Stop this stupid European photography law...

I don't normally get political but I do get a be in my bonnet about copyrights and the there is new European legislation in the offing that would make the taking and selling of photos with buildings in virtually impossible.

There is a online petition here,

so if you live in Europe and like your photography please sign.

Thanks

Wisdom of the crowd

One of the hardest things to do as a photography starting out is judging the quality of your own photos.

There are a number of ways to gather opinion, However they all suffer from the same issue that while people are quite happy to praise a photo, they are far less likely to give you negative criticism. Even if they do, they will rarely give you any useful ways to improve it.

I have always been a fan of 500px since it is one of the few ways to rate my pictures. However it suffers from the same problem. While you can judge by the number of positive likes and loves how favorable received your image is, it will not tell you the opposite i.e how disliked it is.

Up to recently I have been quite good at picking out images for 500px and got some good scores. This recently however came to a shuddering halt when I put this image on.

Now I like this picture. It has an unusual angle, tells a good story, and rather than being a pretty image, I think has a certain gravitas missing from a lot of my work.

So how did 500px rate it?

It got a total of zero, nil, null point likes, loves or even views.

So I am left with the question. Why?

There are a myriad of possible reasons but some that stand out are:-

1. It did not get seen. 

One issue with 500px is that with so many images being presented the photo needs a good hook to drag people in. Not only that but the preview shot on the main page,  only shows a small part of the center image. If that small square does not stand out, then this will cause the photo to be skipped over.

Also upload timing is critical. If it is placed when the majority of the viewers are not around, it will be rapidly relegated to the pit of other failed photos. For example, I only tend to look at the 1st 10 pages of the recent photo page, I probably miss thousands of great photos for that very reason

2. It is not a 500px type photo.

 It is quite easy to recognize a photo that will do well on 500px. They tend to be bright, glossy, and vibrant. Black and white images that do well again they are the ones with strong blacks and whites.

This image is not typical of one of those.  If I was to describe it, I would say it was gritty. Not that gritty photos are not liked, but they are less likely to stand out from the crowd.,

3. It is not very good. 

However much we hate to admit it, this is always a possibility.  Maybe its my judgement that is at fault. In some ways this would be the most worrying, which is why I cling to reason 1 or 2.

The problem is how do I know which is the reason (or is it a combination of all 3). This is why negative critic is so important. To become better photographers we must learn to accept the good with the bad, however painful the bad is.Websites like 500px just don't offer this sort of feedback, and we suffer from it(I can see there could be good legal reason why such a service is not offered. I mean no one has ever been sued for giving out compliments)

There is also the opposite issue of accepting the wisdom of the crowds. If 100 people say they like your photo, and one doesn't, does that make your photo good? If the one who dislikes it is a photo judge, they may have better reason to not like your image than the 100 who do. It maybe those faults will become more apparent with time.

So how do we obtain negative criticism?

Friends and family are not likely to be a great source of help here. However one of the best ways is to put it into competition. Judges rarely hold back, and while many judges have learnt that if they want to be asked back again, not to go totally negative, they can often not resist it.

Often you get what I call, the Judge sandwich, where they start of by saying something positive, hit you with criticism then finish off with some platitude. Worse is when the mark they give does not match their comments.

I must admit for a long time I hated competitions due to the negative comments, but looking back I realise they had an important role in improving my pictures. At the present we are are in the society off season and I am surprised by the how much I am missing the lack of critic, good and bad,

Another way to get valid feedback is to form contacts with other photographers and ask for honest opinions.

Sometimes we have to accept that we have a photo that just won't fly. it does not necessarily mean its bad, just that it's time has not come. However if in doing so you learn something then you can gain something from it despite your disappointment

To use the quotation from Moonfleet "As in life, so in a game of hazard, skill will make something of the worst of throws"

Breaking Bad

To learn anything requires you to repeat an exercise in the same conditions and measure your improvements.

In outside photography this can be a problem, because there are so many variables such as the light, the subject, and the position of the camera. even the lens used and the camera settings.

While often you can extrapolate from one photo to another, it is sometimes nice to be in more controlled conditions.

One way this can be done is via indoor photography. Here you can play around to your hearts content, with all sort of parameters while at the same time taking photos of the same subject.

Of course to do this it is great to have a room set apart for your studio. Unfortunately if you have a growing family, you are unlikely to be in that sort of situation, so instead have to work round the ordinary detritus of human life.

In my case this is the garage. Now like most garages, it has been many years since a car was ever parked in it, and we would struggle to even get a bike in nowadays. Needless to say then it is not ideal as studio,since we  have to fight around tools, drink and various large quantities of wood I have collected  over the ages "just in case" I ever decide to start a carpentry business.

