2013 365-8

Week eight begins with a big smile on my face. Hoping this smiling thing is long term rather than temporary since it feels pretty damn good. And no, I'm not telling you about it. Tough.

18/02/13

Found myself in the HMV closing down sale in Lisburn's Bow Street Mall this lunchtime. filled a bag of cd's and also found two mugs celebrating two of my favourite albums of all time -  this rather splendid one may just become my new office mug for my morning coffee. The other was the Stones' Exile on Main Street, which i have owned copies of since I first heard it. I've owned Exile on vinyl (twice), tape (once) and CD (four times).

19/02/13

I'd picked up a box of little skaters as while back but haven't really got round to doing anything with them. It was a nice bright afternoon today, so I went out into the back yard to see what I could get. I got this shot on the top of the blue recycling bin - Belfast for a bit of context? Now I need someone to paint my skaters in the colours of Belfast Roller Derby (and a couple of zerbras/refs as well).

20/02/13

Half term, so I got to collect the younger two girls early. This then involved a trip to the shops, and as an afterthought we took a wander into the local charity shop where we found this rather excellent Dalek helmet. Fully working, with batteries, one-size-fits-all and for the ridiculous price of £3.49. This is the result of three separate shots layered in Photoshop. I just love it. Another. dafter, shot later in the week.

21/02/03

I read an article on line about using multiple shots to produce large panoramas. This was trial shot number 2 with the ever willing Muffin. Almost 60 shots, with the camera set a 1/125 and f2.8. The first shot was set up on Muffin, then I locked down exposure and focus and took the rest in increasing circles around the start point. Autopano Giga was the software I used to stitch all the shots together, which it seems to do effortlessly and cleanly.

22/02/03

Another Dalek helmet shot. I have absolutely no idea why I decided that this would be a good idea.

23/02/13

My first foray back into concert photography came last night, courtesy of the Warzone Centre and Epic Tour in Belfast. I was asked to go along and cover this (as opposed to my usual blagging and bluffing) and it would be fair to say I was nervous about this. The Warzone is dark - as dark as a dark thing wrapped in a blanket, placed in a light-safe box and buried underground. I had to use flash, but since it was a very small venue I was able to get away with very low power (about 1/32 power) and this also allowed me to use lower shutter speeds to capture the action. This is Kevin, lead singer with French band The Decline! and they were supported by three local punk bands. I enjoyed this; the shots came out well, I got to meet loads of new people and make new contacts and I got to practice a bit of french. The shot above just leapt out at me on the first pass through the shots and seemed to really cry out out for black and white.

24/02/13

The crowd last night was small but energetic. My personal favourite Belfast punk is Barzo (above) who was more than a little tired and emotional last night, courtesy of good old Buckfast. Lovely guy who would never walk past without saying hello and having a chat. The back of his head appears in more than one photo, due to excessive jumping around. I had to take some shots of the crowd and ended up with a dozen of Barzo. This is my own favourite.

2013 365-7

Week 7 is upon us, or at least upon me. Another week sadly lacking in inspiration for photography, but I'm coming to realise that I go through peaks and troughs in terms of my own creativity and productiveness. It may be something to do with the three photoshoots I tried to cover on Sunday just past - three very different events, three very different sets of demands and problems, three very different atmospheres. Maybe I just got burned out?

11/02/13

One from last night's wrestling action, processed today. Like the way this turned out, and was one of the few times when my timing was actually right. Definitely great fun, and I'd definitely go back if I got the invite.

12/02/13

You have to admire Warhol, if not as an artist then as a shameless self-promoter. The MAC in Belfast has an exhibition on at the moment and it is, being quite honest, very good indeed. A couple of galleries of prints and some video stuff would let you put in a couple of hours. This is the wall of the main staircase, between the two main galleries.

13/02/13

My eldest daughter Siobhan, who was kind enough to come round and get her little sister started on some knitting this afternoon. Stitches were dropped on more than a couple of occasions but I did press Siobhan into posing in front of the speedlights. She hates it - I'm amazed that she still agrees to do it, although it does involve some complaining and then some post-shoot criticism of my photos and processing. I like this one and there was no complaints or criticism. Is that a good sign?

