Introspective - Barbican Steps image

I've moved this introspective over from my main site where it's been for a while. A lot of my followers only read my blog and would otherwise miss it.

Barbican Steps

Ancient and worn granite steps. Plymouth Barbican, 2008

I'd never had occasion to go up these steps until I used a car park (Lambhay Hill) for the first time, one which
overlooks the Barbican. My destination was the B-bar for a catch-up with a mate, and to fill up on one of their renowned Thai Noodle Baskets.

Making the capture

Spotting the shot

As soon as I started down those narrow, almost claustrophobic steps, their character began to sink into me. I could see that although the steps were made of granite, they were still showing a definite dip from the wear of countless thousands of feet.

Another quirky thing... because of the curve, you couldn't see if anyone else was coming the other way, until you'd committed and were a few steps down yourself. I imagine that there must have been some tight squeezes as people passed each other down the centuries.

Also, the curve, in shortening your view, added to that closed-in feel—it was definitely a transitional space, a
between-places space, not one to pause in but one to pass through.

Ok, so how to capture that and make the shot?

Making the shot

So having briefly noted this little lot, I got to the bottom of the steps to check how it looked. Perfect. Apart from a pub sign that was padlock-and-chained to the handrail—but that was easily moved to the side, out of frame.

For me this sort of shot requires what is almost a side effect of the HDR  / tone-mapping process,
getting enhanced local contrast. I find that this best reproduces the texture and feel of
stone under bright light.

I also needed the enhaced dynamic range that comes from using HDR (I used 'simple' HDR where the different exposures all come from a single (RAW) shot). This was because the range betwen the bright summer sky and the deep shadow in the corners of the steps was just too much—either the shadows would lose all detail or the highlights, the sky and clouds, would be blown.

Exposure, ISO etc.

f16 1/80th 17mm HDR ISO 200

So with a basic plan in mind I whipped out the camera and checked readings etc. I needed to be at the 17mm end of the zoom to get it all in and use a deep depth of field.

So, with aperture priority set as usual, I rolled it up to f16. That meant, at my usual setting of ISO 100, the shot would have been made at 1/40s.

Much too slow, given that people were up and down the steps all the time. So I pushed the ISO up to 200, (which gave me 1/80s) and waited for a lull in the sudden foot-traffic that always happens when you're finally ready!
It didn't take too long and I made the shot. Actually, I took two or three, choosing different exposure locks from
different parts of the sky. Then I chose the best one to take forward when I got back to base.

Digital darkroom

Pre Photoshop

I pushed the shot through my usual RAW workflow to get it into Photoshop. In short, 3 exposures from RAW, followed by HDR / tone-mapping software to combine the three into one shot.

Photoshop

Once in Photoshop, I cloned away a a small amount of litter on a copy of the background layer and then applied TLR Capture sharpening (and erased any sharpening in the sky—it was already quite noisy). The bw conversion came next, juggling the sliders to get the tonal balance right.

Another little trick I picked up, this time for applying perfect contrast. I create a new curves layer and immediately ok it. Then I change the blend mode to overlay and reduce the layer's opacity to somewhere between 7% and the mid-twenties—whatever suits the image. This time it was 26%.

Then a little dodging and burning to enhance the difference between the mid-tones and highlights of the wall and steps not in shade.

Next I applied a soft light layer and erased away the centre to form a little vignette. I repeated this to get the balance I was after.

A final step to tweak the levels was in order. This was to make sure the darkest parts of the image equated to pure black and the extreme highlights to pure white. It didn't take much and I also shifted the mid-point grey to be a little lighter.

To prep the image for upload I did the usual sharpening, final contrast tweak and image resize. I'll give you that tip on another occasion.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed my walkthrough and maybe have found something to inspire you on your explorations.


comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Abstract interior architecture

Well, not quite abstract but with definite leanings...

What's in a name?

This work is an homage to Douglas Hofstadter and his seminal work, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,a book that helped me on my journey to understand 'life, the universe and everything'.

