Be Excellent To Each Other

Well, I'm loving my D40x and am having mucho fun experimenting. So I thought I'd post some of the results, say a pic a day. However I am greedy so I'm starting with five. Any thoughts or comments would be pleasing! All of these were taken in the last eight weeks or so, though Green Man was late August!



Suspicious Swans - Roath Park, Cardiff



Winter Wonderland - City Hall, Cardiff



Frankly monged and scary Appalachian stylee band O'Death - Green Man Festival, Brecon Beacons



"I sees yur mind," - Girl & Cat.



A bus that never came - Roath Park, Cardiff

I'm still working out how to use exposure properly, but I'm figuring it slowly. I've just got to remember those ratios, and stop being absurdly optimistic about under-exposure based on a bright and shiny LCD screen. Think I'll start shooting in RAW soon too. Ook.

Anyone get any pics they like to share, in this thread or others?

Agreed! If I was in a band and saw that picture.. I'd want to use it!

You should send it them!

Defo, some music mags/sites might pay you for it too.

FLEE! RUN! THAT GIANT CAT WILL DEVOUR US ALL!!!

Gleep! Really?!

I've got a few more like that. I don't know, I got into the stupid brainset at the time that because I was a beginner with SLR and it was a basic lens yadda yadda and although it looked splendid, I was still worlds away. Now, looking through my pics again I'm really chuffed with some of them. If I knew the first thing how to sell them, I would. (And may try to find out.)

However, I'm deffo sending them to the band website. I've got a few more good ones of the band, if you like. (More scarey sweaty nudiness!)

But thank you! Thank you! *Basks*

And the cat CLAWS.

GREAT pics!

KITTY I can has!

And who is that vision of beauty? The lad on the left with his ass-cleve nearly showing? My, my what a tasty little crumpet he seems

I assume you're talking about the swans picture!

Um, I don't know - just strangers in a park I followed and photographed. They call it stalking, I call it selective walking.

I am indeedy hrmmmm!!!

'It's only stalking because they don't know that they are in love with you yet.'

Tip number 17 of 'Shins Snape Stalking Secrets'

SWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

...


Sorry. Flashbacks.

That's a big ass cat.

Nice pics Pete.

I like the wheely one. Wheely!

Can any of you competent photographers recommend a book / web site / any thing else that might actually give me the basics? I've just bought one of those Fuji Finepix that was recommended, and I've yet to get past the ol' "turn on auto and point" level.

You've captured the homoeroticism in the band one excellently.

The cat is awesome, and the ferris wheel one is brilliant.

Now that my compy's fixed, I'm back out there taking photos again. This is a good thing, despite my CRT monitor being 11 years old and completely impossible to calibrate accurately. I'd therefore be chuffed if you could let me know if the pics seem a bit too dark, bright, whatever. I've tinkered with them in Picasa and Paint.net to try and get the right light levels.



Raindrops on wall-growing weeds, Cathays Cardiff.



Dandelion and buttercups, common behind Whitchurch psychiatric hospital, Cardiff. This one is a composite of two pics, and my first serious attempt at photoshopping. Not clean, as I had no tripod, and you can see the smudgy join. Was 5.3 aperture right for this? I wanted a blurred background and sharp dandelion fully in focus. Gngh.



Subway at Gabalfa underpass, Cardiff.



Castle Hill, Huddersfield.



Bee! Wakefield, West Yorkshire.



Castle Hill again.



Near Matlock, Yorkshire. "MAAATLOCK!"

Check out your local library for bundles of books on the subject, try to avoid the ones that barf on too much about filters and new lenses - just get the basics down first. I find http://www.nikonians.org a great place for picking up tips. You can't access all the subforums unless you register, but it has a friendly community with great advice. It also has a good section of book reviews handily broken down into each subject:

http://www.nikonians.org/html/resources ... index.html

The best way is to play with it though. I forced myself to play with manual - it's a steep learning curve but I'm getting some reasonable pics now. Either that or try aperture priority mode, though half the time you'll need a tripod you'll be able to set your depth of field and the shutter speed will take care of itself.