14/02/13

Pictures of my favourite skaters' butts is not something I'm going to take on as a full-time project, but they do wear pants that make me laugh. I was abut to say sometimes, but lately its been pretty much every week. This comes in the same week that a campaign by derby photographers in the USA led to the shutting down of a Tumblr site dedicated to just that topic, due to the amounts of photos posted on it that broke copyright laws. Whoever started the site must have been tired of reading takedown notices.

15/02/13

I have to take more landscapes! It annoys me that I just don't get landscape photography so I've decided to make more of an effort with it. I had read an article on panoramas, got my hands on some nice software and took a swing past Scrabo to test it out. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, although the more I look at it, the tower seems to be leaning ever-so-slightly to the right. Am I imagining this?

16/02/13

A while back, I started to get interested in roadside memorials. I'd recently started driving more in work, and visiting places I hadn't been before with the result that I was passing more of these memorials. I started carrying a spare camera in the car in case I saw one and started pulling over and taking a picture of each. This is the first of two "ghost bikes" in Belfast to commemorate the death of Michael Caulfield. Mr Caulfield was a 56 year-old cyclist and father of four killed after a collision with a lorry on Friday the 15^th April near this spot on the Ormeau Bridge. The bike was placed by an unknown woman. In June 2012, the original ghost bike was stolen but was replaced at the end of June. It has remained there since.

17/02/13

I'm not even going to start to explain why this shot is here. It just had to be here.

367-50 Week 35

Something very different this week. I've been reading a lot on some photo blogs about the possibilities of the new generation of mirrorless cameras with APS-C sensors. This combined with a chance to get my hands on one of these cameras made me think about setting down the big Nikon and using this smaller camera for a whole week. The camera I'll be using is the Sony NEX-C3. It's not the newest version (the NEX-5 and NEX-7 series have superseded it) but it's still pretty representative of the newer breed of more compact cameras. With a 16.2 megapixel sensor, it should have a noticeably higher resolution than my D90. I think (and I'm happy to be told otherwise) that this camera has the same Sony sensor used in the Nikon D7000 dslr. The kit I've borrowed is the NEX-C3 camera with the standard 18-55mm f3.5 lens.

9/07/12

There's a host of quite neat built-in tricks with the C3, including the ability to take panorama shots straight in the camera with no need for stitching shots together later in Photoshop. The camera did a really good job of this. My only quibble would be that it is quite tricky to pan the camera at the right speed to get the shot. Go too fast and the camera gives up and you have to start again. This is my quite small back garden taken from the back door. Conclusion - I like this panorama feature.

10/07/12

Getting down and shooting low is also pretty easy with the C3. The screen tilts (90 degrees up, 45 degrees down) so you can see what you're doing. The 18-55mm lens seems pretty sharp at mid ranges and colour reproduction is good. Muffin doesn't like to pose for photos, but she didn't seem to mind this time. Conclusion - tilting screens are a good idea, mainly for small dogs.

11/07/12

This was taken at Stormont using the built-in HDR function. This function appears to take three bracketed shots and then combines them in-camera to produce an HDR image. I wasn't impressed with the results and the end product was quite a bland picture. Being honest, the sky was washed out and had to be tweaked in Lightroom and the colours just don't pop as they should in a true HDR shot. I suspect that this function might work better if you are shooting at night or at least not shooting with a lot of sky in the middle of the day. Conclusion - in camera HDR on this camera doesn't seem to be worth it.

11/07/12

"This is me doing my Ellen pose." That kinda says it all. Ok - the reason for this was to see how the NEX coped with a portrait. I had figured a way of making the camera fire my flash guns, but couldn't be bothered actually setting up the whole mobile studio thing. Taken in the back garden in shade with a  little ( and well-judged by the camera) fill-in flash this worked quite well. The little plug-in flash looks a wee bit like it's fallen off a child's toy but it copes well for fill-in purposes. I've done a little bit of jiggery-pokery in Lightroom with this shot, but not too much. The photo is pretty sharp and the colours were very well rendered. Conclusion - the NEX copes well with with portraits especially at around the 35-40mm range of the kit zoom lens.

