So, my friend Mike made the comment (in response to my compliment) that anyone could have taken the photo he took, and what distinguishes him is his way of processing. This issue of processing is always a sticky one when it comes to be debated. I’ve talked about it before, and while my views have not changed they have matured a bit and become a bit less sharp (or more sharp, depending on your point of view ).

Essentially, my view is that all that comes before you publish your photo (whether on the web or otherwise) is merely the fertilizer. This is not meant pejoratively, but merely as the raw material that leads to the (varying degrees of) beautiful end product. This does not, of course, apply without variation to all aspects of photography.Photojournalists have to present a less identifiably altered version of reality.

As always, if it is truth you want then maybe you should skip photography and try your hand at religion (or philosophy, if that’s what floats your boat).

I am not a subscriber to the belief which is proposed with varying degrees of fervor, that what comes out of the camera is somehow sacrosanct, representing a definitive proof of reality or your skill as a lensman etc. For me, as someone who only recently stopped feeling fraudulent calling myself an artist, the art that results is all that matters.

That is not to belittle those professional photographers and/or artists who can produce work, unaltered after close of shutter, with which they are happy. If the work you publish is unaltered from the camera, fabulous for you. But the point I’m making still applies.

Your process is your own, it works for you, it doesn’t concern me. If I like your photography, or ‘get’ your art, it is completely irrelevant to me how your art was accomplished.

All those who try to impose their views of what your art should be on you (including me) can go piss up a flagpole in the wind. Technical aspects of art always try to drown out the art when the majority of the practitioners are technocrats.

Anyway, the bottom line for me is with regard to my photography is aesthetic. My line for my own photography is drawn at changing the nature of the scene by adding or removing large elements. But if you do that too, or you want to go all Mapplethorpe Piss Christ on those pixels and call it your art (or truth, if you want), who are we to label right or wrong?

The photos that follow are some examples of how I process my photos. Call it photoshop if you want (although I use Lightroom for 99% of my work, venturing to photoshop, actually Perfect Layers, when I feel the need) but if you think I am wrong not to stick to the “before”, feel free to express your opinion . . . elsewhere .

Before

After

Before

After

A little while ago I started pursuing photography as a serious hobby. Like many things I take on I became quite serious about it and after a couple years began to drive myself with a strong degree of focus (hard to avoid these unintentional puns ).

Listening to the waves.

The problem with this degree of commitment, for me, is that often what was the hobby begins to feel like work. This is particularly the case for me today as I have begun to achieve a modest degree of exposure (here I go again ) and feel the pressure to produce.

A few mornings ago, on a quest to get my daily photo as early as possible, I stopped by the seawall to see if I could get yet another photo out of a gnarled tree trunk that washed up on the shore. The air was cool and moist, the sun not yet burning away the gentle seawall breeze. There had been rain sometime earlier and the air smelled clean and fresh.

Splash!

I had the simplest camera in my hand, a Panasonic GF3 with the 14mm prime lens. They don’t get simpler to point and shoot than this. As I was looking around for a shot I realized how idyllic the entire scene was and began to feel a deep sense of satisfaction at being there at that moment. Had it not been for my drive to get a daily photo I would likely have been in my office beginning the process of answering emails.

Thankfully, I enjoyed a few minutes taking in the scenery and unfortunately not spending enough time composing my photo. But as I stood there thinking about how much pressure I had been putting on myself recently to get a good photo, I remembered why I took on this hobby in the first place, and relaxed.

So here’s the photo I ended up with.

Wet Rocks.

Almost 2 years ago to the day (I’m writing this on 29/June/2012) I summarized my experiences up to the 6 month mark in my 2010 photo a day for a year project. Re-reading it today I note that I concluded that only good had come of it up to that point. I went on to successfully conclude that year’s effort. The photos (in reverse order) are here.

Why repeat the project another year? The simple answer is that it compels me to actually get out and take photos. With a fairly busy day job, a family and other interests and obligations photography can often take a back seat. And if you aren’t taking photos, you aren’t a photographer.

This time around I invited friends to join me. Some who did are now curious as to how I manage to avoid going mad with this fairly onerous commitment. I thought I’d run through a few things I look for to keep it going.

Early days of the year.

Firstly, you have to have some idea of what you want to achieve. Whether it is a personal goal or qualitative or quantitative goals, photographic specific skills you want to build; the bottom line is, if you are just aimlessly farting about, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to see it through.

In my case, aside from forcing me to get out and take photos, I would like to explore more deeply things I haven’t before. I also feel a bit freer of the constraints I place on myself in 2010. I don’t feel as compelled to please people, or to ensure that my subjects are varied. If I want to take 5 portraits in a row, I don’t feel guilty. If it is plants or flowers for a week, I go with it. But while I am casual about a few things, I do have a fairly good idea where I want to go.

A sharp look.

Secondly, don’t be afraid to just take a photo of a lens cap sitting on a table if that is what it takes to trigger the shutter that day. Many people I know of doing this type of project has a day job, meaning that you won’t always get to where you want to go to get that photo you really wanted. And even if your day job is photography it doesn’t mean you won’t have a bad day or 50. Strive to take a good photo, you owe it to yourself and you owe it to anyone you’ve asked to help, whether as a viewer or a critic or simply for support. But everyone will understand if you can’t produce an Ansel Adams every day.

An abstract in light.

Thirdly (corollary to number two), take a photo every day. Each and every single day! The first day that you don’t and you realize the world didn’t end, the floor will begin to slope below you. The second failure will come soon, and in no time at all the slope gets some oil poured on it and you’ve told yourself that you will get past your issues soon and renew your commitment and try again. Nope, you won’t. I know you as well as I know myself and I know that if I didn’t at least click that shutter once a day I would quit before too long.

High Key Wifey.

Fourthly, when it starts feeling like work, and not fun at all, it’s time to simplify. Forget all you’ve been doing for the days/weeks/months past and find a vase. See how many different photos you can take of that one vase. Take one with the morning light streaming through, take one close up with some coloured water, take one with a person out of focus sitting behind. Or, go to a nice spot and take the sunset/sunrise every day. Or take a photo with your feet in multicoloured socks in different positions every day.

Seize on whatever easiest cliche you can think of and see how many ways you can vary it. Essentially, look for the easiest photo you can take, the photo that won’t bring you any stress at all; and make it fun again. Personally, I take photos of my children. Easiest thing to do, very fulfilling no matter how badly done and makes me remember that photography isn’t the most important thing in my life. If you are looking for photo suggestions, the internet is your friend.

Walking on the seawall in the evening.

Fifthly, try to plan your photography time. I generally take up to 2 hours a day or so for photography. On average, an hour or less to get a photo and an hour or a bit more to do my processing, uploading and social sharing. If you aren’t a very organized person usually, it will be to your benefit to exercise a bit of discipline where the photo a day project is concerned. Set aside a time of day to take your photo and a time to take care of the peripheral issues.

I steal a bit of time every day to go take a photo. Whether it is a few minutes early in the morning (yesterday I got a photo I find very interesting and was my POTD and it took me only 5 minutes after spotting the potential scene as I was walking into my office in the morning),  a half hour walk on the street with a friend, a walk on the beach on my way to pick up my daughter (the beach is on the route) or the varied patterns and shapes of leaves or plants in my parents’ garden when picking up my son. I know the routine, so its not a problem anymore.

After the rain (and with a camera phone).