However it has a number of qualities which any studio should have. It is out of everyone's way,. meaning I will not be disturbed. Outside light can be shut off if needed, and with a little re-arranging enough space can be had to set up tripods etc.

The project

 I have always wanted to try my hand at high speed photography, and I had a project in mind to achieve this, and this is where the garage came into play.

The project was to record  the breaking of glass.

Now there appears to be two ways to do high speed photography. Either open the shutter at a high shutter speed in strong light at the opportune moment, or leave the shutter open in the dark and fire a flash at the optimum moment(or a combination of both).

Now both of these require am accurate method of triggering at the opportune time, but the former method is likely to be the hardest, since there would always be a lag between shutter press and activation. So I therefore decided to do the latter.

For this I purchased a radio trigger for my flash. This meant that I could position the flash away from the camera with the trigger close to the subject I wanted to take. Also the trigger had a 3.5 mm din socket that would allow me to trigger the flash by connecting two wires together at the correct moment.

Although  this sounds complex, the real difficulty was triggering the flash at the right moment. The idea was to swing a hammer on a pendulum and at the bottom of the arc meet a glass object. At this point I wanted to trigger the flash.

Now there are a number of ways I could do this. A electronic method could be rigged that triggered the flash if a light beam was broken, or on a sound. However to keep it simple I put a bolt on the pendulum that at some point on the arc would hit a hinge, so make electrical contact and fire the flash. The bolt was used so I could adjust it. The hinge's purpose was so that in theory it would only fire once, since the hinge would fold out of the way.

So how did it go? Well initially I was going to try it with bottles, but I found out that bottles are   actually very hard to break, so I substituted them old type light bulbs which proved far more fragile

This is one of my 1st goes.

As you can see, it worked but the flash fired too early, so although the bulb is breaking it is not quite enough to be easily visible.

However this one was far more successful.

Still I think I can do better. For example the bulb holder has mover as the hammer hit, and it is just a few moments too late.  However I have already learnt some important lessons.

1. I thought I would need to do this in total darkness, which made me nervous of swing a hammer on a pendulum in pitch black with me and camera equipment around. However it turns out that if I set a low ISO, dim lighting is adequate.
2. Triggering is harder that I thought. The mechanism at present sit fires multiple times, which means I have to manually close the shutter, before the 2nd flash. Also adjustment is not as easier than I thought, so i will probably need to redesign the  trigger.
3. Glass gets everywhere, so put sheeting under the work bench and have a way of removing the light bulbs from there holder such as pliers.
4. Get a bigger hammer!. Actually securely attaching the hammer to the pendulum is one of the challenges I need to master. At present I user tie wraps, but they tend to come loose.
5. I will need a lot of bulbs.

Still it is promising. I am tempted to make a electric flash delay that would give be more control on when the flash goes off, but we will see. What I do know is that I will need a lot more light bulbs...

Please be patient, normal service will be resumed ...

I know I haven't posted much on this blog recently, and you would be quite within your rights to think that

a) either I wasn't doing a lot recently
b) This blog had fallen the fate of many blogs and is now inactive.

Neither is the case.

I have probably taken more photographs recently than for a long time. Also I have a number of projects which I hope to document/describe at some point.

However the problem is time. The more photos I take, the less time I have to process them. This means in turn that I have less time to work on projects. All these mean that blog writing has taken a back seat.

Hopefully more time will be available soon, but in the meantime here are a few images that I have managed to get somewhere near to completion recently.

All of these are works in progress, so are rough, but nevertheless show promise

High key image taking in Nottingham

This was taken in Nottingham during a club photo shoot. to be honest I wasn't greatly happy with the results and I wonder whether I am cut out for going around in groups, but this was one of the better ones. I quite like B&W high key images like these, and this is the closest I have got to getting one to the standard i want.

Playing with glass

The next MPS photography is glass, so I have been playing around with some ideas. This was taken at home against a translucent background, and then heavily processed. As such it is not perfect and needs a lot more work, but shows promise.

Houses

Taken again in Nottingham from the Castle walls. I must admit I am getting a bit of an urban theme going, and I think this comes out well in B&W. It is a nice candid shot of a typical British housing state and as such I think it tells a good story.

Kings Mill over the river

Taken from the river Trent from the Aston-on-Trent side. I took a lot of photos that day, but a lot were ruined (or at least compromised) by a smear on my polarizing lens. But the bright buildings contrasting against  the dark greens works well here

Poppies

I love poppies, but locating a field of them seems harder and harder these days. So when I saw this one nearby I had to go and take it(poppies have a very short flowering time, so you cannot hang around.) Of the photo's the contrast against the local power station seems to work well.