12/07/12

Being the 12th of July, it was necessary to escape Belfast for the day. A walk up Slieve Donard was arranged by Dave (on the left) and it was fairly tough going. I've been up Donard a few times before but never on the route that Dave took us on. After a lot of pain and picking up two cracking blisters on my heels, we reached the top and Dave and Conor climbed the cairn at the summit. I pretended that I wanted to take their photo - really I was so knackered and sore I couldn't face going up the cairn. I foolishly told them to "do something manly" and this is the result. The sheer manliness is almost overpowering. The Sony NEX-C3 was a star on this trip - lots of well exposed sharp shots and it weighed about 1/5 of my D90 and lens. A real pleasure for this kind of trip and again the panorama mode worked really well with the beautiful views on the way up and at the top.

13/07/12

This was a bit of an adventure for me today. I was offered the chance to do a boudoir shoot in a beautifully equipped studio, specifically set up for boudoir photography. I was also able to shoot alongside an experienced and pretty skilled photographer, in the hope that I might actually learn something. I learned a great deal today, mainly from working alongside someone who knew what they were doing - probably my favourite way of learning anything to do with photography - and was able to produce a few shots that I was very happy with. The main thing that I learned was that shooting boudoir is very difficult and quite complicated - I guess I'm not that used to taking shots where the main thrust is to make someone look as good as it's possible to do. That was a major piece of learning for me. I didn't shoot with the Sony, instead using my D90 coupled with the nikkor 24-70 f2.8 and also took some shots with my Lensbaby composer. I'm still at the stage with the Lensbaby where I can see the potential it has but can't just get the technique 100% right to actually produce the shots. The shot above was taken with the Sony, and I'm not sure whether to call it a detail shot or just admit that I'd forgotten to take any shots with it until the end of the shoot and everything was being tidied up. Again, can't fault the Sony here - shot indoors with ambient lighting only and it's sharp front-to-back with good colour and contrast.

14/07/12

Again, this is more a photo taken with the Sony of a set of photos taken with my D90. I couldn't really ignore the project I did with the Belfast Roller Derby crew when I was asked to take the headshots for their upcoming bout at the end of the month. Spread over two shoots, they were an absolute joy to take and process, mainly because of the fun attitude that the Roller Derby folk bring to everything they do. Shot with two speedlights (one high, one low - both placed at 45 degrees to the subject - through umbrellas and triggered wirelessly) and given a lot of punch in Lightroom before being processed through the Camera Bag app for the MacBook. I'm really looking forward to seeing these printed in the bout programme and also got the shots processed into the correct resolution for the programme today. Disc burned and ready to go. I also have to admit to really enjoying seeing shots as prints, rather than on screen.

15/07/12

Went for a walk on the beach this afternoon and took the NEX-C3 with me. There wasn't too much to take but this kinda looked interesting - the bottle isn't mine, I hasten to add. I think that this shot from the NEX-C3 is about as good as what I would get in the same conditions with my D90. If anything, the depth of field in this shot is just a wee bit better with the blurring at the front and rear of the frame really helping the shot. Colours and sharpness (as noted previously) are excellent.


Conclusions about the NEX-C3, after spending a week in it's company?

Pros
Sharp shots and good colour reproduction
Easily set to P,S,A and full manual modes
Will shoot in RAW
Kit lens is pretty sharp in it's mid ranges (around 30-40mm seems best)
There are loads of built in effects, some good - some not so good
The panorama feature is excellent
It's really light and suitable for really long walks up mountains

Cons
The 18-55 kit lens is bulky and makes the camera feel like it's all lens and no body
The in-camera HDR is poor
It's just not quite as good as my D90
Functions are accessed through a slightly confusing menu system as compared with the multitude of easily accessible buttons on the D90