12 views of Kerlingarfjöll

in Photography , Tuesday, January 31, 2012

For quite a while I’ve wanted to try the 500px photo sharing site.  I’m pretty bored with Flickr, although I’ve got some friends over there, because I don’t think it presents photos very well, it’s become very cluttered, and it is very, very focused on the now. I don’t think the date I took a particular photo has much bearing on what I set out to do. 

So I’ve gone back a bit and assembled a specific 12 photo portfolio looking at one specific place, Kerlingarfjöll in Iceland.

All of the photos in this set were taken with “ancient” technology, the Olympus E-1, a camera limited to 5Mpx output. And they were taken before I’d really got a grip on digital, and generally the apertures are way beyond the diffraction limit. So they’re not going to be exhibition prints.

But as an exercise in revisiting the past through a completely new portal, it’s quite interesting.

Seems a little less trivial than Flickr, somehow, and more worth putting some effort into.

11 photos from 2011

in Photography , Sunday, January 08, 2012

Although the whole end-of-year list thing makes me a bit nauseous, I’ve seen so many “Top 10”, “Best of 2011” etc lists of photos that I felt I should do my own.  Actually it wasn’t very easy. I didn’t think I’d taken 10 good photos on 2011. I’m still not sure I have, but anyway, here are 11 I like. And it’s quite a diverse set.

2011 was probably not a classic year for me so far as photography is concerned. Work, and especially commuting, really eats into my time and destroys inspiration.  Nevertheless, according to my Aperture library I took 3915 photos, and that doesn’t include film. In 2011 I completely avoided high latitudes. The highlight was 10 days in the Aeolian Islands in March. I didn’t quite get the shots of Stromboli erupting in winter light that I envisaged, but I got closer than before. I also greatly expanded my library of Ticino mountain streams / rivers, especially Verzasca and its tributaries, and Calanca. I should probably do something with those one day. The rest largely come from various short breaks and holidays.

January: Plaine Morte glacier, Valais, Switzerland. Olympus E-PL2.

February: Rome at night, near the Trevi fountain. Olympus E-PL2.

March: Stromboli eruption, from outlook on the old summit trail. Olympus E-3.

May: Tuscany, the standard shot. Olympus E-PL2.

May: Tuscany, Abbazia di Sant’Antimo. Olympus E-PL2.

August: Ticino, Val d’Osura. Olympus E-3.

August: Sea cave, Marettimo, Aegadian Islands. Olympus E-PL2.

September: Cefalu, Sicily. Olympus E-PL2.

October: Val Calanca, Graubunden. Olympus E-3.

November: Val Verzasca, Ticino. Olympus E-3.

December: Val Bedretto, Ticino. Olympus E-PL2.

Do you detect any kind of personal style in this motley collection ? I don’t!

Just some photos

in Photography , Wednesday, December 21, 2011

No time to blog. No time for anything but work and Christmas / family stuff. I’ve written several posts in my head, including an overdue review of Bruce Percy’s Making of 40 Photographs, a catastrophically late of Roberto Buzzini’s fabulous Via Alta della Vallemaggia, and a sort of reply to Mike Johnston’s list of desirable cameras. But they remain in my head.

So, instead, here’s some of this month’s random walk-by Ricoh GR shots, straight from camera JPEGs, no editing whatsoever.

some deep & meaningful street photography

the obligatory morning coffee shot

commuter hell

so near, so far

I’m off for a mercifully short trip to the Untied Kingdom for the first time in ages. So here it is, Merry Christmas.

retail therapy

in Photography , Sunday, October 23, 2011

This is time of year where the days draw shorter, where weekends get taken up with life’s trivia, and going out to take photographs just doesn’t happen.  And in fact I’m getting a but tired with all the trappings of photography, and can’t help but wonder what it’s all for.

So it’s a good time to re-discover the Ricoh GR Digital slipped into my jacket pocket.  This wonderful little cult camera is such a pleasure to use that it demands that photo opportunities be found.  Even after a hard saturday afternoon’s shopping.

Caffeinated. Ricoh GR Digital in B&W mode, Ilford FP5+ simulation in Nik Silver Efx Pro.

I know of a least two great photographers working daily with this camera (and similar models), Mitch Alland, who’s street photography from Bangkok is endlessly fascinating, and Wouter Brandsma, who’s transformation of everyday trivia into photographic art is an inspiration.  Not really what I do, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it.

HDR with film

in Film , Sunday, September 25, 2011

I took a set of XPan frames of a scene in Iceland back in 2009, with the express purpose of seeing if I could make an HDR composite from them, and get the gritty, high contrast, low saturation “grim up north” look so beloved of brands such as 66 North.

There are 3 exposures, one “normal”, one 1 stop below, one 1 stop above. I decided to try running them through Nik HDR Efex (NHE from now on).  On the first try I fell at the first hurdle. Although NHE has an auto-align feature, it cannot cope with input images with different sizes. Since I had tidied the scans up a bit, they were all slightly different.

The 0EV (middle) exposure

So I rescanned all three using exactly the same size, and tried again. Unfortunately, it is absolutely impossible to get three completely independent scans exactly aligned, so alignment was still required. At least now they were the same size. So, back into NHE. The input processing takes something like 15 minutes or more with these large images, but again the results were hopeless. The alignment was completely off.

So I decided to try pre-aligning with Photoshop’s Auto Align. This worked fine, very well in fact. So having nearly perfectly aligned images, I fed them back into NHE. And 15 minutes later, NHE mangled them way out of alignment. Back to the drawing board. I turned off “alignment” in NHE, and gave it another go. This time it worked, or well enough.  In terms of alignment there are still some artifacts at 100% zoom but for smaller viewing sizes it works.

So then it was off to fiddling with the wide range of settings in NHE, and eventually I got something close to what I wanted.

The HDR look: Somewhere grim in the Westfjords

However, with film as the input, NHE makes grain explode. I had to do a lot of cleaning up, especially in the sky, and the results are most certainly gritty.

It would probably have been a lot easier to do it with digital, but there is a rather unique look coming out of film here, and have got a process that sort of works, I might try refining it.