My thoughts on digital imaging.

After watching an inspiring talk on the benefits of landscape & nature photography by Thomas Heaton, Tom Walsh & I headed to Beacon Fell just before sunset to attempt some astrophotography. Technology has made this type of photography much more efficient, with augmented reality apps allowing you to know exactly where the milky way and other star formations are within seconds. This technology also handed us the knowledge that the Milky Way isn't perfectly visible at this time of year and won't be until around February. This didn't deter us from practising our skills ready for when we have prime conditions. I only got one decent shot from the whole night but I could see a nice glimpse of the Milky Way (decent enough for a first attempt) on the back of my display. A lot of astro photo images are edited in some way so I decided to blog about the quick edit I did. The original images as uploaded into Lightroom. Firstly, due to the white balance being on wh

In the lesson on focus stacking we were given a set of images of a peg.  To make the peg look as sharp and crisp as possible when enlarged as part of a composite the peg is photographed at different focus points then stacked using an automatic feature within Photoshop. We then placed the peg into another image and created a our own drop shadow (see image below). I think I did a decent job of this other in hindsight I would probably make the opacity of the shadow slightly less and feather its edges some more. I had already considered using focus stacking in my project on scale but this lesson inspired me even more to do so. Also, I have a high powered macro lens that I haven't used properly in the couple of years that I've had it, so I decided now would be a good time to learn. / My first attempt consisted of approximately 13 images. As you can see from the highlighted area above Photoshop struggled to blend the images without big blurred areas. The problem with such a h

Over the summer break I was asked to do some restorations for a family friend, I made the mistake with this one of getting way too involved for the price that I had quoted. Once I had started I saw it as a challenge to see how much I could push myself with Photoshop and I’m glad that I did as the end result is something I’m really proud of. As a rule I usually work in a non-destructive way in Photoshop but for some reason had never done this for restorations. Previous attempts have always been no more than a few layers, with only minor scratches and blemishes. Before starting the task I watched a video on Youtube about restorations where the tutor broke the whole process down into sections that could easily be erased or adjusted later on because each section of the image was edited on separate layers. I decided to use this method myself as it seems very logistical. 1 - This is the image as it was scanned in, using a mediocre scanner from a photograph that was roughly 4