Sixthly, imagine the payoff. While it is helpful to be completely OCD like I am, if you are able to stick it out without it becoming more work than fun, you will almost inevitable find yourself with a few images that are superlative. Everyone won’t like everything you do, but you will be able to assess for yourself what is good based on what you set as your qualitative goals (if you set some).

I had an exhibition at our National Gallery, hosted at Castellani House, mainly out of my 2010 photo a day project. The majority of the photos were taken from the 20,000+ photos I took in 2010. Prior to 2010 I had what I considered to be gallery worthy images, but they were very few. Now I have a significantly expanded portfolio.

Flashed cherry tomatoes.

Finally, very little art exists in a vacuum. If it is art that you are seeking to produce that you will not be wasting your time to browse photography in pictures or writing, wherever you can find it in as much quantity as you have the time and energy to consume. I have heard people saying that they do not want to pollute their own consciousness with other people’s works or writing. I suppose everyone is entitled to be wrong if they want to be. The most successful artists are almost inevitably heavily exposed to all aspects of their art (and others). Thinking that you can produce art in isolation is almost always a perfect demonstration of hubris.

I read about photography voraciously. Not merely technical and instructional, but also photographers thoughts and perspectives. I love reading what they think about life, what motivates them, how they approach life. Technical instructions are good if you want to duplicate a result; developing your art is all about figuring out how you want to express yourself. The thoughts of other artists are what will guide you to fulfillment.

There are few things that motivate me more than another excellent blog post of photos from Steve McCurry. His masterful photography never fails to give me chills. But I also see how he uses photographic technique to express his view of the world. With McCurry, as with all of my other favourite photographers I learn how to express myself and learn what photography can mean. Apart from everything I’ve said above, nothing motivates me to continue my photo a day like seeing what can potentially result if I work hard enough at photography.

Walking below a tree in the early morning.

If you have taken on a photo a day project, or plan to, keep it going. Persistence is the key to getting better at it, and if improving yourself isn’t what you wanted to achieve with your photo a day project, then you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place :).

Riding below the mountains.

That was to set the tone for me for the rest of the trip.

I had realized for a few days that I had a sore throat, but I was taking some strong painkillers for something else, and that masked the effect of whatever new and debilitating disease currently working on striking me down.

I knew from my previous trip that driving the safari route through the Pakaraima mountain range in southern Guyana would be no leisurely exercise. So in desperation, mere hours before beginning the trek, I ventured to a hole in the wall pharmacy that I knew would sell me the industrial strength medication I would need. And I’m not talking aspirin (although that is what the pharmacist tried to pawn off on me until a paroxysm of coughing convinced her of my plight).

Suitably fortified, I continued to wallow in the ordinary stresses of an unprepared traveler. Mere hours to go and we hadn’t gotten the vehicle ready, we hadn’t gotten our clothing ready, we hadn’t gotten the children ready and we hadn’t gotten ourselves ready.

Nevertheless, we somehow made it to the meeting point for the vehicles at the GUYOIL Service Station on Regent Street. We were even early, the first vehicle to show up.

A trifling 3 hours later we commenced the journey . . . and then we came back all safe and sound with big smiles on our faces.

Er, okay, there was a little more to it that that. And I’m pretty sure we can discount the smiles.

So, here’s what happened.

Annai Road an hour from Oasis

Illness (me), bone deep weariness (us), continuous squirts of adrenaline (me), lots of great photographs (everyone else). Maybe a bit of an over-dramatization, but not much.

In 2009 I was deceived. I drove the safari and it was, by comparison with this year, a lark. Sure, there were moments; like when we nearly drove off a cliff, or like when we couldn’t find a clean toilet. But nothing to cause you to regret not updating the last will and testament to cut out that ungrateful twit of a nephew. In other words, nothing like this time.

This time, we had the mud hole which put the vehicle on the side, and the vertical cliff descent with the chasm cutting the road in two. We had the forest diversion with the fallen purple heart tree that had to be cut with an ax (the army boys brought a dinky 18 inch chainsaw which wasn’t up to the task, not to mention not having any fuel) then winched out of the way by me.

We had the bridge approach which was a complete quagmire, the 40 degree ascent of completely smooth, water slicked clay, and many others.

Stuck in the mud

One of my favourites though, was the section affectionately (the same sort of affection the french peasants reserved for Marie Antoinette) known as “Rock World”. Let me tell you about Rock World, it was absolute proof of the relative nature of time; 21 minutes of agonizing driving that felt like an hour of torture.

This definitely was the trip for the inveterate adventurer I wish I was. I should have stayed home and let what little inveterate adventurer I have in me make up some stories.

As usual, for me, it was the people who made the trip worthwhile. The 3 who were with me; my wife, Michael and Naseem, and the other participants.

We had Jason on the trip. Jason is quite possibly the busiest and best equipped person on the trip. Need a spade? Jason has one. Need a hammer? Jason has one. Need a laptop? Jason has one. Need a chainsaw? Jason doesn’t have one?? WTF?? Seriously though, he packed more stuff into less space than anyone else we know. And it was endlessly fascinating to see Jason off walking at 15MPH looking for a photo, while his wife Lily trailed desultorily behind, well shaded by her black umbrella.

Then we had Cecil. Cecil unflappably drove the entire way without once appearing to break a sweat. Did I mention that he is 68 years old? Well he was ably supported by passengers like Jai Singh, who was along with him for the scenery.

Jai is the man who took the chainsaw away from the army boys because they were being so inefficient, and proceeded to calmly demolish half the rainforest in a 10 minute span (its called “hyperbole” tree huggers, he only took down one sapling . . . and part of an errant buttress root . . . and maybe another sapling). But it was the brisk and ruthless efficiency with which he handled that chainsaw (especially by comparison to the rather hapless appearing previous wielder) that really impressed.

The army had been re-supplied by plane at Orinduik Waterfalls (the objective of the safari was to drive to Orinduik and back) and part of the re-supply was a proper, man sized chainsaw.

Or how about Jan and Matt, the drivers, accompanied by Sandra? They were driving a 30+ year old (if it was a day) Toyota Land Cruiser with a 4 wheel drive system that made functioning the exception rather than the rule.

Jan fixing the four wheel drive

Given some of the rocky, broken, slippery near vertical ascents that we had to make, I initially thought that those dudes might have some real brass ones. But after experiencing a few more sphincter clenching drives made slightly easier by my functioning 4 wheel drive (and hearing the solid metallic clanging coming from their Cruiser) I could only assume that they are possessed of solid cast iron ones (or maybe something else broke in the Cruiser). Pity the fool who assumes they are merely brass.

It was quite extraordinary to see Sandra hop out after what must have been a hair raising ride, calmly pick up her watercolours and begin painting a scene.

Sandra and the watercolours

Then we had poor Bibi. That is the only term that comes to mind when I think about her; “poor Bibi”. Clearly unprepared for what the safari had to offer, Bibi eventually arrived at the solution of pulling a blanket over her eyes anytime some interesting driving was about to be undertaken. I wonder if the blanket was wool. Mind you, Bibi is a woman (albeit one who would probably weigh 80 pounds soaking wet in winter clothes) with two big children.

Can’t forget the indomitable pair of Frank and Rodney. Frank is the Manager of Rainforest Tours and the man in charge/organizer of the trip. He is the one who struggles to keep you alive when you are trying so hard to drive off a cliff. In a crew of a dozen Generals, he is the Captain you want to pay attention to when you need to be directed out of the latest mud hole.

Frank and Rodney, fixing

Rodney is his assistant, with a greater degree of unflappability than a well starched flag. I can’t help but remember the moment Rodney kept directing me up a hill as I was traveling towards him at what felt like 30MPH. I think his instinct for self-preservation might have been surgically excised. I saw him repeat the same actions with several other drivers.

