Tag: Photographer Cork

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AI – Or Human Expertise

Photographers have a lot of fancy tools available to them these days but I usually end up doing things the hard way – straightforward clone tool in GIMP

The trick to removing something is to work out what to put in it’s place. Generally there’s something in the frame you can use as the basis for a replacement – a bit of wall or a plant or something that will cover whatever shouldn’t be there. Then it’s a matter of blending and making it look natural.

But the cage in this photo is an issue: we have some elements to copy and use but the rad valve is partially covered but unique in the image. So a bit of creativity was required to create something that looks right

The Disappearing Dog Basket

Now it’s possible that Photoshop’s AI tools could have done this automatically. I have seen it get pretty close to some of these edits – but crucially it missed some of the reflections and shadows so needs some finishing off the old school way.

I’m not an expert in these tools. I’m a photographer with pretty good expertise in editing with the basic tools. I’m like a carpenter with a sharp chisel.

In reality, this kind of thing doesn’t come up that often – it’s usually just simple fire exit signs – so there’s no need for me to look to major efficiencies here.

Of course we should have just moved the dog basket out of the way in the first place! But the reality of most photo shoots IRL is that there is always something that you miss or can’t fix on the day.

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Disappearing Me

It’s been a busy few weeks between First Holy Communions, Confirmations and a lot of Commercial work. I was recently back in APC Physiotherapy and Sports Clinic. A great team who really know their stuff and had everything ready for a great shoot. Hopefully you’ll be seeing new pics on their web and socials soon.

Mirrors are my nemesis. Usually it’s just the odd mirror over a fireplace and I need to make sure that neither am I in it nor does the bounce off my flash make it look weirdly bright.

But there are some places where there are mirrors everywhere. It’s a necessary part of the functionality of the space: people need to see themselves in action in order to correct their movement or posture. So physios, dance studios, karate clubs all have big mirrors.

Once you know about it, then you can work around it. And in over 200 delivered photos, there was one that I was in (and couldn’t be cropped out of):

Now it’s a minor edit but necessary enough.

Can you see me?

I did a talk for Cork Camera Club about edits like this and it occurs to me that I could probably do about 2 hours of tricks and tips on this kind of thing – there are many little tricks to getting it right. But maybe the AI tools are all doing it now?

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En Vacaciones

Although I take photos for a living, I still enjoy taking holiday pics. There is always the expectation of finding a new way to capture a much-photographed location: whether it’s just because you have a fresh, unique eye for something (?) or just because you get lucky with something unique occurring when you happen to be in location.

Valencia was a mix of both: the last weekend of the Fellas (a mad festival of sculpture, parades and very loud firecrackers); and these very modern buildings waiting (begging) to be photographed.

The Fellas is pretty hard to capture and like a lot of things you need to be in amongst everything and I was on holiday, I did capture some of the artwork. The trick here is to find a different view of things (and try to exclude a much of the clutter as possible).

I do have a grá for slightly abstract photos of modern buildings (especially with nice blue skies) – and especially in black and white. It goes way back to shooting the Grandstand in Epsom with black and white film and a polariod + red filter combo to make the sky go black.

And although I’m sure these buildings have been shot a million times, and maybe in better conditions and with more time (much fewer people for a start!), I did have fun.

Looking around at what other people were doing, there are a few teaching points:

  • I used a wider angle lens (on the Nikon 1). This exaggerated and emphasized some of angles and perspectives of the buildings.
  • I didn’t always try to eliminate the people – they are part of the landscape in a busy tourist attraction like this.
  • Look up, squat down
  • Look for abstract details: shapes, colours and structure. Isolate them (I also had a longer lens with me)
  • Think about contrast – and possible options for black and white images with high contrast.
  • MOST OF ALL: keep your eyes and mind open. I particularly like this letter-box photo viewing between the bridge shadows and rather than waiting for the people to clear out I like the people in there as silhouettes (especially the two taking photos). Also I think I as the only one to spot the reflection in the water in front of the building at the side. The other water features may be been intended as reflection pools but it was too breezy that day apart from around the side.

Anyway, here’s the edited highlights:

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Please leave a message

…or text

If you call me and I don’t pick up, please leave a message or text me.

I’m getting loads of cold calls from Overseas Call Centres which cloak their VPN call using random Irish mobile numbers. If you call these back, you get that random person’s number who hasn’t got a clue what’s going on because they never called you. I’ve had some of those calls (and made a few), it’s very confusing. So in general I’m now not calling back missed calls from unknown numbers unless there’s a message or a text.

I got four missed calls yesterday in a row. New business or time wasters?

These calls are really annoying and a massive waste of everyone’s time but don’t see what can be done, if you block the number you risk blocking a real person who might one day need to call you. And I’m sure they use a different number each time.

What boggles the mind most is that these companies say that they are ‘Marketing Experts’ but not only do they not understand GDPR but they are actually loosing me business if a new client calls but doesn’t leave a message.

