Joe for all their support on this course.

See you on the next course !

Patter of tiny paws

or Paws for thought

Well, after loosing our precious Becky last year, which devastated us and many people we know, and many who we did not, we visited a farm yesterday and one extra came back !

 

Meet Enya

Ok, she sleeps a lot !

She has been introduced to these odd shaped boxes that sometimes flash, and she will be my new model for Pet Photography, as long as she keeps them sharp puppy teeth to herself !

We will never forget our beautiful Becky xx

Photoshop-ed Too Far

In today’s world of digital photography, the old saying “the camera does not lie” might be true, but it is what happens after the photograph is taken that can really make a photograph tell a lie.

Whilst there are many good reasons to correct elements of a photograph, like remove a distraction, correct the levels and remove a colour cast, there are some people who take the art of digital image manipulation too far, for one reason or another.

In an article in Newsweek magazine, people complained that up to 95% of images of top celebrities have been manipulated, in some way.

In this first example, the retoucher has gone too far on the model, and this has resulted in a very long, unnatural looking, neck:

The next example is from the Los Angeles Times from March 2003

In this example, entitled Soldier in Basra, elements from two photographs were used to create one:

Original photos

Published photo

Here the photographer Brian Walski was fired from his position at the Los Angeles Times after it was discovered that two news photographs of a gun-toting soldier had been combined to create a more intense photo. When later asked why he had digitally manipulated the photo and risked his career Brian replied: "I knew what I was doing. It looked good. It looked better than what I had, and I said 'wow.'"

Another example features Condoleezza Rice, in the USA Today website in October 2005:

Original Photo

Published photo

An Associate Press photo that appeared on the USA Today website showed then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with unusually menacing eyes, a result of too much retouching, where the whites of the eyes have been too strongly whitened. Some questioned whether the effect had been created deliberately as it was difficult to easily replicate. The offending photo was quickly removed and replaced with a version much closer to the original and an apology from the paper's photo editor.

Finally, in the magazine photograph, do you spot something wrong (or familiar) ?

Here people from one area of the crowd have been copied and flipped horizontally, to make the crowd even larger. Closer examination may find more duplicating !

The moral of the story is to use Photoshop (or whatever program you use) carefully. Don’t mis-represent someone or something.

Always remember you can use Photoshop to make you look better on facebook, for someone to look at, but if they see you for real,

Photoshop cannot help you !

Doing your (nested) tables

This blog is for Eric, and anyone else interested how I made the “Selecting Final Images – “ blogs, using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer.

First of all I started with the main table:

From the toolbar, select the insert table option:

From the option box select the width as 600 (or whatever you wish) and the number of rows as 10 and columns as 2:

 

This created the table for the images and the reasons why I chose them, there are ten rows, two columns, but note that the “Show table border” option is not clicked.  For clarity I have selected this option for this tutorial.

Once you have the table, insert and resize the image and drag the column width over to the left, to allow for the text:

Then, below the image add the name of the subject, and leave two line spaces below it for the table:

Eric

With the cursor on the bottom line of the left hand table cell, below the image, select ‘Insert Table’ from the tool bar again, but with these options:

With this nested table (a table within a table) you can enter the shutter speed, aperture, etc

Eric

Now you have got the image and exposure details in the tables, you can enter the text into the right hand cell, as to why you chose that photograph.

Hope this helps.

 

Peter

Visiting the Exhibition

Well, visited the exhibition today and it looked very good, although I was disappointed not to see Eric’s picture on the wall (so was Eric).  I saw Jim, Eric, Pippa and Steve Davies there, amongst others.

Also watched the show reel that Steve Davies had made with some of our work on, put to music, in the lecture theatre.

Then a walk around the rest of the exhibition upstairs, looking at various arty pieces of work.  Very impressive.

Now to think about next year !

Revenge of iWeb

Arrhhh !!!!!!!!!!

Where is one of my most important entries !

Revenge of iWeb ?

Fortunately, I made a number of notes when I was working on the "Selecting Images - Portraits" entry of the blog, so all that suffering through iWeb did teach me something valuable !

Always make a back up !!

Just re-entering it now.

Always remember "to err is human, but to really foul things up, it takes a computer !!"