I cannot neglect to mention Eddie, the leather craftsman with the typical outdoor sportsman rough sense of humour. For this lawyer, Eddie’s joking was a breath of fresh air. His driving, on the other hand . . .

Seriously though, I understand that you get better at driving this kind of road with practice, but I cannot understand how drivers like Eddie can cover such broken ground so quickly.

As with the previous trip, the real motivating factor for me was the potential for great photos. I should have learned my lesson from my 2009 trek and realized that the driver never gets much of a chance to explore photography. Having to drive most of the hours of the day, coupled with utter exhaustion at any other time does not make for contemplative photography.

Settlement at Karabaiko

Nevertheless, I tried my best and the slideshow which follows are some of my top picks. All the images I found satisfactory can been seen in my online gallery.

During the trip I became convinced that this would be my last safari drive. This always happens, it takes me a month or so before I begin planning (more like scheming) for the next trip. This time around though, I think it may take me a little longer to recover, particularly after getting the repair bill for my vehicle.

On February 16th, 2012 an exhibition of a selection of my photos together with a selection of Michael Lam’s photos opened at the National Gallery, Castellani House, Georgetown. For me, this represented a significant milestone in the progression of my development as a photographer and an enormous validation of the effort and dedication I have put into photography over the past few years.

No one really wants to hear how hard I worked at it, they just want to see the results. Of course, had I not done a reasonable job I am sure the comments would have reflected how much more effort I should have put into it

It goes without saying that this was a massive boost for my ego. Close friends always get a bit irritated at my frequent bouts of self doubt but it is almost impossible for your friends to truly assess the quality of your work. As a result I never really know whether my photos are good, or just good enough for my friends not to have to lie too much to me. I am not entirely sure that it is safe to assume that the show at the Gallery means that I am not too bad a photographer, but at some point I suppose I have to accept that my photography has passed some level of competence/acceptability.

So what of my actual experiences?

It was overwhelmingly gratifying to see the diversity of people who visited. I get a strong online response to my photography; but this is usually by a fairly small subset of Guyanese (and a few others) who are either interested in photography, or happen to be internet savvy. So it was a new experience for me to interact personally with people who were seeing my photography for the first time. The positive reaction was very different when received in person. One particularly high note for me was the encouragement local photographers seem to have taken from seeing large framed prints of photographs. Few of them, particularly the younger ones, had realized the impact of a large print hanging on the wall.

I recall a young lady, clearly high school age, who visited with her mother. She mentioned how encouraged she was to pursue photography now that she saw Mike’s and my photography. I think that meant more to me than any compliment I might have received on my photos. I think if I have to pick out my most surprising moments, they would have to be the extraordinarily complimentary articles about the show written by Mr. Dave Martins (of the Tradewinds) and Mr. Terrence Roberts, both noted Guyanese artists. It is not merely that their reviews are so unexpectedly favourable, but that these two noted artists would even have reviewed the show.

I was told by the curator of the gallery that this was show was one of very few photography shows that had every been hosted by the National Gallery, Castellani House. Mr. Bobby Fernandes, who has been known for many years as the Guyanese photographer, has had a show or two. But this is the first that photographers with very broad and general portfolios have been featured. Ms. Bissember, the Curator, noted that they would now be more receptive to applications from photographers to be featured. Another positive step.

A few years ago, when I started to get more involved with photography as a hobby, I never could have imagined that it would be possible for me to show my work at a gallery. While I did occasionally take an interesting photo or two, it never occurred to me that I might eventually put together a body of work of sufficient quality and quantity to facilitate such a show. Malcolm Gladwell said in his book, Outliers, that to become an expert at any activity, you need to practice for 10,000 hours. This is a premise that took the internet by storm not so long ago.

10,000 hours is 417 days, which doesn’t sound that bad until you consider that for a 3 hour a day hobby (in my case) that is just about 10 years. I’ve had my gallery show after 6 years of dedicated practice of at least 3 hours a day. Making a lot of very unscientific and unsupported assumptions based on what I just said, I conclude that I got lucky And I guess the harder I work at it, the luckier I will get.

Part of the display at Castellani House.

If I were to provide my work for “exposure” to all the business people who suggested it, I’d be getting all my exposure from the fact that I wouldn’t be able to afford to buy clothes

The bottom line is that business people’s primary aim is to make money for themselves. They often do so in the most ruthless manner that they can find, and it is up the artist/professional to ensure that they are not taken advantage of.

I have to admit though, in my specific case the allure of seeing my work up on public walls is seductive indeed. For many hobbyist’s like myself, there is usually little need to feed ourselves from the work we do. As a result, a process of rationalization can often make it seem useful to have that exposure that is promised in return for your freely provided work, when, in fact, you are merely being swayed by the stroking of your ego.

I was personally approached recently by a business person, as is usually the case, promising exposure at the negligible cost to me of providing 4 of my favourite pieces framed and matted so that the business person could give me exposure, no doubt while she makes the supreme sacrifice for my benefit of having my work enhancing her decor, and hence the ambiance her customers enjoy.

On sending her a price list, I could feel the shock in her (very polite) response indicating that she had expected me to “sponsor” the pieces that would be hung in this business which she had poured so much effort into (she did not, of course, mention the years of dedication I have poured into my photography). If I were to give her those 4 pieces which I value in total at about US$600 it is highly unlikely that I would ever recover through resulting sales, enough to justify that investment.Meanwhile, I still have to pay my mortgage, still have to pay school fees for the children, still have to pay for endless maintenance on a 20 year old car, and cetera.

I am not going to ascribe malicious motives to the lady, who has been very polite in her communication with me, but I have to wonder if there is any other endeavour anywhere that people expect they will get the resulting product for free?

“Artist” is not a profession, and no one who considers themselves an artist ever expects that they will be able to live off it, but I really have to wonder at the disrespect of a person who sees what I have accomplished through hard work and dedication who then wants me to give them the result of my hard work so that they will benefit, but I should not charge for that.

Worse than the business people who expect free services/products from photographers are the artists or professionals who do give their stuff away for free. Reasonably competent hobbyists or professionals who allow clients or customers to trick or bully them into providing services for free do great disservice to those who have to make their livelihood at photography. The more that is freely given away, the more difficult it becomes for a working professional to command reasonable remuneration. An expectation of free services are created in the customer base.

As I told the lady who approached me (cribbing unknowingly from John Harrington above) the only benefit I am likely to receive from giving her free prints is that more people are going to come to me expecting free prints.

I always feel a bit uncomfortable discussing money when someone approaches me for a print, but I force myself to think of the photographers who don’t have a day job like I do, then it becomes significantly easier.

The bottom line here is, if you are a photographer and someone likes your work enough to want to hang it on their wall, they are getting a material benefit. You should not have to suffer financially as a result of anyone liking your work.

The first photo I took for my 365 in 2010.

The last photo I took for my 365 in 2010.

I can think of reasons that professionals may want to do a photo a day (even if they are taking photos everyday in the course of the jobs) and I can think of reasons an amateur may want to do a photo a day. In my case, the first time around I wanted to improve myself generally.

Now this second time around because I’ve noticed that the more photos you take, the more good photos you have at the end. Logical, you may say. Yet it is a concept you do not necessarily grasp until you viscerally experience it.

I did a photo a day project in 2010. At the end of it I had a hard time limiting myself to a Top 25, having to chose from some 20,799 photos. In 2011 I had a tougher time finding as many as 25 for a Top 25 because I took only 4,545.

