Drive Through…

Up until now I’ve mainly been using Adobe Lightroom to process my RAW photos for white balance, exposure and tonal correction along with removing dust spots and sharpening. Whilst I’ve got pretty used to Lightroom I’ve often found myself wanting to do a bit more. I have a copy of Photoshop Elements 4 on my Mac and sometimes take photos out to that to do a little more with levels and layers. However I’ve never really invested much effort into that side of things. Whilst I always try to get things right in-camera I’ve become increasingly interested in improving my post-processing skills.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is pretty much the de-facto standard for photo editing, but the problem is it costs a lot. I’ve never been one for the illegal use of software, mainly because I work in the industry, so up to this point have simply got by with what I have, plus a few great low-cost tools like FDRTools, Calico and NoiseNinja.

So, I recently stumped up and bought Photoshop CS3. I also got a couple of books: Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Photographers by Martin Evening, and Scott Kelby’s 7-point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Whilst Evening’s book is a typically comprehensive overview of the features and function relevant to photographers, the Kelby book is structured in a different way. It concentrates on a core set of functions and techniques, including processing in Camera Raw (or Lightroom), curves, shadow/highlight adjustments, painting with light, channel adjustments, layer blending and layer masks and sharpening. It applied these techniques to 21 photos each in it’s own chapter. It is basically teaching by rote. You can download the RAW files he uses and follow along with each chapter taking you through the same set of actions (more or less) until they become ingrained. Along the way he introduces other techniques but never digresses too far from the seven key concepts.

I’ve found this very useful in terms of helping me learn what to apply in what circumstances. There’s such a wide array of tools in Photoshop that there are effectively many ways to achieve the same end result. Already I look back at how I used to do things in Elements and know it wasn’t the right way. The real value I’m getting from the 7-point system is to give me a solid base skill set that I know when and how to deploy for the result I want to achieve. Without this and if I just had the Evening book (or any similar one, including other Kelby efforts) then the information overload it gives you can be a problem and it is hard to relate that to what you would need to do to take one particular photo from start to finish.

Of course, the danger is that the 7-point system becomes too formulaic and the inevitable look that it produces becomes too familiar. I think the challenge here is to use it as a basis but then extend that knowledge with your own style and ideas, and other techniques that you pick up along the way.

To end, CS3 has also been great fun to use with one of my Christmas presents: a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet. I can’t wait to revisit some of my back-catalogue of photos and work them through CS3!

With a free Friday in Florida after the end of Lotusphere, a few of us took the opportunity to head the 70 miles up to Daytona and catch the Friday practice and qualifying sessions for the Rolex 24, otherwise known as the 24 hours of Daytona.

For just $25 we gained access to the infield and garages and got up close to the prototype and GT cars taking part in the event. In addition to the practice and qualifying sessions we also got to watch a good hour or so of the Florida 200 race in which 95 cars ranging from Roush tuned V8 Mustangs to Mini Cooper S’s raced in a fairly hectic encounter.

This was my first go at motorsport photography and the dark-art of panning. For the non-photographers out there, panning involves tracking the car with the camera whilst using a deliberately slow shutter speed. If done properly this leaves the car in focus and the background nicely blurred, really giving the car a punch that makes it stand out. Whilst it is fairly easy (at least in the bright Florida sunshine) to use high shutter speeds to freeze the action and get sharp shots, a good panning shot will really stand out. For example, compare the shot of the Ferrari F430 at the top of the post with this one of a Roush Mustang from the Florida 200 race:

Unfortunately, panning is hard. Especially when shotting hand-held. With my 55-200 Tamron lens I only got about half a dozen worth panning shots out of probably over 100 attempts. The good news is that with motor racing you are typically not short of opportunities to get the shot you want given the cars tend to come round quite often!

The access to the garage areas was great, and I have a load of shots ready to be processed from that. One particular highlight for me was seeing a couple of British drivers - one well known and one not so (at least in the UK) As you can see below, the veteran Derek Bell was driving in the 24 hour race in a Pontiac Riley prototype. His car finished in 63rd place overall and 24th in the prototype class.

However the highlight for me was getting to meet Dan Wheldon. He was a few years below me at school and went on to win the Indy 500 and Indycar series in his rookie year, as well as being a previous Rolex 24 winner. I managed to blag my way into his trailer based on this tenuous link and had a quick chat with him and fiancée.

Unfortunately he didn’t have the best weekend. His car was crashed by a team-mate on Thursday and they finished 42nd overall, 18th in class in the Chip Ganassi Target Lexus Riley.

Click for large version.

I first read about Photophlow on Ajaxian a few days ago. Of course I signed up immediately for their limited beta and this morning an invite was waiting in my inbox.