Bloody hell, Pete. I brought my camera into work today in the hope of getting some nice pics on my walk along the canal path but I'm now put off by your PHOTOGRAPHY SKILLS OF AWESOMENESS.

I can always recommend Understanding Exposure — Bryan Peterson.

Great shots, Pete. I do really like the band one; you've really managed to capture a great moment there. You seem to be handling your camera pretty competently so far, so just keep shooting.

Nowhere near the quality of Pete's stuff, but hey:



Didn't quite get the shallow depth of field I was after. Ho hum.

As opposed to 'Photographer Monthly' mags which are as Viz correctly parodied (all about taking pictures of big beautiful breasts)



Gngk! Gngk!

Gost, I really like that Roda. I especially like the surf in the background, I think you've hit on a pretty decent aperture on that one personally. It's got a nice impressionistic dapple and a sense of movement, and the framing's pretty good too. At the risk of sparking off a "Yo, you da man," / "No. YOU da man," fest, I'd have to say that from that pic you're doing damn well. However, I shall now scrutinise it for flaws and dole out fatherly badly misjudged advice.

What camera are you using by the way?

Garsh. Thanks, Pete, that's greatly appreciated. A larger version is here and here's the enorm-o-vision version (where actually, the DoF looks a lot better). Any advice or criticism would be gratefully received.

I'm using a D70s - far too much camera for my talent really, but it produces some lovely pictures even in the hands of a dolt.

Quality seems fine to me, chap. It's a nice photo, and I don't think a shallower depth of field would necessarily be better here. Pity the bird is in so much shadow, mind. I think it would have been better if you'd have gotten more down to the animal's level, too, to give more of a personal feel to it.

Mm, I tend to lower myself as much as I can for that type of shot, unless it brings a distracting horizon into play. I think it wants a little more sharpness on the bird maybe, but not much more - frankly I'd be quibbling.

Thanks chaps, that's useful and interesting. Also, my copy of the book you recommended arrived this morning MF, and it looks great from an initial skim-though so thanks a lot for that.

That heron seems to like hanging out on that spot - I've seen him (um, her? I have no idea) there a few times, so I may have another crack at the shot the next time I see it and see what difference a change in angle makes.

Your photographic skills are much to be admired Mr Pete. Unfortunately your geography is weak. Since when is Matlock in Yorkshire?

Excellent. He has another one called Learning to see Creatively, too. I don't think it's quite as good seeing as it's pretty subjective, but it's still worth a read to see some compositional techniques.

Ha! We conquered Matlock last November, certain counties refuse to acknowledge the new Yorkshire Empire however. Pitiful fools.

Now everyone join me in the Yorkshire chant. (Assumes braying, low, sneering voice) "Yerkshire. Yerkshire. Yerkshire. Yerkshire. Yerkshire. Yerkshire. Yerkshire. Yerkshire." (Repeat several dozen times.)

I'm reading a good summary book called 'The Complete Illustrated Encylcopedia of Digital Photography' by Steve Luck. It's helping me a fair bit. The stuff on focusing is good.

I, for one, welcome our new Boycottian overlords.

Thang yew. Pies and photography for all! (Hold the wife-beating.)

By the way, when you're doing wide angle, narrow aperture landscape shots am I right in thinking that you focus at an object or point a third of the distance towards the horizon to get maximum sharpness? Is this true in nearly all cases? Just making sure I'm reading it all right.

Close enough to be correct, I find.

Have a google for Hyperfocal Distance. I have a nice little calculator on my phone for it, but I find focusing a third of the way into the scene gives completely acceptable results.

Hullo all!

I've just trial downloaded Photoshop Elements 7. Pretty much immediately fallen in love with it too, as I'm working through my Gower photos. Here's the first one I've edited. Again, not too happy with my current monitor, so let me know if it's too dark or too light and stuff, and any comments or criticism. (Exposure was a little off I know, it's too underexposed. This was to avoid bleaching out the sky - I really need a graduated filter for horizon stuff.) This is the first in a string of beach shots, some of which I may be turning into bigish prints due to their pixel size of 3872x2952.