I did get some decent stuff in 2011, but not nearly as much as in 2010.

In 2010 I wanted to improve myself generally, this year I’ve started another photo a day project because I want to refine my tastes overall and also force myself to again explore some genres (like street photography or street portraits) that I neglected in 2011.

I believe I am now reasonably technically proficient thanks to my photographic activities in 2010, but I want also to again experience that phenomenal growth that I experienced in 2010. I know that is not likely, but some part of it may be.

This year I am shooting with my faithful Pentax K7, a Canon S95 and my cellphone camera. I’ve already gotten past the unreasoned fear I used to have that I might get an inferior photo, simply because I am using a less capable camera. If you were to check my current 365 gallery you will see that there is a reasonable mix of images from each camera.

A vendor braves the flood on day 26 of 2012.

One thing I’ve noticed in the 59 days (one side benefit of the photo a day project is that you gain strong familiarity with which day of the year you happen to be in ) I’ve been doing this is the relative ease with which I have been getting decent photographs. It is not unusual for me to go several days with top class (for me) photos. This is surely the end result of my familiarity with camera, composition and processing. In no small measure my ability to process my images to show what I really want to show has grown significantly, again, as a result of the pressure of having to process sometimes dozens of images in 2010.

The point I really wish to make with this post, however, is that it has become very clear to me that I cannot ease the work that I put into that daily photo. The challenge to me this year is not just finding something to photograph each day (a task which has gotten a bit easier) but ensuring I put as much effort as possible into making that photo a good one. I have seen examples of people doing the photo a day project, who aimlessly point their cameras in any handy direction when they realize the day is coming to an end, and they have no photo as yet.

An abstract of light.

This is little better than not taking on the project at all. This observation occurred to me on day 42 as I swept my driveway in the hot midday sun, then got a step ladder, balanced precariously at the top to get the photo below. Its not great art, but I am satisfied that I put the work into it to get an adequate photo. Had I not done so, I would have ended up with a mediocre shot which might not have conveyed what I wanted.

The bottom line is, if you are not prepared to put some effort into it, you are just wasting time. Getting better at anything requires commitment. Don’t waste the time if you are not prepared to make the effort.

The shadow of the persevering fall over the pile of the defeated.

I am now sufficiently removed in time from the memory of the stress of taking a photo every damn day . . . so I’m doing it again :).

In 2011 I had originally intended to do a weekly photo instead, along the lines of Michael’s 2010 and 2011 Deck. It didn’t work out though, I had a hard time transitioning from the discipline of one photo a day, to remembering at least one a week. Particularly as I don’t like blogging about individual photos, as Mike does.

Given the relative dearth of photos in 2011, I thought I would have had a much more difficult time finding as many as 25 photos. I had assumed that, as a result of the significantly fewer photos I took, that my selection would have almost been made for me through lack of choice. It was, however, harder than I thought it was going to be.

I took fewer, but also had a higher rate of keepers. So again, it was difficult narrowing it down to 25.

The photos I ended up choosing aren’t necessarily the most popular photos I’ve shown, but the ones that interest me most.

As always, they are an eclectic mix of the scenes, objects and people who interested me over the year.

I find it curious that so many of them are colour. I had no preconceived notions before selecting the set, but given my proclivities, I would have expected more to be monochrome.

This past year has been light on street photography, unlike 2010. I will definitely have to change that trend, considering how much I enjoy street photography and enjoy interacting with people on the street.

As it is, I am still tentative with the choices I’ve made and have several other photos waiting in the wings so that I am tempted to turn this into a Top 30 or Top 35.

I do believe in editing as brutally as I can though, and in a pinch I think I can reduce this to a Top 15. I don’t have that many viewers, but I don’t believe I should subject people who take the time to look at my photos, to anything but my best.

Anyway, the full gallery of my Top 25 for 2011 can be found here. Click the link to see ’em all.

It is not unusual to find technicians familiar with photoshop who claim that you can “fix” an image and make it interesting when it originally was not. Personally I think no matter how nicely you polish crap, all you will end up with is polished crap :).

On the other hand it is entirely possible to spend the same time (in photoshop) and effort on something that started out passable and end up with something decent. The bottom line for me (and this is a personal position that I do not suggest is necessarily “right”) if you are going to spend a whole lot of time on your computer on an image it makes sense to start with something of reasonable quality. And while garish “improvements” to an image are possible, it may be better to try subtlety. Note here, I rarely take this advice myself. Quite a few of my presets are anything but subtle :).

Before I ramble along at length let me clarify; I use Adobe Lightroom to do most of my processing and Photoshop from time to time as might be occasionally necessary. I have nothing against the use of either of these tools to whatever degree the user might consider necessary, I just don’t believe that you can fix a poorly composed, poorly lit image or make an uninteresting image into an interesting one.

One other thing, by subtlety I mean a viewer should not look at a photo and think “nice job with photoshop”, or “he really knows how to use layer masks” or anything similar.

Anyway, onto my real point. Processing with subtlety. On Saturday I was looking around to take a photo, I saw some clothes clips nicely lit against a blue sky with some nice puffy clouds in the sky. Everyone has taken (or will take) a photo of clothes clips. Art it ain’t, but it can make a nice photo (might be good enough as a stock shot, but a million photographers have probably done it already).

As usual, I don’t pick a feature and tell you how to use it, I pick a photo and tell you how I did it. Most photos don’t come in for anywhere near this much processing. In fact, most of what I consider my best photos took minimal time and processing. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

So here is what I ended up with:

The Mundane (click the photo to view bigger)

The first major thing I did was to crop and remove spots. Shooting the photo was a bit of a challenge as the clips were almost eye level for me, so I had to half stoop and point the camera up. Additionally, I wanted the clips to be large in the frame but with as wide a view of the sky as possible, so wide angle lens, close up. But there was the additional problem of the roofs of the houses on either side that severely constrained how wide I could go. Anyway, crop and spot removal:

First crop & spot removal

As you can see, the crop was minimal, and just to get part of my neighbour’s television antenna out of the extreme left of the frame. I used spot removal for a spot on the rope. Blue skies can be unforgiving of spots on your lens and sensor. The <R> key invokes the crop tool in Lightroom.

The next major step I decided to take was sharpening and reducing noise. No major philosophical reason, I just wanted to get rid of the noise I was seeing in the blue sky because it was irritating me. With Lightroom, the sharpening step doesn’t have to come at a particular part of the processing sequence as Lightroom performs the steps in an optimal manner (theoretically) when you export the image.

Before Sharpening & NR

Seasoning to Taste

After

Okay, so the effect on screen is subtle, but it is there.

I have a number of presets that I have worked out over a few years of using Lightroom that are suitable for the “types” of photos that I prefer taking. A substantial percentage of the time I use one of those presets. When I take a more unusual photo for me, like this one, I tend to have to go through all the steps in the processing to get to what I want. After the NR and sharpening I raided the Basic panel in Lightroom to get closer to what I had seen. I pushed the exposure a bit to the right, so pulling it back a bit was part of the processing.

Exposed to the right

After being run through the "basic" panel

Most of my photos never go past the Basic panel, I use a preset, then make minor corrections to suit. This one though had a taste of almost everything :).

Every slider played a part

One major bit of correction/alteration that I had to make (thanks to my failure in adopting a proper technique) was the use of graduated filters to even out the tone in the sky. I forgot to take off the polarizing filter so it caused the part of the sky at 90° to the early morning sun to appear considerably darker from the rest. I evened it out as best I could using the graduated filter feature.