Three Part Fugue With Inversion

A photographer friend, John Miles, had invited me to see his digital darkroom set-up in Royal William Yard. On leaving, I noticed the beginnings of this arrangement as I turned right (I came into the scene 'stage left'). I backed up as far as I could, even leaning backwards over the rail a little to fill the frame with the composition I was after and made the shot. As usual, I fired off two or three (especially when there's lowish light and it's hand-held), just to make sure!

The title is chosen for the composition. The various compositional structures rotate, reflect, invert and repeat each other, much like JS Bach did with the themes in his fugues. There's also hints of Escher, with the deep perspective and hints of a jumping of levels.

I didn't need to do a great deal to this shot, just a little bit straightening and some dodging and burning to enhance the lighting and some of the textures.


comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Neighbours - a social comment

I was staying at a friends a while back in their beautiful new home. It's in a development on what was Ipswich's war-time airport and in their back garden, I was struck by how isolating these spaces are.

Too much privacy?

Neighbours, Ipswich 2007

Some would say it's for privacy, and I guess that view has some merit. I just question the totality of it. I think that much more usual, and what I'm more used to, is hedges, low fences and walls, where you can still see your neighbour's space if you make a little effort—you know, crane your neck, trim the hedge, pick weeds out the wall. That way, it's still private, but not entirely off-cutting.

By this I mean that the out-of-sight, out-of-mind syndrone exists. You know, the SEP field generator used by Slarty Bartfast (Hitch-hikers Guide To The Galaxy) to hide his spaceship (SEP field—a field that works on the Somebody Else's Problem principle— if it's somebody else's problem, it hits your slippery-shouldered blind spot, where your subconscious knows it can safely ignore the existence of the thing and so you just don't see it).

So this image is a social comment about the slow destruction of real-world community by the treatment of people by large organisations as repeating homogeneous units, where one is the same as the next.

How you read the image is up to you—there's certainly heavy overtones of regimented uniformity; suppressed uniqueness, enforced uniformity—the way our personalities are wrapped up into little indistinguishable boxes.


comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Introspective ...Sky Lambs

Before I feature an introspective here, it's usually been on my main site's home page first.

So if you want an early preview of the next inrospective, have a look there. It may be a few hours or a day or so before the new one goes up. You know how it is—the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft aglay...

On being ready for the unexpected

or You make your own luck...

Sky Lambs—by the A303 in Wiltshire, Winter 2008
A beautifully framed and signed A2-sized print of this piece is available
at the Martin Bush Studio Gallery, Royal William Yard (map)

I was returning from my paying day job in Staines last year, following the A303 on its winding, wending way through the fields of Wiltshire, following the contours of the land. The lighting and weather conditions were real nice and I had been stopping every handful of miles, looking around for shots.

Making the capture

Spotting the shot

On this stop, I was trying to find an angle and composition for something entirely different but it wasn't working out from where I was.

I was about to walk back to my car and noticed these extremely low, scudding clouds coming at me quite fast. So low, I felt I could reach up and touch them and this was accompanied by a slight shiver as my mind felt their cold clamminess on the back of my hand. All this flashed through my mind as I quickly scanned around, looking for a decent backdrop for them. This scene looked promising and turned out to be just perfect, I hope you'll agree.

Exposure, ISO etc.

As I'd already been trying stuff in pretty much the same lighting conditions, I knew that leaving the camera set to ISO 100 was right for this one.

By default I always have the camera set to aperture priority so I can control the depth of field easily. I know that f9 at the wide-angle end of my zoom lens (17mm focal length) means pretty much everything from my feet to infinity will be in focus.

As an aside, this knowledge is great for when you can't spare any time fiddling with settings and have to make the capture before the opportunity is gone. As long as there is enough light around so that the shutter speed to accompany f9 (or whatever aperture you choose while composing) is fast enough for the scene. Knowing that everything is going to be sharply in focus means you have one less thing to worry about. Heck, you can even switch to manual focus and shave some time off how long before the camera is ready to take the shot.

Anyway, with this set-up it was straightforward to quickly exposure-lock on the brightest part of the sky, recompose and make the capture before the clouds were gone.

