Photographer
Title-The Haunted Manor
Just a quick post today as I’ve been busy with other things, however I wasn’t going to miss posting another image for Mono Monday. This picture has been sitting on my Hard drive for some time but not seen by anyone until now.
Due to the dilapidated nature of the building I thought that applying a selenium tone would give it a slightly spooky feel.
Thanks for stopping by.
Title-Stargazing
So here we are with another mono Monday image. This was taken a couple of years back whilst on a trip to London with my cousin and a couple of his friends. I like how I’m taking a picture of someone appreciating another photographers work. There’s a simplicity about having just the one person in the frame that appeals to me, had there been more it wouldn’t have worked so well, if at all. Black and white just seems to be the right choice for this picture.
I’ll have to make a return visit at some point and have another stab at some street photography as it’s an area I really need to get more confidence with.
Btw, I am now on Google+
So Mono Monday has come around once again, but for this one I am here to tell you that there are a few things happening right now that are taking my attention away from this blog. Nothing bad mind. First thing is that my stepson and his girlfriend are moving into their first home and so I’m helping out with that. The second thing is my wife’s 40th birthday which is coming up in the next week, and we’ve been busy arranging her party. Oh and there’s one more thing, this time related to photography that hopefully will come my way shortly, I’ll let you know as and when.
Until then I will be taking a short break from posting anything but I intend on keeping this a short a time as possible.
Thanks for all the comments and tweets that you’ve given me. Be back soon.
Title-‘Seaside sweep’
I’ve gone with a rather minimalist shot for today’s Mono Monday. This was taken at Birling Gap on the same evening as the previous post but at the end of the shoot just before we hit the pub. The light we had hoped for withered away leaving us with not much more than a drab grey sky, however, I thought I’d try to create some abstract shots by panning the camera during a longish exposure. I took about half a dozen in total with this being the most successful.
I was going to keep it as a colour photograph until I saw a recent post from my good pal Brian Matiash. Brian has been experimenting with minimalism in mono lately, and this prompted me to see how this shot would turn out if I did something similar. I think I actually prefer this to the original colour one, so cheers Brian!
For those interested I hand held the camera, panning it during a half second exposure at f22, iso200.
Title-‘For Vincent’
In a previous post I showed the practical benefits of using HDR to help achieve a better representation of a scene when contrast levels exceed that of the cameras capability. This time I’ve chosen to show how you can use HDR software to give your pictures a much more painterly look.
This area of photography has come under much criticism over recent years and I for one have become rather fed up with it as ultimately is all rather pointless, in fact the argument doesn’t differ too much from what the impressionist painters went though during the 19th century, or indeed the modern artists of today. It simply comes down to this: It’s your art, do it how you want to do it. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. If it’s not your thing, fair enough, ignore it and move on.
Anyhow, let continue…
As explained previously, you will ideally still be bracketing your exposures when out shooting, but you can create this look by making a pseudo HDR image out of one shot if there is a good tonal range running throughout. The difference between making a picture look realistic or painterly has a lot to do with how you set the smoothness slider (assuming your using Photomatix), so in this instance you’ll be wanting to set it more to the left, if not all the way to to the left. There is no hard and fast rule as to how you set all of the other sliders so it’ll be just a case or trial and error as every picture will react in slightly different ways, so play around with all of them to see what happens. For this reason it is always best to have the software reset everything when starting a new project.
In my opinion it’s still desirable to avoid getting halos, but the main objective is to get the dark and light areas to a pretty even level. So that’s really all there is to it. What you’ll end up with is something that (to me at least) looks a lot more impressionistic. This is exactly what went through my mind when I was out on an urbex shoot last year and came across this chair, it immediately screamed of Vincent van Gogh’s Chair and I set about doing my own take with the vase of flowers.
So have fun with your photography and try something new.
Thanks for stopping by.
Title ‘Simple Decay’
I tend to do a fair amount of post processing on my dereliction pictures, usually being either HDR or mixing colour and mono layers together. Sometimes though, a straight forward switch to black and white is all that’s needed.
Dave Wares 