This gradient was applied from the sun side (right) to reduce the apparent brightness

The polarizer caused a circular area above the clips to be darker than the rest

I also darkened the bottom a bit to even the tone left to right

At this point I had gotten all of the basic stuff as I had wanted, but the image needed a bit more “pop” (for my tastes anyway). So I hit up the Tone Curves and brought some contrast to the shot.

Tweaking the tone curve, seasoned to taste

At the end of it all I got what I wanted, more than 2 hours of writing a blog post (yes, I know I talk too much) and about 10 minutes worth of actual processing :).

Before

After

Eh, doesn’t really look like I did anything much apart from darkening the sky, does it? Well, I’m trying to be subtle (with the processing anyway, not so much with the apparent saturation :). Thanks for reading if you managed to get this far.

A consequence of our day jobs is that we usually have very limited time in which to do any actual photography. Going out at midday gives us only an hour, driving to a location away from work, in midday traffic, is usually not practical (although we have on occasion). So we often just walk around the immediate vicinity. It helps that our offices are fairly close and that we are in the centre of Georgetown.

Afternoon photo expeditions grant us a little more freedom as we tend to have more time. But everything is relative, more time just means an hour and a half rather than 45 minutes.

So, contemplation. What part does that play again?

For years I had been dying to get a chance to spend some time at Kaieteur Falls. This was partly because for some types of photos I need time to set up and the normal hour that you can spend there if you fly in is not enough. But a bigger part, for me, was the fact that to properly represent all that the National Park is, time is needed even by the photographer, to figure out what it is all about. There is no argument that the falls are the centrepiece, but that is not all there is, and straightforward photos of the falls are, to me, not necessarily representative of the whole experience.

My favourite photo there is the shot below. It took me at least half hour to get that scene framed and shot (it’s an HDR). But at least another half hour before that just to pick the spot from which I wanted to take the photo. The key was to spend some time there; smelling the air, listening to water flow, letting myself become calm and letting the excitement of just being there dissipate a bit.

Breathing in Kaieteur Falls

Unfortunately, as I pointed out above, we are not always afforded the opportunity to stop and look. Most of the time our photographic opportunities resemble a drive by shooting more than anything else. Our trips to Berbice and elsewhere that should take a month of slowly making our way through villages, usually take us a half day. Yet we do come away with some decent photos quite often. I’m particularly pleased with the photo below that we got on a trip to Berbice recently.

Scarred, but proud

Contemplation for us is often compressed into the barest minimum time permits. My father once likened what we do to a hunter looking for prey. The comparison is apt, but I wish it wasn’t. Much preferable to us (I think I can speak for Mike here also) would be the opportunity to sit and look, think on the scene for a while. I will speak for myself here, but I think there is a bit of shallowness to my photos with which I am often unhappy. Unfortunately, until I some rich benefactor appears, and my children grow up, time will ever be scarce and photography will continue to be a lower priority no matter how I wish otherwise.

This is very sad to me, as I believe there is so much to photograph around me, but I cannot see thanks to the need for speed and the lack of time for contemplation.

The situation that prompted me to write this occurred last Friday. St. Barnabas, an Anglican Church built in 1884 is about to be torn down to make way for a shopping centre. You can read more about that here.

I (and many others) consider this to be very unfortunate. We Guyanese are slowly, but surely, losing all of our architectural heritage. And there wasn’t much to begin with. I don’t judge either the church officials or the purchaser, they both saw an opportunity and took advantage of it, but I believe that a deeper understanding by the Government of what we are quickly losing is important in slowing the loss. Without a strong historical preservation movement, with teeth granted by the Government, we are going to be left with nothing but slab sided concrete buildings.

Expediency is trumping genuine societal growth. It is understandable, but by no means acceptable.

Anyway, getting back to the point. We worked hard on getting an opportunity to take some photos of St. Barnabas. Finally, with the assistance of the purchaser (to whom we owe thanks) we were given a brief chance to document the church interior. Nothing much was left, just a sad reminder of impending loss. I had many ideas of what photos I wanted, and how I was going to get them.

Unfortunately, on that final day, the priest in charge was unable to spare the time to give Mike and I the opportunity to sit (or stand, the pews were all gone) and contemplate the building and what photos would best represent what was left. Thanks to the “training” that we have been getting over the course of the last few years I think, despite the need for speed, we were able to make the most of what we were given.

Here then are some of the photos (the full album is here), among the last to be taken here; compressed contemplation:

The Forward Outlook

Vagrant View

Awe, now gone

Seclusion

After seeing the shadow from this fence many times, I finally stopped. Glad I did as the building is now changed.

It was a typical older concrete building, all sharp edges and variations on squares and rectangles, there were some boarded up windows in the front and what appeared to be a tunnel from front to back (at one point they even had the inevitable Guyanese red curtains in side windows). There was often a battered old blue Landrover in front of the building.

The problem is, the best light to capture it would have been late afternoon when the soft, diffuse evening light would cause the colours to deeply saturate and brought some melancholy to the decrepit building. But, inevitably, at this time I am driving past with the children in the vehicle and could not stop. And once past the building, I’d completely forget. A symptom of the stress I feel at having to drive in that afternoon/evening traffic.

This is not the only strong regret I’ve had at not stopping. Just last year I was coming out in the morning and there was a heavy mist in Diamond. At the same time the sun was brilliantly shining through the clouds causing the mist to glow with this indescribably golden colour. A beautiful looking morning, but that isn’t all. As I pulled up to the corner of 3rd Street and the Diamond main road, I noticed on the Eastern direction there was a break in the mist, forming a wall perpendicular to the road. Imagine an amorphous golden wall. Silhouetted against the wall, to the right of the road was a street sign and as vehicles broke through the wall heading West, the mist wall would swirl around the vehicles. It felt like a primal scene.

This was taken shortly after yet another occasion of being taught, yet again, the lesson of stopping for the shot.

I didn’t stop, but I turned and drove West, away from the scene. I kept an eye in the rear view mirror, beating myself up mentally every inch of the way for not stopping. Once again, I had my son in the vehicle and it would have been difficult to either jump out and leave him, or take him with me. I should have stopped and figured it out then.

One more example? Driving again (noticing a trend here?) I was headed home driving up the East Bank, just entering Little Diamond. The cane fields are on fire, a huge billowing fire fanned by a strong breeze from the North-East. Smoke is pouring across the drain and road with the still burning ash glowing like meth addicted fireflies. As vehicles pass through the smoke it swirled around them and followed in the wake. On that extremely busy East Bank road the place felt lonely and foreboding. You could see only the single vehicle closest to you. This was about 4 years ago. Didn’t stop, never got the chance again.

I could go on about this for a while, but I think you get the point. I don’t remember every lost opportunity, but some really hurt. And it’s really my own damned fault.

I’m not suggesting that I would have gotten a great photo, but I’ll never know. Like so many other things, a crappy job of it would have hurt a lot less than the regrets.

I hope I can stay motivated and keep it going. For all my regular viewers and commenters, thank you.

Published!

On the still, calm waters of the Potaro River we began the final river bound leg of our journey upstream to the raging torrent of the Kaieteur Falls, the second day into our voyage overland to Kaieteur.

We had left Diamond on the East Bank at 6 a.m. on the previous day to journey over the roads to Pamela’s Landing, in the minibus of Ian. Frank Singh of Rainforest Tours organised our trip and made sure we were never, advertently or inadvertently, dependent for our survival on the care of any lunatics or persons otherwise of unsound mind.

