Whitesand Bay, Sennen Cove

 landscape, stock images  No Responses »
Sep 012011
 

Whitesand Bay, Sennen Cove, Penzance, Cornwall

Conventional wisdom might say we picked the wrong week to go on holiday – one and half days of sunshine out of seven – but fortunately dragging the kids up hills in all weathers has made them pretty hardy and they seem to appreciate any time whatsoever that we can get to the beach. For me, bad weather is more interesting than blue skies, just so long as it’s not too wet to get the camera out.

My eldest makes a rare appearance here – I’d spotted the flag and him walking along the beach so I wandered ahead and waited for him to walk by.

Available for licensing on Getty Images

Trebarwith Strand, Cornwall

 b&w, landscape  No Responses »
Jun 032010
 

Trebarwith Strand, Cornwall

Taken on a recent family holiday to Cornwall.

This beach was a lucky find – we were just looking for sandy bits on the map because our eldest wanted to go to another beach before we returned home. This is a great location though – it has caves, great sand and a really dramatic rock structure at the entrance to the beach featuring enough rock pools to keep the kids entertained for hours (if the tide is out).

This shot was taken from one of the caves accessible at low tide on the south side of the beach.

Purchase print at RedBubble

Barrel Distortion

 tutorials  No Responses »
Jul 262009
 

Seaweed covered rocks, St Bees Beach

After taking this shot I was quite looking forward to seeing how it came out. I was using my Hoya Circular Polariser at the time and I’d rotated it to bring out the best of the colour both in the sky and on the rocks – the green of the seaweed was really emphasised by it and it was one of those rare moments when I was really glad I’d bought it.

Sadly, when I viewed the shot on the computer, this is what it looked like…

Seaweed covered rocks, St Bees Beach

Notice the sad face being pulled by the horizon – I’d forgotten that the Sigma 18-200 has really noticeable barrel distortion (where straight lines are bent away from the centre of the image) at the wide (18mm) end. That’s not to say that it’s a bad lens – for the price it’s a pretty good all rounder.

Fortunately it’s possibly to remedy this (with a bit of trial and error) with The GIMP.

Versions prior to 2.4

Open the file and select “Distorts” from the “Filters” menu. Select “Curve Bend” from the sub menu that appears. You should then see something similar to the following:-

The GIMP, Curve Bend Screen

To correct the barrel distortion we need to build a curve which will be used to modify the image. To do this I first placed a straight line roughly where the horizon was in my shot by clicking on the left and right sides of the grid. Then I placed a point (by clicking in the desired place on the grid) in the centre of this line which I then I slowly dragged downwards, changing the straight line into a slight curve. Once the results of the preview looked acceptable I pressed the “Ok” button and waited for The GIMP apply the changes (which took about 15 seconds).

Versions 2.4 and up

A new filter was added in version 2.4 – Lens Distortion. Open the file and select “Distorts” from the “Filters” menu. Select “Lens distortion” from the sub menu that appears. You should then see something similar to the following:-

The GIMP, Lens Distortion Screen

As the distortion on my original image was convex (bulging outwards) I needed to apply some concave distortion. To do this I tweaked the “Main” value and eventually settled on a value of -12.

From the manual…

Main – The amount of spherical correction to introduce. Positive values make the image convex while negative ones make it concave. The whole effect is similar to wrapping the image inside or outside a sphere.

More documentation on this filter can be found here – http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/docs.gimp.org/en/plug-in-lens-distortion.html

Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

 landscape  1 Response »
Apr 262009
 

Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

Purchase print at RedBubble | imagekind

In a number of previous posts I’ve mentioned just how much difference a few minutes can make to a scene. The above shot was taken on the first day of a recent holiday in Cornwall whilst we waited for our accommodation to become available.

I’ve become more interested in black and white than colour photography just recently and it seemed the perfect style to capture the old harbour. The sunlight was patchy at the time and I got the shot I was looking for, looking out to sea through the railings (see below), however just as I was preparing to move on the sun broke through the clouds and lit the scene perfectly. It was impossible to ignore the combination of colours in front of me so out came the red filter I’d been using and in went the ND grad to improve the sky.

Railings, Mevagissey Harbour

Harbour Wall, Mevagissey

 b&w, filters  No Responses »
Apr 192009
 

Harbour Wall, Mevagissey

It seems I’m currently “very into” black and white photography – although to be fair, it’s something that I’ve always liked when other people have done it but never really bothered with it myself.

With the advent of digital photography I think B&W has got a bit of a bad name for itself – tools which can greyscale an image mean that it’s an easy way to attempt to salvage a flawed colour image (not that I don’t convert my own colour images sometimes also). The shot above however was achieved using a Cokin P003 red filter, with the image then being desaturated and the contrast tweaked slightly – which took about 30 seconds at most – the ideal amount of processing time when you’ve got a lot of photos to work through :)

Why desaturate? Why not just shoot in black and white mode on the camera? Well, if I was shooting in jpeg mode it might be a good idea but as I’m shooting in raw mode, when I get the images into Lightroom they will be red again anyway so there seems little point. It doesn’t really help for reviewing the shots on the camera either as the black and white preview displayed on the camera seem quite different to what I see in Lightroom. Besides, I’ve got used to previewing the red images now – once you’ve learned to trust your manual exposures it’s not that much of a problem.

Using an external filter isn’t without its problems though – the main drawback with the red being that you lose 3 stops worth of light so you end up having to make sacrifices in either ISO, shutter speed or aperture (or a combination of the three). Shooting at ISO100, f/11, 1/250s isn’t going to be an option unless you are taking a picture on the surface of the sun so I usually end up at ISO200, f/8, 1/100s – not ideal, but as an exercise in learning to take control of your camera in its manual mode I can heartily recommend it.

Fortunately many DSLRs now have the ability to simulate the affect of certain colour filters built in to their Monochrome picture options – certainly the Canon range do. These can be used without any loss of light, but only have an effect if shooting in JPG – raw images remain unaffected by them.