Category: Photography Project 2013

A new photography project for 2013.

For my 48th birthday, I received a copy of ‘Photocrafty: 75 Creative Camera Projects for You and Your Digital SLR ‘. This along with suitable encouragement from my wife and son has inspired me to start taking photographs again.

I have not really had the time to have more than a quick flick through the book since I received it but it has already reminded me of techniques that I have not tried for many years. Rather than just taking more photos and adding them to my collection which currently has around 50,000 images, I have decided to try to show a few of them here. As I work my way through the book I will try to add pictures and comments as I go.

Experiments in HDR

About 10 years ago I attempted to create a few High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. It was a time consuming process that involved manually aligning three or more images on different layers, then merging them into one. At that time I had access to an old copy of Photoshop at work. The technique sort of worked but took hours to complete and I was never really happy with the results.

Software and processing power has moved on in leaps and bounds since them. Today I use Paintshop Pro as my editing tool. It’s comparitively cheap and easy to use. Whilst browsing the help for something else I noticed that it had an HDR merge facility built in so decided to give it a try.

The source images were all taken hand held so alignment wasn’t perfect. Even so the tools in PSP have done remarkably well. I have to say that I find most of the presets to be not quite right, but they work as a starting point.

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Vibrant Colours

This is the first post in my 2013 photography project. It’s as much a learning exercise in using WordPress as it is about presenting the images. These images were taken at Spittalfields Market in April. I set out with the intention of capturing a series of images displaying vibrant colour. The market is well worth a visit, on the day we visited the Huguenots Festival was taking place so there were various cloth making demonstrations taking place.

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