For some period during the ride in Ian’s minibus we were not sure Frank had been entirely successful in keeping us out of the hands of lunatics, but we soon realised that Ian was an experienced and careful (though speedy) driver, and raconteur of tales ribald and and pure, like the one about a man who was living in Georgetown since “big market clock was a watch”.

Uncle Bayney (left) and Ian discuss Big Market "watch".

Having experienced much rain and mud on what are charitably called roadways in Guyana’s interior we finally arrived at what, for me, was the real beginning of our journey; the boat waiting on the Potaro River at Pamela’s Landing.

Andre Lam, fellow photographer and traveler, and I demanded the best seats at the bow of our water chariot, a 15 foot wooden boat, with a leak from the bottom that absolutely did not in any way resemble a geyser. To draw any such comparison would be pure hyperbole.

On the river.

We drew out into the calm, glassy water of the Potaro. A photographer’s delight of subtle and varied reflections of the sky and forest that caused the spontaneous triggering of the shutters of both Andre’s and my cameras, before we even knew what we’d done.

What we both captured pales by comparison to reality. It is the solemn duty of all who have the means and wish call themselves true Guyanese, to make this pilgrimage. If you do not, you may claim love of your country in your heart, but you will never know the awe of your country that you should.

After spending more than 1 hour, but less than 2 hours (the official method of measuring time in the bush) we arrived near Amatuk Falls. Once again there was a spontaneous release of shutters both Nikon and Pentax, before conscious thought stumbled up.

But here were we, at our first day’s destination and one of the visual wonders of our trip and here was my cousin Kevin without a single available exposure on his memory card. Kevin, in a fit of typical teenage efficiency had forgotten to offload his only memory card’s worth of valuable memories before coming on the trip. Again with typical teenage conformity Kevin’s camera used a proprietary memory type different from anyone else’s.

The island.

At Amatuk, an island perched in the middle of the impressive cascade of the falls, we set up camp and got our first taste of the pot of the gentleman would would be our chief cook and bottle washer (and tour guide) Tony.

Tony was a toshao (chief of an Amerindian community), is Frank’s right hand man, is a protector of bumbling photographers, is a raconteur extraordinary, is our Chief Medical Officer and was quite possibly a Swiss Army knife in a former existence (he truly is a jack of all trades). Having only been introduced to Tony the day before we were not sure we could trust our continued corporeal existence to him, but it did not take long for him to gain our complete confidence.

Keeping the river where it belongs. Tony chats unconcernedly on the right.

I must say though, I was very disgruntled at the fact that in my moment of need, he resolutely refused to fetch me up the mountain on his back. How unreasonable could he be? Could carrying 200 pounds of teary, blubbering, unfit, photographer up a mountain be too much to ask? I think not!

Be warned, if you ever happen to become a 200 pound, blubbery, unfit, photographer and seek the advice your uncle (who last ascended to Kaieteur via the Oh Meh Gaad 1 and Oh Meh Gaad 2 trails, 17 years in the past) who tells you that it is “easy”; I advise you to seek a second opinion, preferably not from your other uncle who also did the climb 17 years ago.

And definitely avoid asking Tony, who is just looking for another anecdote with which to regale the next bunch of victims tourists.

A word of warning regarding the Oh Meh Gaad 1 and Oh Meh Gaad 2 sections of the trail: You are not permitted to push over the edge (or otherwise brutally end the existence of) your friend or cousin who are skipping gleefully and daintily up the almost impassible trails while you breathlessly lumber behind. No matter how sorely you are tempted. Don’t do it.

Having said all that, the scenery around us on the trail was awesome. Not the “awesome” that has become the synonym of “nice” but the “awesome” which means causing feelings of awe. In fact, all that caused Andre’s life to be spared on that walk up the mountain was because only he had the energy to take pictures and if I’d pushed him off the mountain there would be no pictures of the climb. Plus he had to carry my camera, I couldn’t manage to carry it myself. I feel no shame; evidently the Prozac has worked.

Going up?

On a final note; we spent 2 nights at the top of the plateau. I’ve traveled to Kaieteur Falls several times by plane and spent my allotted 2 hours (half of which is spent merely walking to the falls from the airstrip) viewing the falls. I’ve always thought, having exclaimed at the wonder of it all on every viewing, that I’d had the “Kaieteur” experience.

I thought this trip would merely give me the time to take the photographs I’d always wanted to, but never had.

I was mistaken. I now see that spending 2 days here merely makes it clear that 2 days is not enough. Not enough for taking pictures, not enough for experiencing the falls. After I’ve had an opportunity to spend a week there, I will let you know if a week is enough. I doubt it will be. Hmm, I wonder when Frank has another tour climbing the mountain.

P.S. I took several hundred photos of which 54 made my cut and fewer yet, the magazine. If you are interested in seeing the rest of them (apart from the posted photos here and the slideshow below) go check them out on my website. They are worth your time.

Andre’s photos, all 157! of them are here.

Needless to say I am not a purist save where what I want the image to say is concerned.

I am a big fan of the old, decaying and/or dilapidated. New and perfect is fine and can make great photographs, but it is in the old and used that character lies. Visually, the textures and shapes of old, used object is what catches my eye. Unfortunately I rarely get a chance to photograph them in the optimal lighting conditions to emphasize the texture.

In addition, I like strong textures.

My primary image processing software of choice is Adobe Lightroom. This is not the place (or time) for a basic user tutorial of Lightroom, so I am going to assume that you can follow along. All the steps used in this process are under the “Develop” module. I did not delve into any of the deeper capabilities of Lightroom such as the Local Adjustments (brush or graduated filters) or tone curve.

Now just to be clear, this is my way of doing things. It is not the only way and it is not the “right” way. You may like it, or you may not. But it is the way I like it.

The Clay

As you can see the image to the above, what I’ve got is a strong composition of shapes and textures. As soon as I saw the bulldozer at the side of the road I knew I had to get a shot. It was rusted and clearly well used and was parked in the open in the eye searing midday sun. When I got out of the car I had to squint and my eyes watered when looking at the bulldozer.

The camera captured a perfect exposure . . . from its perspective. I am guessing if my eyes worked like my camera this is how I would see things, but they don’t and I didn’t.

The first thing I did was to bump the exposure up an absurd amount, +1.5ev. Anyone with some experience processing photos will tell you, amateurs push the sliders up to a million, pros you can tell by their subtlety. Ah well, colour me an amateur :).

As you can see, even the histogram was shocked.

Before Armageddon

After the bomb

This is what it looked like:

Adding 1.5 positive ev

A bit washed out, but none of it is blown out yet. There is a remarkable amount of flexibility in the Pentax K7 files.

Anyway, moving right along. We are getting a little closer to where I want to be with regard to the intensity of the light, but I’ve lost the grittiness of the texture. My next step is to boost the black levels. Working firmly in line with the fundamental principle that more is more I set the black level to 75.

That gives me this:

Yuck!

75 is the new 11

The histogram shows the effect of the higher black point

Nothing here is looking any good at all. It must be clear to everyone that this image is completely and irretrievably spoiled. Well to sort out some of that oversaturation issue, my next step was to drop the saturation. There are two controls for saturation in the Develop module; vibrance and saturation. Saturation works as a sort of global adjustment. It increases and decreases saturation across the board.

Vibrance, on the other hand, is a bit more selective. It increases the saturation of colours that are not as saturated. I tend to use them both in varying ways. In this particular photo I found that I liked the saturation at -75 and vibrance at +35.