Digital darkroom

To summarise, I converted from RAW and pulled it into Photoshop where I cloned out a telegraph wire that was intruding into the top left corner. Also consigned to oblivion by the clone tool were a couple of distant birds that were just black specks on the clouds.

As an aside, some folks get a little prissy about this, but a serious photographer knows it's the distractions which draw the eye and that they can ruin a shot.
Being somewhat of an image tart, I have no such qualms—and by this, I mean that they didn't feature anywhere in my artistic intent and they were a distraction, therefore they didn't deserve to be in the image.

I then converted to black and white using a bw adjustment layer, juggling the sliders to get a close fit to the tonal relationships I was after. A bit of dodging and burning in the field to enhance its contours as I recalled them and that was it.

A final bit of sharpening and size reduction as I saved as a jpeg, and it was ready for upload.

comments / critique / feedback always welcome :)

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Introspective ...Walking The Dogs

Walking The Dogs
A shot taken at Felixstowe seafront of a couple walking their dogs
along the concert, with a stray child looking on. Winter 2008.

I was visiting Felixstowe on a day out while staying with friends in the last days of December, last year. I had my trusty 17-85mm zoom fitted, complete with hood because of the lighting conditions.

Because I was with two kids who were full of beans, I needed to keep my wits about me and be ready for when those few magic moments appeared. You know the sort, the ones where you think, "darn, if only I'd been ready with my camera!"

Composing and making the capture

Spotting the potential

Well the lighting was superb, picking out the eager faces of the beach huts and, with the curve of the coast leading the eye naturally to the main beach in the distance, there was plenty of potential. I just had to hope that someone would turn up to provide the subject for this wonderful backdrop.

Preparing for the shot

I noticed the steps coming down from the car park above, so positioned myself so that anyone approaching from that direction would walk into the scene from the right. I then composed so that the main beach was roughly in one of the rule-of-thirds power points.

I could see a couple coming down the steps to the front, and knew the final elements would soon be in place.

Exposure, ISO etc.

Lighting was fine, so there was no need to move from ISO 100. I always stick with aperture priority and f9 at the wide angle end of my zoom is enough to get everything in focus from my feet to infinity. Perfect for this shot. Because I was shooting into the sun (slightly out of frame to the left), the lens hood was essential to minimise lens flare.

I exposed for the sky (exposure lock — point at the sky, half press the shutter release and hold it, then recompose and finally press the release all the way). I fired off a couple of practice shots to check the histogram — I didn't want to blow those highlights.

As it turned out, on the first practice shot I did, so I re-exposed, making sure I was on the brightest part of the sky this time for the exposure lock. Yep, the histogram was showing all was well. I was ready. Shutter speed was 1/250 by the way.

Oh, and as I always shoot in RAW, I knew I'd have some leeway with the exposure, should lighting conditions change between taking the final exposure lock and waiting for the scene to be filled with a subject.

The capture

I was ready and, on cue, the couple entered the scene — with dogs, too! Got lucky with my subjects there :)

The child on the upper concert was a further bonus, adding to the story. I think he'd raced ahead of mum and dad, who were still coming down the steps.

And then I was off for the next shot (Caught By The Surf, if you were curious — and, wow, two in a row were keepers!)

Digital darkroom

Rawshooter Essentials

The first part of my workflow is done in Rawshooter. I initially sort out the keepers from the maybes and the definite binners.

For each keeper, I then make any slight exposure and any initial contrast adjustments before converting to 16bit TIFF, ready to move into PhotoShop.

For this one, the exposure was ok as taken, and needed just a tad of fill light before the TIFF conversion.

PhotoShop

Again, fairly standard for my workflow, I applied a bit of
TLR capture sharpening first, converted to mono using the black and white filter and judicial use of the channel sliders.

While adjusting the sliders, I kept an eye on the interplay between sky and ground but couldn't quite achieve a conversion that convinced me. I ended up treating the sky with a gradient fill to tone it down a little.

I did a little dodging and burning to the rightmost beach hut and applied a slight double vignette to bring the eye's attention to the couple and their implied destination.

