Photo of the Week – Burner

Photo of the Week – Burner

Today’s photo was taken just after dawn at the Bristol Balloon fiesta. Just before the sun rises about a hundred teams spring into action, unfurling huge balloons out on the launch field at Ashton Court.

This image intentionally looks pretty calm but just out of frame are hundreds of people dashing around. I shot this wide open at f2.8 because I wanted the trees and sun to be soft in contrast to the hard steel of the burner.

Burner at dawn

Burner EXIF data

Because of the large difference in exposure between the gas burner and the sky I was working in manual mode, making sure I held as much detail as I could in the shadows without blowing out the sky.


Burner Lightroom adjustments Over in Lightroom I made a few tweaks to finish things off. Firstly, I warmed the whole scene a little and upped the Vibrance and Saturation to enhance the sunrise feel. Then I pumped up the shadows to give tad more detail in the metalwork. There’s also some Clarity in there because Clarity is magic!

Photo of the Week – Rally Day

Photo of the Week – Rally Day

For this week’s photo you can probably tell I wasn’t actually behind the camera! I’ve positioned my GoPro Hero 3 against a tyre wall and retreated to a safe distance. If you look carefully, you’ll see me in front of the Race2Recovery truck on the right, leaning over the hedge. I’m using the GoPro app on my iPhone, right on the edge of wifi range, to trigger burst mode. That’s 10 shots per second for 3 seconds in this case.

After a few test runs to get used to the lag (being able to wirelessly review shots with the app really helps work this out) I was getting shots like the three below.

The 3 source images
Layers in PhotoshopThese got opened as layers and auto-aligned in Photoshop. The shots were taken a few minutes apart and so much debris was hitting the camera that it moved a little so the auto-align came in handy when masking.

As you can see, it’s quite a simple file. Just the main exposure with an (artificially) blurred wheel, the chase car and the flying rocks.

So here is the base exposure. Because it’s shot with a GoPro, with no manual controls, you pretty much get what you are given. The quality is decent enough and 12 mega pixels gives plenty of opportunity to crop in but the real reason for using it in this case was the ability to get it VERY close to the action.

Main image

With no control over shutter speed, the wheels on the Bowler Wildcat were frozen still. I selected the wheel, popped it onto its own layer and applied a radial blur, masking out everything but the bits I needed. There is also a little motion blur added to the other wheels using the Smudge tool – literally the only time I use it!

Blurred wheel

Next up was the chase car. This was shot on completely different track session but I think its addition adds a little drama to the final image. Chase car

Finally, the flying rocks. These were kicked up behind a different truck as it was trying to get closer and closer to my camera each lap! Again, with the GoPro shooting at whatever shutter speed it needs to work with its fixed 2,8 lens, the rocks were frozen in mid-flight so to add some movement I applied a very slight zoom blur. I’ve then masked the layer to control where the rocks appear.

Rocks

Which leads us on to the final image:

The final image

As usual, I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

Photo of the Week – Rush Hour

Photo of the Week – Rush Hour

This image was taken a few years ago as a Get Off My Ass mission – I’d not been out with my camera for a while and decided that tonight would be the night. I don’t recall what gave me the idea but I decided on shooting some light trails and fired up Google Maps to find a suitable location.

This bridge is just north of the M4/M5 interchange outside Bristol. I like this location for the curve of the road leading towards the RAC tower and the light pollution from the city giving the sky some interest. I took a batch of images, a couple to get the right exposure for the sky and the rest at 15 seconds to capture the light trails. You get surprisingly few cars in 15 seconds leaving sparse trails so 4 frames were layered in Photoshop (using the Lighten blend mode) to give better density.

Rush Hour parts

Overall I am pleased with the image but looking back at it now I can’t help but see one thing: The blue mile marker sign on the left hand side! How did I not see that glowing reflective blue square when I first edited it??

_MG_2386-Edit

Photo of the Week – Jet Car

Photo of the Week – Jet Car

As you’d expect from its name the Fire Force jet car is fast but I think the sheer amount of noise it produces is what makes it hard to shoot. Couple that with the fact it’s literally halfway down the strip at Santa Pod in the blink of an eye and you’ll understand why I still only have a few good shots of it.

On this occasion I decided not to try panning as it passed me just off the start line and instead shot a bit wider facing down the down the track, waiting for it to enter my frame. This was the original shot. Composed with the car dead centre so I had my most sensitive focus point on it, AI Focus mode and high speed drive. This was one of a batch of pretty average “raw material” shots that I hoped I might be able to get something from. What stood out on this one was how the heat haze caused as the engine kicked out 5500lbs of thrust made the crowd looks almost like an oil painting.