So the image starts to approach where I want it to be, but not quite. It has the texture and brightness that I want, but not that post apocalyptic glaring look that has become the standard (ironically) in post apocalyptic movies :).

There is still something lacking to me, it just isn’t where I want it to be as yet. But the glaring “problems” with previous processing steps have mostly been sorted to my satisfaction. The next step is Clarity. A very appropriately named control, used judiciously it sometimes feels like removing a film of gauze from in front the image. Most of the time I rarely exceed +40. With this image (of course) a bit more is needed. +75 here we come.

The midtones (what little of them are left after reaching this very high contrast point) are now a bit sharper. It seems strange to describe anything about this image as subtle, particularly an adjustment of +75 clarity, but the difference isn’t huge.

I’m still not happy but by this stage I’ve figured out how to get what I want, so a bit of tweaking to the brightness and contrast, +15 and +80 respectively and almost everything is as I want.

Contrast & brightness adjusted

Now, finally, by making a great intuitive leap (20 minutes of trial and error) I realize that the colour temperature is too cool and doesn’t match the feeling of the midday sun in Guyana (at least the way I see it). So a couple more quick tweaks.

From This

To This

And Bob’s your uncle.

Click on the image to see it larger.

I don’t usually process my photos as dramatically as this, but for a very long time I was taking photos of old machinery and was completely unsatisfied with how they looked. They looked nothing  like I imagined when I looked at the scene. The reason I could never get it right is because I didn’t have the knowledge about images that would permit me to know what I had to do to get it right.

Through a significant period of trial and error I eventually came to this, which I am pleased with as it finally represents what I want to see. The conclusion for me is that you either have to know precisely how images work; contrast, levels, white balancing, etc. Or you have to do as I did, work until it is what you want it to be.

If you’re interested, I created a lightroom preset for this bit of processing and all you have to do is download it here, import it into Lightroom, apply it, season to taste and its done.

Thanks for reading.

Seriously, you can read the most passionate and/or logical of arguments from articulate and motivated film or digital photographers for either side. You can also read many dismissive and/or abusive arguments from either side too.

The bottom line for me is that the technical aspect of photography, while interesting and endlessly fascinating, is just the tool for realizing my vision (whatever form it may take).

For some other, well, I am absolutely certain there have been hate and vitriol filled debates between painters about the medium, brushes and brands of paint they use (or species of egg they used to use for egg tempera).

I recall reading arguments between writers regarding word processors and typewriters. I’m sure sculptors occasionally toss hammers at each other over the type of chisel they each prefer. I think you get where I’m going.

So when I decided to try film photography this year I expected some laughter (got a bit more than I bargained for) and teasing (about what I expected, thanks James and Dwayne :)). I also expected a healthy skeptical response along the lines of: “Film? Film is dead, digital is the way to go.” And I didn’t get much of that. Seems like there is a resurgence of interest in film, or at the very least a degree of maturity has finally reached in the debate.

For a professional, working with a tight budget, it is undoubtedly more sensible to use digital, although I suspect that the cost factor probably isn’t as clear cut as for a hobbyist like me (as shown below). But the cost consideration is not as relevant, or relevant at all, to a hobbyist.

I tend to take about 5,000 photos a year, although last year (while doing a photo a day project) I took significantly more.

If I were to take that many photos using film then costs would be significantly higher. Something on the order of US$1,200 (143 rolls of 35mm, 36 exp. film x $7 ea. x $1.50ea. for processing) annually.

In my time also, costs would be higher. It takes me significantly longer to process 35 photos (chemical processing, scanning, colour correcting and uploading). I would guesstimate over 10 minutes per photo as against less than 2 minutes per photo for digital.

A smile from Mira

But there is no way that I am going to take 5,000 photos on film per year. In my (entirely fictional, more like 4 months :)) 14 days I’ve used 5 rolls of colour film and 1 roll of black & white). So even with the cost of the camera @ around US$50, and using my existing Pentax (K-mount) lenses the costs have not been particularly high.

As far as costs go, this is acceptable to me. Your mileage may vary.

So cost is not really a factor. But one reason is chose film lies in aesthetics. Just as records can be preferred to CDs, so too analog film can be preferred to digital perfection. I sympathize with the view that you can simulate film using various digital methods, but even in attempting to duplicate imperfection and randomness there is a digital perfection to these methods.

Mira, playing behind the curtain.

I don’t propose to wax lyrical about the “warmth” of analog versus the “coldness” of digital. My little experiment is not bound up in creating art through accident. It may seem counter to what I was saying a paragraph ago, but I prefer control to randomness. I don’t really want to express my vision through accident and variability. I want to put on paper (or screen) exactly what I want there. Not something I created by accident (although, conversely, I appreciate the role of serendipity in creativity :)).

No, I have about 5 or 6 presets in Lightroom that came about through trial and error, evolving into what I see and how I see. So aesthetics are not really that much of a factor to me either, although I would jump for joy if I could find film that approximates the way I process my digital images.

So why did I chose to experiment with film? Skill. Or rather lack thereof, on my part. At least initially.

With an ultra modern SLR like mine (Pentax K7) you hold a very fast, single purpose computer with a lens. This is what any modern digital camera is, varying only by degrees. Pick up any modern digital camera and it will be superb at its primary function.

Yes, there will be nit pickers and there can be usability issues, but the marketing department of whatever camera company you favour will have ensured that their product in the same price category as a competitor will be at least as good as that competitor’s.

As you move up in price, you tend to get more control and more flexibility (and, in absolute terms, image quality).

The point is, even at the very top, the camera does most or all of the thinking regarding the technical stuff. You still have to compose an interesting photo, but exposure is almost entirely automatic. And even if you use manual, most cameras tell you how far you are from optimal exposure so you still have a fair degree of guidance. And if you still get it wrong, you can usually do a fair bit of exposure correction from the RAW file (if you use RAW anyway).

All this is not to say great photos are difficult, but it’s hard not to agree to some degree with old pros who say us digital photographers are undisciplined. Particularly if, like me, you never had a lick of formal training.

So that was my primary motivation then, gaining a degree of skill by using a manual camera where the limitations are much more restrictive. I got a Pentax K1000, an old workhorse that is a favourite of photography schools everywhere and that would take many of my current lenses. For any of my visitors who aren’t Guyanese, to the best of my knowledge, there aren’t any photography classes available here.

Spade and brick, alight.

The first major difficulty I faced was deciding on the film I wanted. I couldn’t find anything to say what different films look like (I didn’t really know what to search for). Since I tend to like grain and high contrast, I decided on Kodak Portra 400 VC, which is a saturated, high speed colour negative film.

For black and white I chose Ilford HP5, ISO400 film.

Unfortunately, used to potential shutter speeds on my K7 of up to 1/8000 of a second, it never occurred to me that on the K1000, limited to 1/1000 of a second I wouldn’t be able to open up the aperture to reduce depth of field.

Unfortunately also, I did not realize at that time that there are no B&W film processors in Georgetown. At least none that anyone seems to know of. It seems like once I finish my 3 remaining rolls I will have to send them to the US (or Trinidad, if I can find someone there) to process.

Initially, I had intended to do minimal processing to my photos, so I wanted B&W film rather than simply converting colour negs to B&W. I think expediency has forced me to revise that somewhat. The photo on the left is colour, processed B&W in Lightroom.

I also have quite a bit still to learn about scanning my negatives. I am having a hard time getting consistent colour out of the scanner, although I’ve turned off all “auto” settings in the software. All the colour shots accompanying this post are slightly different despite my best efforts.