I applied my usual final tweak on the curves to increase the contrast and added a slight adjustment to the levels to deepen the shadows and lift the highlights a bit and that was it.

A final bit of sharpening and size reduction as I saved as a jpeg, and it was ready for upload.

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Introspective ...Hay303 Stacks

Hay303 Stacks

A shot of the fields alongside the A303 near Stonehenge,
just after hay making. Wiltshire, 2008.

Composing and making the capture

I had seen the landscape dotted with these obelisk-like haystacks over a regular journey I make. On this particular occasion the light was right, so I kept on diving off the road down farm tracks and entrances to fields, whenever it looked like there was half a chance of a shot.

I'd not long passed Stonehenge, heading west, when I got lucky with this and another shot. [Hint: note how you "make" your own luck by giving the good lady chance to smile on your efforts!]

Placing the horizon low for airiness

The rolling hills and low clouds with the clear sky above made the scene light and airy, and I knew to capture that feeling, I'd need to put the horizon low in the frame. The rule of thirds suggests that the horizon line should go about one third of the way up in a shot like this, but I wanted more emphasis, so placed it even lower.

Three's the charm

The eye tends automatically to "zone in" to odd-numbered groups, giving them power in a shot. The scene in front of me wouldn't play ball and insisted on four haystacks, but again I was lucky in that three went nicely on the skyline with one below it.

Exposure, ISO etc.

I always keep my Canon EFS 17-85mm IS USM mounted on the camera and again it was perfect for the shot. The day was beautifully bright, so I checked the ISO was set to 100. For maximum depth of field, I set to f9, giving a shutter speed of 1/320s. As I was shooting across the road with the view often blocked by the frequent lorries that were passing, the fast shutter speed would only help. I focus- / exposure-locked around a third of the way in to ensure front-to-back sharpness before recomposing and dropping the shot into the box.

In the digital darkroom

HDR

I never have the camera set to anything other than RAW, a pre-requisite for the sort of HDR treatment I intended for this shot. I went overboard and, using RAWShooter Essentials 2006 (now a part of PhotoShop LightRoom), made 12 separate exposures from the one shot. I did this, anxious to get as much texture in the clouds and razed crops as possible. I brought them together using Dynamic-Photo HDR before moving to PhotoShop.

PhotoShop

Again, fairly standard for my workflow, I applied a bit of TLR capture sharpening first, converted to mono using the black and white filter and judicial use of the channel mixer sliders. While adjusting the sliders, I kept an eye on the interplay between sky and ground but couldn't quite achieve a conversion that convinced me. I ended up treating the sky as a separate conversion on another layer.

A tweak on the curves to increase the contrast and a slight adjustment to the levels to deepen the shadows and lift the highlights a bit and that was it.

Any comments or questions, fire away :)

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Introspective: Knot A Rope Knot

Every so often I examine one of my images in depth, commenting about what attracted me to it and what I was trying to achieve.

So, on with Knot A Rope Knot. First, I guess, the name. I guess people will have noticed that I like to play on words - not very well but I try, lol. In this one, there's the half of a knot in the wooden post - not quite a knot - and then the rope knot as well, hence the name - knot a rope knot - geddit? ;-)


Rope knots have a special meaning for me - I spent a little time in the merchant navy and briefly tied for work and pleasure (monkey's fists, mats, shoe soles, and other decorative ones whose names I forget). I also spent a few years as a caver and at times you just got to rely on the knots you tie, in a life or death sort of way :)

"contrast..." The first thing that attracted my attention about this piece was that of the contrast between the rough textures of the rope against the intense smoothness of the wooden post and the blandness of the fabric background.

"pattern..." So much in the way of strong pattern - the intertwining strands of ever smaller strands (Big fleas have little fleas, Upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, And so ad infinitum) ...the delicious patterns of the grain and the hints of knots in the wood. Oh, and the humour in the two different kinds of knot :) - oh, how easy I am to please!

"shape..." What a lovely shape that knot of rope makes, winding round and round and in and out - very pleasing. There's also quite a 3d feel, adding to the overall effect.

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