So please call me if you think I can help. If I’m with a client I won’t pick up so please leave a message and I’ll call you back. Or just drop a text.

If you are a Company cold calling with a cloaked VPN. Please stop calling me.

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Back to the Beach

Harbour View, Co Cork

It can sometimes be a tough decision whether an image will work better in black and white or colour. Certainly many of the images in this session worked well in colour: a cold, clear winter’s day with the sun low on the horizon produced deep blue skies and high contrast on all that sand and wood texture.

But as the sun dipped lower, at this angle the colour drained from the image and inspired by some more Minimalist Photography, I dropped the colour out of the image and I kind of like it.

I use Lightroom to do the conversion, then work on the contrast and tonal separation.

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Gibbous

A student on my evening class asked about taking pictures of the moon. It’s a facinating subject and I think it’s become current with a prominent mobile phone Ad boasting the ability to take amazing moon photos.

I’ve never really dabbled but I know the theory, and my course notes have been updated with the following about taking photos of the moon:

  • It’s very far away so it is very small. We often think it’s larger than it looks as our brains have the ability to ‘focus’ on the details of small things. But to the camera it’s small. You are going to need a long lens (or a telescope)
  • It’s very bright, especially in the night sky so balancing the detail of the moon and anything lit with ambient light (or moonlight) on earth is tricky.
  • It’s moving faster than you think. So if you are going for long exposures to balance out the ambient darkness then you can’t go too long before the moon itself will blur as it moves.
  • Most of the stunning moon images you see on the internet are
    • Double Exposures
    • Dramatically enhanced in Photoshop
    • Just pure fake (two images mixed: one of the landscape and a completely different photo of the moon taken with a completely different lens – and maybe not even at the same time).

Having recently finally acquired a long telephoto lens (the Sigma 150-600 Sport) I decided that I should really try and see just how hard it is to take a nice photo of the moon. And this weekend I was in the garden and notice a nice Gibbous Moon by twilight. Now I didn’t have a tripod at home so this is hand-held, so I had to tweak up the ISO and turn on the OS to keep it steady but I think it’s quite nice.

However, this isn’t just the a long lens shot:

  • Taken at 600mm
  • With a x1.4 teleconverter
  • On a crop sensor camera (Nikon D500) – which is worth another x1.5
  • And finally cropped about 50%
  • Equivalent focal length, over 2000mm! Or around x40 magnification

Now this isn’t my specialist field. I do understand that the ‘large’ moons that we see on the horizon appear bigger partly because the light travels through more atmosphere (also making it less clear) but my understanding is that a lot of this is still pretty perceived so I stick by my belief that most of those dramatic moon-rise photos are faked!

So the question remains, how does a mobile phone, with it’s tiny sensor and lens package create stunning photos of the moon? It warrants more research but I read something that seems to suggest that the AI in the phone recognises that the moon is in the photo and ‘intelligently’ blends in stock or reference moon photos to your scene to make the moon look great. Don’t hold me to it, but it makes more sense than it being better than all the tech I used to create this simple image.

Now I’m off to find a landscape to paste this beauty in to…

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Old Fish

The New Year brings a time to generally sort things out. I’ve fixed up the web site a bit so it’s all WordPress now and works better on mobile devices (still more to do on the content). It’s also the time of year when I think I need to do more personal work. Previous projects include Shooting Nana which in time has become something that I’m very happy I took the time to do.

So far this year I haven’t come up with anything significant for a personal project but the urge to take some more photos has had me outside with some unusual and unused combinations of cameras and lenses. Just to try out, maybe learn something, add a few strings to my bow.

I’ve always been a fan of the Fisheye lens. I have an old 16mm f3.5 manual lens from the early 70s and it’s served me well when the fad has taken me over the years.

So I put it on my usual work camera (the D850) and took it for a spin on Sunday. The results were … underwhelming. I loved this lens. I love the weird and simplistic point of view. But it looks kinda dull on the D850. I’m not sure if it’s picked up some fungus or the newer, higher resolution sensor is just showing it up for what it is or maybe the subject and lighting just didn’t suit it.

Railway Bridge Fisheye. The intention was to show the unusual construction of this bridge over the old railway: the way that the stones are laid radially with the arch and then slope into the arch underside

More testing required and it may be time to look for a more modern replacement – even though I don’t use it that much (and hardly at all professionally). There are a few new Fisheye being made for the mirrorless cameras that look interesting.

So I went back today with the rectilinear wide-angle. These are more complex (and expensive) wideangle lenses which try to correct for the natural distortion that a simple lens like the fisheye creates.

Again the aim here is to try and bring out the unusual structure of the bridge by using the extreme wide angle to exaggerate the geometry.

Railway Bridge at 14mm, fully corrected. The wide angle gets you in to the arch and shows up the shape while the rectilinear lens hold the horizontal lines as straight as possible. The black and white conversion brings your attention to the geometry of the stone work.