(Fer more detail in magno-view - http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/Fi ... directlink)

More to come an' that. Well worth having to wade back to shore due to failing to check incoming tide cutting me off from behind, I reckon. Oh how those fishermen mocked at twenty past five in the morning.

Very nice Pete. What the tall bit, is it a stack of rocks or part of a breakwater?

Quite pleased with catching this little fella on my camera phone.

WTF?! Spiders aren't meant to be fucking BLUE!

Wow, never seen one like that before.

I thought the only blue spider was the cobalt tarantula. Pretty little thing, wish we had some here.

Oh yeah! Me too!


...

Ta mate. The tall bit is one of three incredibly curious tall rocks knobbled with seaweed. I couldn't quite get at them to examine them, but they made a good break in the framing. No idea how they were formed.

Cool spider. Hopefully not hilariously a deadly tropical spider having moved to England due to climate change, eh? Ho ho.

First in a wave of new pics from the weekend, among others:



Carry on, citizen.

(Bristol Temple Meads waiting room.)

The cobalt blue, or haplopelma lividum, is one of the tarantula species I was looking at buying when I was researching the two I've got at the moment.

Always been drawn to them thanks to their colouring.

I was put off when I read that they're nasty little fuckers and they won't hesitate to chomp your hand if you spook them. At least the two that I've got are relatively docile.

I photographed some spiders yesterday too, I went to sit outside for a brew in the morning sun and these lot had just appeared overnight:

Awww, look at the lickle spiderlings.

That blue spider one was about 1cm across. Caught my eye as he darted underneath the swing Baba Z was in, never seen one like it before...

*googles*

Worryingly he doesn't appear on any UK/European spider sites.

Any idea GazChap?

He's UK based JC, well at least he's living here now.

No idea what he is, but it's unlikely to be dangerous.

On a continuing creepy-crawly tip:



These are buggers to photograph. They don't sit still for long and really don't like you getting close, making it very easy for you to end up, f'rinstance, focussed on the leaf the bugger's sitting on rather than the bugger itself. This is easily the best of the 20 or so attempts I had yesterday, and even this is screwed up by the blade of grass in front of the fly's head. Another go this afternoon, I think.

Oooh more shiny beasties.

That's quite nice old chap. For future reference, digital cameras are worse than analogue cameras for getting a decent gradient of exposure. Sure, that was an extreme situation of light and contrast that most film would baulk at, but IME digital cameras tend to sit somewhere closer to Transparency in their exposure gradient than negative film - though I understand the latest high end stuff from Nikon is a lot better nowadays. Two tips you can try though I'm not sure if Elements will allow you to do either.

Merge bracketed exposures - take three shots to cover the highlights and shadow areas and merge them using one of Photoshops automated functions - if Elements has it, try File > Automated > Merge HDR and have a play with that.

Other means are to try using blended layers with the various image files.

Failing that, warez a copy of Lightroom and use the recovery tools in that to find details in the blacks They may well have some of the functionality of Lightroom in Elements as well seeing as Adobe seem to be hellbent in so much functionality crossover nowadays.

It is! I really like that.



Quite a cool technique when done tastefully — it's incredibly easy to over-do merged exposures, and nothing puts me off more quickly. Of course, you'll ideally need a tripod for this technique as you need each image to be the same. I believe Photoshop has some tools to match up exposures intelligently, but a tripod is certainly going to be the better way.



I've never gotten on with Lightroom as a processing tool, probably because I'm so used to the full functionality of Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. Lightroom is a brilliant tool for organising your library, though!

Also, good point about recovery in the blacks. And remember, you can often recover detail from the blacks, but the same isn't true of the whites. Try not to blow you highlights!

More buggery (um, no actually I think that's something else - Ed):







I wouldn't have minded getting one of one of the beasties in flight or landed with its wings open, but they're so fast and erratic in the air that the former's extremely difficult, and the latter would need more patience than I've got when I'm walking in my lunch hour, so I think I'm just going to be satisfied with what I've got.