Photophlow is an extremely well designed web application for community viewing of photos from flickr. The best way of describing it would be to imagine a photo slideshow application mashed up with an IRC chatroom. It hosts a variety of virtual rooms (you can create your own) in which people can gather. There are rooms available for flickr groups and the application will highlight room for groups you are already a member of. Anybody in a room can perform a flickr search and then select a photo to be viewed. Meantime all people in the room can talk and discuss in real-time as well as having direct access to usual flickr features such as adding contacts, favourites and comments.

From within a room you can display a list of photos from either a choice of options (the photostream for the related group, your photos, your contacts, explore etc.) or you can search. If you click on a photo from the resultant list it is shown larger on the right hand side of the window. People then naturally start commenting on it, critiquing and generally interacting with each other. It is fascinating to see how the conversation develops. This morning I entered the Stobist.com room and began looking at a couple of photos. A few more people came in and I struck up a conversation with a guy from Huddersfield. Somebody else started looking through his photos and in the meantime a conversation was taking place about the best wireless remotes for off-camera flash. The Huddersfield guy then took us off to view a photo from a friend which recently made the top spot on explore.

The beauty is the way that other people can control what you view. It has the potential to be disruptive if people are constantly changing photo, and I guess as more people come into the system this will be something to keep an eye on. It would be tempting for a lot of people to go into a room and immediately start displaying their photos for instance. Thankfully there are a couple of different modes. In any room you can choose to go into manual mode which means others cannot override the photo you are currently viewing. You can also go private which means others cannot see the photo you are looking at, but you are still in the room and can still participate in conversations.

Things get even more impressive when you try the built-in support for twitter, allowing you to create tweets when you enter a room of ad-hoc from directly within the photophlow interface. They also have tumblr support, and the ability for the system to notify you by email or IM when certain events happen, like somebody entering your personal room.

The screenshot above shows a rather serendipitous moment when one of the other people in the room did a search for “shielding” and one of the photos that came up was by Roo.

I have three invites to give away, so please leave a comment (make sure you enter your email address on the form) if you want one.

Historically I’ve been pretty poor at keeping backups of my data. Recently however I’ve become aware of the need to be more vigilant in this area. Touch wood I have never suffered a disk failure on any computer I’ve owned, so I reckon I’m overdue one. The fact that my iMac disk now contains the results of months spent ripping my CD collection as well as a growing library of photographs it is time to take it seriously.

For the past few months I’ve been using the excellent SuperDuper! to perform backups of the iMac. However although the software is good I didn’t set up a scheduled backup so it relied on me to remember to run it regularly. Secondly the backup was performed to a Lacie 500GB Big Disk Extreme. Whilst this is an excellent external disk and runs very fast over Firewire 800, it is actually two 250GB disks arranged in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 means that the two disks combine together and data is striped over them. This makes read and write access faster than a single disk, but has a big potential problem when the disk is used for backup, namely that if one disk fails then you lose all your data. Effectively you are doubling your risk of a hardware failure. Not ideal.

With the arrival of OS X 10.5 Leopard and the built in Time Machine backup I’ve decided to sort out my backup solution in a proper fashion. Therefore I’ve just ordered one of these beauties:

The Lacie 2big Triple is a 1TB triple interface (USB2, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800) drive. Like the extreme it actually contains two 500GB drives that make up the total capacity. The difference however is that this one supports RAID 1 as well. RAID 1 puts the disks in mirror mode, meaning that they both contain a copy of the same data. Thus, if one disk fails the other one is still there to serve your data. What’s more the drives are hot-swappable so you can replace the failed one and it will spin the new one up and copy everything onto it to bring it in line. In fact the disks can work in four modes: the aforementioned RAID 0 and RAID 1, plus JBOD which allows both disks to act as separate volumes, and Big which just creates a single volume without RAID support.

A couple of years ago consumer level (read affordable) hot-swappable RAID arrays were unheard of, so I’m really looking forward to throwing Time Machine at this beast. Unfortunately for the time being I’ll probably have to leave my Adobe Lightroom catalog out of the backup until the Leopard compatible fixes are available later this month. In the meantime I’ll back all my photos up to the old Lacie.

Of course, any comprehensive backup strategy will include offsite storage, afterall if the flat burns down or we get broken into then I could lose the iMac and the backed up data. I’m not yet sure what the best way to go with offsite is. Either buy a cheaper 500GB external disk and run a SuperDuper backup onto it every now and then and take it into the office to store, or try online storage with something like Amazon S3 or even .Mac. The latter is probably more reliable as I can script it to happen without needing to remember to bring a disk home every so often. I need to work out if it is cost effective for the 300GB or so of data which I need to have backed up.

We got the first batch of our wedding photos delivered this week, as a set of 7×5″ prints. I’m chuffed with how they have turned out and am looking forward to receiving the full set in soft copy so I can put them up on the web. I’ll link to them over at our wedding blog and here. A shout out must go to James and Shawna at AAA Photos for a sterling job.