Hopefully it’s easy to see the different characteristics of these two lenses. Although the are very similar focal lengths, their rendering is quite different. The Nikon 14-24f2.8 has done a far better job of rendering the details and contrast of the image (in fact this was taken on the Z6 as an experiment and to take advantage of the maximum dynamic range).

I still like the Fisheye. I might put it back on the D700 and do some more testing before replacing my 16mm f3.5 AI-converted lens (which is nearly as old as I am!)

Freshwater Steps. The glory days of the 16f3.5 fisheye: paired with the Nikon F4e
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Happy New Year

After an nice quiet Christmas Break, it’s nice to be taking photos again. I had a very lovely, short portrait session yesterday in the Hayfield Manor (great location as always and even nicer – or me anyway – that it too is quiet at the moment). And today, with the sun out, I just wandered out of the office with one of my less used cameras and walked the Marina.

I have realised that it’s easy to disappear into the Internet when you are stuck at home: too many gear sites; too many photos of exotic locations; other people’s ‘interesting’ lives.

It’s easy to forget that I actually just like taking photos, and the camera is just a tool that enables that (and one camera or lens might do that better than another).

And most of all, we are blessed to live in Cork. If you care to look, there is something interesting to photograph all over the place!

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Upgrade Ingredient List

So here’s what it took to upgrade my working camera system (in chronological order):

  • Computer: A new camera will produce larger files.  To move all that extra data around effectively I needed more processing power and more memory.  Otherwise there’s going to be a lot of waiting around.  Now this was actually forced on me with my old one dying but in fact doing this first makes a lot of sense so you’re ready for the files when the new camera comes.
  • Lightroom Upgrade.  I was getting by with an older version with one-off purchase.  I need an upgrade for a newer camera RAW files.
  • New Main Body – obviously. I chose a Nikon D850.  Second hand from a large dealer in the UK.  Reasonably low shutter actuations and 12 month warranty.
  • XQD and SD cards.  New camera takes different cards.  And bigger, faster cards to manage those larger files.
  • XQD card reader.  I prefer to download cards from a reader rather than connecting the camera to the PC every time.
  • Spare cards.  So having got one to start off with, I shopped around for spare cards.  With the costs of the XQD cards I’m only carrying limited spares.  With the D700 I had a bank of CFs available.
  • Screen protector for the LCD.  I use the thin ground glass, stick-on ones.
  • Spare Battery.  I bought a third party spare which came with a USB charger which allows me to charge at home and at work as a bonus.
  • L-Bracket for the tripod.  The ability to mount the camera vertically on the Tripod is really useful.  L-Brackets are fitted to each body so you need a new one for a new body.
  • Upgrade my 50mm. So this was always my weakest lens (although not a bad one) and the higher resolution and faster focusing of the new camera has shown it up to the point where I can justify the upgrade.  The others look good for now but the 50 needed to be changed.  Again, take advantage of a good second hand market across the EU.  Lots of people buy these lenses and end up not using them much (unless they take portraits professionally).
  • Battery / Vertical Grip.  I used the vertical grip the whole time on the D700 but I am enjoying the reduction in weight not using it on the D850.  I rarely needed the extra battery.  So I wasn’t going to bother.  But for jobs when I’m shooting a lot of head shots the vertical grip is useful.  Then I got a deal on a third party grip in the US so I got it just for those jobs where it helps, rather than to be permanently attached.
  • File Backup / Archive.  Those larger files are now eating disc space as well.  I Archive all the original RAW files as well as maintaining an archive of the finished client files.  I made some changes to the way that works to make it more cost effective per GB and bought more disc space.
  • Backup / Second body upgrade.  Initially I just used the D700 but it’s very different to the D850 (and uses different cards and batteries).  As I get more used to the new camera, the D700 is a less effectively back-up / second camera.  Ideally you’d buy an identical body as backup but that’s a lot of cash.  In the end I bought a D500 second hand.  Same cards, same charger, very similar functional layout, same focusing system.  Crop sensor!
  • More cards.  My two bodies now use the same cards and batteries so I need another spare.
  • Another screen protector for the D500.

I think that’s it.  For now!

Do I need a couple of DX lenses (including a standard zoom) for the D500?  Maybe but I’m not yet convinced.  I have an old 17-70 DX which will do and the 17-35f2.8 sits quite well on it too – for the uses I have for it.

Otherwise my existing lenses cover me and are all good.  Most have a replacement which is ‘better’ but also is going to cost me considerably to upgrade – even if I sell the old one – and realistically the benefits are pretty marginal.  The most obvious is my 85f1.4D which is a little battered and not optimised for modern high res digital but it’s not a main lens (I use the 105f2.8 a lot).

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A New Home

From today, 11th September 2017, Rob Lamb Photography has moved to

Unit G6
Enterprise House
Marina Commercial Park
Centre Park Road
Cork

We’re waiting to get the old landline number transferred so for now the best way to contact me is on the mobile

087 683 8511   or

rob@roblambphoto.com    as usual.

Still a bit to do on the new place to find homes for everything and hang a few pictures but I’ll be taking appointments and viewings here as before.