Again playing with Poppies

Again poppies but with a relative long exposure, zooming out. I think it works well and provides a different take on flowers

Tree at sunset

This is an image I am still thinking about. Leaving the large black space at the bottom is probably a competition fail, but.....I like it. I think maybe the composition is not quite there yet, but close


Finally....

On top if that we had a trip organised by the Melbourne photographic society to Nottingham. As a result of this I put this montage together, with some suitable music :). I do like putting montages together and in this case I think it went together quite well..

The award for newcomer of the year goes to....

Melbourne photographic NOTY trophy in all its glory

While I am sure most of us do photography for the pleasure of it, to get recognition once in a while is also appreciated.

So I am very please to announce that I am now Melbourne Photographic society's new photographer of the year (or NOTY as it is termed). Since this is probably my first award since I got 3rd place for Karate when I was about 20, it is needless to say I am very pleased and honoured. (I won my previous trophy with the clever ruse of putting my face in front of my opponents fists , so getting them disqualified. Fortunately winning this one came a lot easier ),

This trophy is given to the photographer who has been with the society for less than 3 years and is based on the 10 best scores in society competitions. It also can only be awarded once.

I must admit that my entry to competition was more to help improve my photos, than gain any reward and certainly my early results meant that any idea of winning anything could not be further from my mind.

However now I have received the award, I must admit I cannot help being a little pleased with myself, if for no other reason as it stands as a marker for how much my photography has improved over the last year.

Certainly in early competitions I wondered why I was entering, since I often took the results and criticism personally. At one point I decided I would not enter again, but I did and it resulted in improving my photo's.

It also gives me renewed confidence for next season.

I cannot win this trophy again, but there is the photographer of the year trophy (or POTY). This however will require another leap in the quality of my photos. This year I was about 5th in the overall scores, and to improve on that, a quantum leap in improved quality will be required. I am under no illusions that this will be challenging. Nor will it happen overnight, so I will have to be patient and take the good with the bad.

But still, if nothing else I can approach my hobby with renewed confidence and vigor and if nothing happens, I will still always be the winner of the NOTY

a year remembered

I haven't been able to do many photography related activities recently, including writing this blog. As result I have a backlog of images to sift through with the somewhat vain hope that I can unearth some gems from the rough. Plus I have a number of new projects just waiting for the point I can spend some quality time on them (also note to self, also see more of family).

A consequence of this. is that I have only recently noticed that it has been one year since I started this blog.

Now this is a big thing for me, since my track record on these sort of things is not stellar. I remember getting a diary when I was 12 at Christmas (life was simpler then), and deciding I was going to keep a day to day log of my activities. I think I got to about January the 2nd, before I gave up. The entries up to that point had not been literary masterpieces with passages such as "had dinner" or "went to bed".

I now wish that I had the discipline and ability to record my life in more detail (although when you are 12, writing a page of prose is not something you could ever imagine you would do as a  pleasurable activity).

However I took two lessons from this failure

First blogs, like diaries, take considerable time and effort. Secondly the biggest challenge is finding something that you find interesting and you consider worth writing about. With blogs, there is the additional complication that it has to be something you others might also find interesting.

Over the years I have started a number of blogs, with limited success, but this one has so far proved the most fertile and long lasting.

When I started this blog, it's purpose was for me to record my progress in photography. It was a personal journey, but one I was happy to share if it helped anyone else along the way. Since that point there has been 69 posts and almost 3000 views. Now some of these are probably just accidental, but I do like to think on my darker days that someone may of get some joy out of it, even if it was just to pass away 5 minutes on a dull day. My primary intention of course was to help me remember my journey. Helping anyone else on the way is just a bonus.

As with all anniversaries, this calls for a bit of self-reflection. So how has the year gone photographically speaking?

Well, this is probably the 1st year that I have taken my photography seriously.  A lot of my journey has been traveled and measured against my local photographic society who have provided many of the challenges, plus many of the incentives. If anything the social side of joining a club, being together with people of the same interests has been as important as the photography itself.

The big question for me however, is has my photography improved over the last year?

I think the answer has to be yes to that. At the start, I possible had a slightly over-inflated[slightly? - Ed] opinion of my abilities as a photographer. As I entered competitions, I had a rude awakening and had to re-evaluate my talent. However in recent months I have had some good results, showing that if at least I have not completed my journey, at least I am a part way down the road.

However I have a feeling that this is a sort of 90-10  situation, where 90% of the work takes 10% of the effort and the final 10% takes 90% of the work. The easy fruit has perhaps been picked. Moving to the next level will require as much effort again, if not more.