I’ve also been busy with my camera and new lens at the wedding of our friends Steve and Louise in the UK last week. I took it along purely in an unofficial capacity as the ideal opportunity to test out the 17-55 in a variety of indoor and outdoor locations. It was also the first serious work out for my 430EX Speedlight which proved invaluable for fill both indoors and out. I’ve yet to fully master it, but am very happy with the results. I won’t be posting them to flickr, but have put up a slideshow of them. Given that they had a pro doing their main shots I stayed in the background for the most part trying hard not to interfere (there’s nothing worse than missing a shot because everybody happened to be looking at the wrong, i.e. my, camera I’d imagine!) so I’m most happy with some of the more reportage style of shots, especially these two:

(Sorry if you are viewing this on the web and the images sneak across the right column of the page, but I don’t have the software at work to do a decent job of resizing them)

I especially like the way that the backlighting on the second one highlights the hair, and the catchlights in the eyes from the Speedlight.

The formal shots took a good 90 minutes or so but once the reception meal started the pro ‘tog finished up leaving me to capture some shots inside, of which my favourite is this one capturing Louise’s reaction to her father’s speech:

I won’t be giving up the day job anytime soon though - I can’t imagine there are many more stressful jobs than official wedding photography. It is easy to capture decent shots when I can both relax in the knowledge that nobody is counting on me and also when I can pick and choose the ones I want to show (notice the complete lack of group shots!)

As mentioned before I’ve been hankering after a new lens, specifically the Canon 17-55 f2.8 IS USM. Well after a fair amount of procrastination, I have it. It all happened rather by chance. Lana and I were in the city centre shopping and we wandered into a camera shop just for a browse. I asked if they had the lens in (just to have a look at and see the price) and the assistant said yes, but that they had also just taken a second hand one in which was €300 less than the new one’s price. On inspection of it and after taking some test shots on a 400D body I bought it. There are a couple of slight cosmetic marks on the outside of the body, but nothing to worry about. One often cited gripe about this lens is the fact that it easily lets in dust behind the front element. There are a few specks there, but again I’m not concerned about this. The shop honour a 1 year warranty on second hand lenses, and it can always be sent back to Canon for cleaning if it becomes too much of an issue (I can’t see that it has any effect on the images I’ve taken so far)

The lens is widely regarded to be L grade glass and the fact it isn’t designated so is probably down to the lack of dust and weatherproofing, and more likely that Canon don’t want to designate any EF-S mount lenses as L grade. The test shots I’ve taken so far indicate that the resolution of the lens is significantly better than the EF-S 18-55 kit lens it is replacing as my main walkabout lens. The addition of f2.8 throughout the zoom range and image stabilization mean it should also prove very useful in low light situations, something I’ve been quite frustrated with recently. I’m attending a friend’s wedding this coming week so am looking forward to giving it a good work out.

Finally, as you can see from the photo above, I also bought the EW-83J lens hood as well (again, the lens is not L-designated glass so it doesn’t come with one as standard) Normally Canon lens hoods are widely regarded as a rip-off. The price for this one on Warehouse Express is a whopping £43.99. For some reason it only cost me €25 (£17.44) which certainly cannot be sniffed at! I suspect that the assistant discounted it as I didn’t barter with him over the price of the lens, something I only thought about after the fact.

As mentioned in my previous entry, I’ve been playing the Electronic Arts Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 game on my XBox 360 since the weekend. One feature of the game is “Game Face” which allows you to model your career golf character on your own face. Now face modelling in video games isn’t new, for instance 2K Games’ Oblivion had an extensive modelling editor which took the approach of using sliders to alter every part of a model head to match your own. The FaceGen engine used behind this has a demo downloadable app with which you can plug in a photo (or for best results a couple of photos) and it would create the 3D model for you. It was then just a simple case of copying the slider settings manually into Oblivion to create a pretty realistic likeness to yourself.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 takes this much further though. The Game Face engine is part of the game code, and allows you to use one or two photos to create the 3D model directly. Naturally, I spent a good amount of time playing around with this before I even swung a club in anger in the game itself!

My first attempt was with my XBox 360 Vision Camera, a 640 x 480 web cam that plugs directly into the console. I took a head-on and side profile shot of myself, taking care to make sure that the lighting on my face was even (the 32″ reflector from my camera gear came in handy here!) The game then processes the photos to create the 3D model. It takes about ten minutes if you use a single photo, or up to about 20 minutes if you use two, the latter giving a more accurate render. EA keep you up to date on progress with an amusing set of status updates. So, here’s the result of the Vision cam render…

Overall, very good, and certainly better than you could hope to achieve using a traditional slider approach. It isn’t perfect though, so I broke out my Canon 400d and took some proper photos of myself:

(It was a bad hair day, and the morbid expression was suggested as being best for the rendering!)