Original shot

I saw enough in this shot to make it worth a little tweaking in Lightroom. I started with a fairly tight crop to improve the composition (this is where 20+ megapixels comes in handy) followed by a contrast boost, a little desaturation and a slight vignette. I’ve also applied one of my favourite Lightroom tweaks here and that’s the gradient filter. I use it to quickly put some interest in the sky. If there is some detail in the clouds I’ll use it to pull down the exposure and boost the contrast and clarity, but in this shot the sky was just simply flat grey. In this case I  pulled the colour temperature to the cool side and increased the saturation to add a little blue to the sky.

Here’s the result:

Finished item

You have got to be kidding me?

You have got to be kidding me?

Someone showed me a link this week to a program called Piccure designed to remove camera shake and motion blur from photographs. If this was an iPhone app, aimed at cleaning up those shaky images shot in nightclubs it’d be brilliant. Phone cameras just can’t deal with low light situations. But it’s not. This is a plug in for Photoshop Elements and Lightroom. It’s marketed at people with enough interest in photography to have bought an image editing package.

I quote from the website:

“Correct camera shake in a matter of seconds – save time, money and frustration.”

Seriously? I think this is just encouraging people to not learn the basics, to just spend more money on a plugin that will attempt to fix it after the fact in Photoshop. If you really want to “save time, money and frustration” just get to know your camera and learn the exposure triangle.

Dig a little deeper on the site and you get to this:

“For example, if you shoot a subject that is far away with a tele lens and you select a long exposure (e.g. 1/50), your image may be blurry because your camera has moved a little during the 1/50 seconds.”

It’s blurry because hand holding a long lens steady at 1/50th isn’t possible, even if you’re Joe McNally, but you do not need to buy Photoshop plugins. You can fix this easily by opening your aperture and/or upping your ISO.

This is clever technology but you really don’t need to spend £80 on it. Instead invest a little time in learning. There are plenty of free resources online, in fact you can even find a few tips on getting sharper shots right here.

So please, save your money and educate yourself instead with a few ebooks from Craft & Vision instead.

Photo of the Week – Stop the Bus!

Photo of the Week – Stop the Bus!

I was confined to an exhibition hall because a monsoon had descended on Peterborough Arena and the rest of the show I was at was rained off. Not exactly conducive to photography but hey, I like a challenge and that challenge came from ‘Maxxis babe’ Sarah. Something like “Go on then, come up with an idea!”  “Give me an hour” was my reply.

I walked the hall but came up with nothing interesting. The place was rammed as a some of the outside parts of Modified National had squeezed inside. The atmosphere was great with everyone trying to make the best of it but there was barely room to move.

The only real option for a location was the Maxxis VW van but just shooting the girls with it in front of the Maxxis truck under the orange hall lighting wasn’t going to cut it. So I came up with the concept of the girls traveling the UK with this as their tour bus in a sixties, Summer Holiday style.

So here’s the original image. Everything but the bus is underexposed almost making it look like a composite already. Ideally I’d have preferred the bus on a plain or at least a simpler background but I had to work with what I had.

orig2

Obviously there was going to be a fair bit of compositing involved but the first job was to get the lighting right. The only light in the hall was coming from the high ceiling lights so the inside of the bus was dark and gloomy. If I dropped that onto a bright sunny background it was going to look very wrong. So, with the idea explained to the girls, out came the flashes.

The first is tucked away in the glovebox in front of Amy, camera right. It was set to a wide angle and feathered over towards Sarah on the left to even out the exposure. It’s not perfect but it’s close enough to pull back in post production.

Lana, Nickie and Danni in the back (seriously rocking the 60’s vibe by the way!) were lit with the second flash. It’s sat on the floor firing up towards the panel behind the front seats to make a nice big light source. Being a heavily modified van, this panel was covered in orange audio amplifiers so there was a MacGuver moment when some of the sticker sheets the girls were giving out we’re used to cover the amps and make a white reflector. Without this, the colour cast would have been very strong, especially with the amount of orange Lycra in the shot!

After a few test shots I knew I had the interior lit just right but the front of the bus was far too dark so a third flash is sat on the floor facing upwards hitting the front with just a wink of fill.

After using almost every Photoshop selection technique I know I had a finished layer mask.

Photoshop layer mask
Applying that to the original shot gave me a nicely lit, floating bus, ready to drop onto a suitably sunny background found on a stock library.

Bus Cutout
A quick Google for an Austin Powers font and a touch of the Warp tool and the image was done.

Austin Powers style text
Yes, it’s ridiculous, cheesy and hammy but it shows the sun can still shine in an exhibition hall in rainy Peterborough.

composit2