Also the progression has been incremental. I sort imagined that I would wake up and have a road to Damascus type moment, when all would come clear. Instead it has been a year of slow learning and trying to reinforce any lessons learned.

So what about the year ahead. Well, like I said earlier, I have two projects which are in their early stages, and as I do them, hopefully I will document them on this blog.

Like any good reviews, I have also set myself some improvement goals as a  photographer, namely

• Stop taking to take "nice" photos' and instead to take ones that have a improved narrative.
• Improve my black and white photo's. B&W images are the purest form of photography, since you cannot hide the flaws in composition etc by saying "look at the bright colours". 
• Take fewer insurance photos. Taking a lot of images in itself is not a problem, but most are there just because I lack the confidence to know that I have got the image I want. I take many images of the same thing with different aperture, focal lengths and exposure settings. This is because I don't have the skill and confidence to execute the image I want. I want to learn how to better imagine, plan and finally take that photo, so I get the result without 100 other images of the same thing.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has helped me this year, with advice, a shoulder to cry on and tea and encouragement. It's been greatly appreciated. Also thanks to all of you who has visited the blog over the last year. The fact I am not shouting into the wind has given me loads of incentives to carry on.

Get on your bike.

I got a new piece of photography kit recently

Well, I not exactly new since it has been sitting around in my shed for years. It's just recently I have come to appreciate how useful it is for photography.

Here it is...

No it's not some sort of re-configurable tripod, it's a bike. In fact quite an old bike, one I have used on and off(mainly off) for about 20 years.

So what has this got to do with photography?

Well, as I set out in my personal philosophy, I am a great believer that you don't have to travel the world to take great photos.

There are considerable advantages in taking photos in your local area. I find that as you get more into photography you start seeing potential photographs everywhere you go. However often you have to wait for the right light or just for the time to take it. Travel to an exotic destination and you have much less time to find the right location and wait for the right light.. Go, say to Venice, and the whole week maybe consist of continual drizzle. Stay at home and you will get another chance, 365 days a year.

However one of the big issues of local photography is transport.

Yes you can walk, but that limits you to about 5 miles from your home. However if you are time constrained, this can take 2 -3 hours, meaning you are more likely to do a mile or so on a good day.The plus however, is that by walking you get to a better appreciation of your local  environment..

Alternatively you can drive, which get's you further, but there are some problems with that.

Firstly, how many times have you been driving when you see a great scene in a perfect light?

It happens to me all the time(of course normally when I'm not carrying my camera.). However since you are in a car, you can't just stop and hop out. You need to pull over, find a safe parking spot, lock the car, and then often trek back to where you saw the shot. By then the light may of already been lost. (I'm thinking of creating some bumper stickers that say "Warning: Photographer on-board, may stop suddenly for sunsets")

The second problem is you will not believe how much you you miss when your driving. If you drive sensibly(as you should), then your eyes should be on the road, not scanning the horizon for that perfect sunset. Even at 30 m.p.h it is amazing how fast the landscape whizzes by before you have chance to take it in. Just think about today's journey to work.  How much can you remember of it?

The bike is the perfect compromise for this. On a bike you can easily do 12-15 miles in an hour. At the same time you are not cocooned in a air-conditioned glass shell, so you are more attuned to your environment. Stopping is as easy as pulling over, resting your bike against the wall and you are good to go

I discovered this recently when I was persuaded to do a charity bike ride, and thought it would be a good idea to do some training. The first time I went light, without my camera and cursed continually as I saw loads of great photos. At the same time I found myself finding new local spots I hadn't even realized existed. I found two lakes, which I had been driving past for years, a new route to the river and a place where the sunsets play over water. Even if I did not take any photo's at the time, they are know noted, someday to return.These are places I would never of found in a car.

A rapeseed at sunset

M&S distribution center

Of course there are downsides. Weather is a much bigger factor when you are on a bike. On a calm, summer day there is nothing nicer. Add some rain and wind, and the the desire to go out quickly diminishes.

Another issue is the equipment you can carry. Tripods are out, unless it's very light. Also since you are going under your own steam, weighing yourself down with lenses and camera bodies can be a problem.

One of the biggest problems, is the time to get the camera ready to use.

One thing I have noticed on a bike is that because it is fast and relatively quiet, you can easily catch the local birdlife unaware. However when you stop to take a picture, by the time you have got the camera out, the bird has caught on and flown off. Often I pass a local Buzzard sitting on a fence, but as soon as I stop, they go. Unfortunately you cannot really ride with a camera strapped round your neck.

But these are minor issues. The big plus is that you get to take great photo's of your local area. The bonus is you are getting fitter at the same time. A classic win-win.