In order to get the game to use these photos, you have to upload them to the EA website. Now this proved to be one of the most frustrating experiences on the web I’ve ever had. Firstly I had to register. Now I was already registered for the EA web site, and it knew about my XBox Live gamertag, but apparantly this wasn’t enough. Getting the correct registration involved constant back and forth between three different EA sites, and lots of patience and experimentation. Finally, though I got to the page where I could upload my photos… except it wouldn’t let me. Apparantly their servers were very busy and I should try later. Checking various forums it appears that they’ve pretty much been like this since the game was released three weeks or so ago. Finally a day later I managed to get them uploaded whilst the US were asleep. Once I got started it was pretty painless. The web app does a good job of helping you optimize the photos ready for the rending by zooming them to fit a profile overlay.

From that point it is back to the XBox to go through the Game Face process again, this time telling it to download the images from the EA server. This was painless, and the render process started. 20 minutes or so later, and I have one of those WTF moments when this appears on my HD TV:

Now that is pretty damn near photorealistic. The Nokia N80 camera phone photo from my TV screen doesn’t do it justice. Let’s put it this way, I got Lana to look at it and she freaked out when a bald, blinking me stared back at her from the TV!

The final stage was to “dress” myself with a hairstyle, beard, clothes, etc. etc. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, which in this case is how the avatar appears in-game. Here’s are some more (poor) camera phone shots:

All in all, Game Face is pretty awesome and it is quite a surreal experience to see yourself on the screen. I can only see more games taking this sort of approach to give added realism. Imagine how this technology could enhance an adventure or FPS game. Of course, the real-time 3D graphics in a golf game are much simpler and less dynamic than a typical FPS, but it is probably only a matter of time and processing power.

I’ve been quiet on this blog for a past few weeks, for the simple reason that I’ve been busy getting married and going on honeymoon The wedding went off great, and Lana and I really enjoyed the day. We had a wedding blog up and running before the big day which we publiscised to the guests but which I guess people may want to look at now.

For the honeymoon we flew to Boston and spent ten days touring New England before fying back from New York. We drove over 1200 miles in all, taking in six states. I spent a lot of time behind the lens, shooting about 1000 frames. We took along the iBook and so I did some quick processing of some and stuck them up on flickr as we went along. I want to spend a lot more time going through them now we are back, so expect more Here’s a slideshow of them (which should update with new ones as I add them):

I originally wanted to buy a new lens whilst over there, and had my eye on either the EF-S 10-22 f3.5/4.5 or even better the EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS I tried the latter out in Calumet New York (B&H was closed as we were there on a Saturday) and it is a lovely lens, but in the end I decided to wait and think about it a bit more, despite the tempting exhange rate. I did buy a couple of little bits, including a diffuser for my 430EX Speedlight and a 32″ reflector.

Just noticed that my flickr account has gone through 20,000 views, just under 5 months since making 10,000. As with my lack of blogging, I’ve not been in a position to get the DSLR out much over the past month. What photos I have taken have been with my Nokia N80 and have appeared on Facebook. I’ve settled into a nice split between the two whereby the more creative photography goes up on Flickr where I seek peer recognition and comment. The more social/snappy stuff appears on Facebook where the majority of my social network are connected with me and where it is subject (i.e. people who can be tagged) rather than composition or other technical aspects that are interesting.

I went along to my first flickr meet today, with the folks from the Meet Dublin group, including a colleague of mine, Karim (a man who is living proof that talent rather than equipment makes a great photo) As mentioned, today marked the first anniversary of joining flickr, so it seemed as good a way as any to celebrate. It was also the first chance I’ve had to get out the camera since we’ve been here.

After meeting up outside the Gaiety Theatre, the unanimous choice was to head to Merrion Square, where the AIB Street Performance World Championships were taking place. The SPWC sees various street acts from around the globe basically doing their stuff over the weekend whilst the viewing public can vote for their favourite act. Thankfully the weather, whilst overcast, held up and there was no rain other than a few spits.

After a quick walk around the park I started to take in a few of the acts. My creative juices weren’t really running, and to be honest the acts were difficult to shoot, but I think I got a few decent ones. There was also a lot of opportunity for candid shots. It was hard not to just put the camera down and enjoy the shows, the highlight being Popeyed, an Australian acrobatic/hand balancing duo.

The best of the bunch of photos I took are up on flickr in this set (slideshow here)

I missed out on the pub meetup afterwards due to losing myself in the park, and not remembering the name of the pub. However, on my way back to the car, I did stop to take some shots of a group of skaters outside the Gaiety which I’ve yet to process.

All in all, a lovely day, and just one example of why I’m already loving living in Dublin.