So in my own meandering way I’ve revealed several of the lessons I’ve learned so far. But what of my primary goal; gaining skill? Well not so much. Firstly, because of the effort involved I find I am using the film camera less than I should. But also, it doesn’t seem to be much of a challenge.

Manual focusing is not difficult for me, as I’ve used a couple manual focus lens on my K7 for years. Exposure is not that difficult as the K1000 has a light meter and the sunny 16 rule works well. Especially as, in Guyana, it tends to be perfectly sunny much of the time. And when its rainy I can’t use the camera anyway.

I love film, daddy!

Perhaps because I’ve always preferred setting things like aperture, shutter speed and ISO manually on my DSLR I’ve gained a feel for manually setting exposure (NB: “feel” is not analogous to competence :)) which has translated to the film camera. But where my lack shows is in my inability to reliably get consistently exposed frames in varying lighting situations. This is something which has to come in time I suppose, but I’d hoped for a speedier learning curve. Like everything else though, if you aren’t putting in the effort, you won’t get the result.

One major thing I’ve learned, or noticed, is that the photos I take of my children always seem better to me than photos of anything else.

This is partly due to the fact that they happen to be the most inspiring subjects when I am in the mood to use the film cam. But for some reason, even subjects that normally interest me can’t seem to get themselves in order to give me photos that I like.

Another thing I’ve learned? Don’t get bloody fingerprints on the negatives! I don’t think it will be visible in the small photo in this post, but it is clearly visible when viewed larger.

Fingerprints on the left!

Yet another thing? The damned ISO don’t set itself on a Pentax K1000 :). Yes, I’ve got lots of stuff left to learn, but I think the day you don’t feel you have something left to learn in whatever endeavour you get into, you might as well quit. See some of my picks here.

Happy Easter!

Leaf, in dappled light.

Lock Up Tight (hey, its a photo blog; we must have photos!)

Security is on my mind right now. I am not the most careful person when it comes to online security, but I’m better at it than most people. Not because I give in to paranoia and stop browsing the internet altogether (which is probably the best thing to do if you are paranoid) but because I make use of a few tools which look out for me, so I can afford to be a little less vigilant and because I keep a track of genuine alerts (not the ones forwarded to you via email), via normal news channels like BBC and CNN.

I’ve noticed most people who aren’t as comfortable with tech related issues tend to fall into two camps when it comes to online security; either complete paranoia resulting in minimal use (sometimes missing the best bits of the internet) or shocking laxity; giving out personal information to anyone who asks nicely assuming that because they have an anti-virus they will be protected from everything (this is not the case).

If you aren’t interested in reading my lengthy exposition, there is a list of handy and quick clickable links at the end of this post. Feel free to skip to the bottom.

I’d like to add one proviso first; this is by no means a complete list of all that can go wrong and the respective solutions. Its just a primer, so be smart.

Real Life vs. Online Life

You Can't Enter!

Let me give you a short answer right now: If you apply the same principles to online security that you do in your everyday life, you are already halfway there. If you don’t go out and post photocopied chain mail (the ones where you have to buy stamps) then don’t do it with email; if you don’t hand out your name and address and personal details to any stranger on the street who asks, then don’t do it online; if in real life you avoid anything that sounds too good to be true (particularly when coming from strangers you just met) then don’t get taken in by online scams in identical circumstances.

Of course, it isn’t always that simple but the critical thing to remember always is to analogize any online issue with real life, bearing in mind that written communication does not represent emotional context as easily as verbal and visual communication. You can’t tell easily from an email if a person is being honest, you can’t tell from a comment on a website if a person is angry or sarcastic.

And as far as giving out payment details; sometimes “bargains” aren’t what they seem. If, in real life you see two shops side by side, selling the same products, one unknown the other a well know chain; would you give your private payment details to the unknown one with suspiciously low prices? Not likely, so don’t do it online. The internet makes some things harder (visual cues) but makes other things easier (research).

Do a little ground work first. Once you find reputable online merchants you don’t have to search again. Or simply ask friends who have experiences (you can add this as a rule, asking friends is the easiest way to find anything trustworthy).

Email

Secure Mail

Trust me on this: Neither Colonel Gaddafi, his wife, his son, his main body guard, the widow of his driver nor anyone connected with him is seeking your help in getting the forgotten jewels/money out of Libya (it’s only a matter of time before this one shows up).

Let me add in this minor rant: Do not forward emails to me which have been forwarded to you and a hundred of your other friends. These are always junk! I swear to you the drug companies are not conspiring to hide the fact that lemon juice cures cancer (unless they are, in which case, sorry). Bill Gates will not give you and everyone you know $2,000, bunnies will not be trampled to death if you don’t forward an email out (and even if they are, the saying “multiplying like rabbits” didn’t come about by accident, there are lots of them let them be trampled).

If you do feel compelled for whatever reason then please, please use the BCC feature in your email. If you do not use BCC you are creating the possibility that spammers and other unfriendly people can get your friends’ email address, plus the possibility of embarrassing mistakes. I used BCC when I sent this post out to my friends.

As I am on email at the moment; there is another sensible precaution you should take when it comes to email – Don’t Click On Unsolicited Links or Attachments (memorize this one by heart and keep it in mind every time you see a new email notification. If a friend or colleague sends you a link or an attachment that you didn’t specifically ask them to send, don’t click on it.

No matter how enticing that link may be, don’t click on it. Copy and paste the words into google or Snopes (debunking online scams, urban legends and email “alerts”) and that should give you an idea if the link is safe or not. It’s not hard I do it all the time. Most email clients now scan for viruses in attachments. But still, if you didn’t ask for it, odds are you didn’t want it. If you must see it, google it first.

Many of your friends may use the word “password” as their password. Or 12345, or their names, or their children’s names (I know you aren’t that silly). This means that crackers can easily take over their online accounts. In an attempt to ensnare as many people as possible, those crackers will then send their bad stuff to all of that person’s contacts so: Don’t Click On Unsolicited Links or Attachments.

Finally read up about 419 scams, it won’t take long and it will open your eyes. Advance fee frauds are the most popular via email, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t others. The rules of thumb to avoid these things are the same as in real life (a/k meatspace). If it sounds too good to be true, it is. No matter what anyone tells you, ask a friend’s advice before you pay anyone anything. Never, never act on impulse no matter how hard it is to resist, wait a week and ask for advice from a friend. Oh, and those spam emails advertising cheap herbal Viagra? Well if anyone has to tell you to avoid any such email with a ten foot pole (well, the size of the pole doesn’t really matter, I’ve been told :)) . . .

So I’m a curmudgeon, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take my advice.

Security Tools

A Pair of Brass Bells

Okay, now that you are being sensible about your general habits you need some tools that will assist in keeping you safe. Depending on your level of paranoia there are a number of sensible tools you can make use of (this is for people like me, not security professionals or the ultra-paranoid).

First, and most important; if you are using Internet Explorer (a lot of you still do) go and download Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome or Opera and immediately stop using internet explorer (all of the alternatives I’ve suggested will import your bookmarks and history). For a variety of reasons the conventional wisdom is that Internet Explorer is not as secure as Chrome, Firefox or Opera. I use Firefox but can recommend either of the other two. [Edit: A reader took umbrage at my suggestion that IE may be less secure than the other and it does appear that the versions of IE from 8 are on par with the others. An ad-blocker is available, as is LastPass, for a fee, but I haven’t been able to find any of the other add ons which are available for Firefox. In other words, ensure you are upgraded to the latest version of IE if this is your preference].

The second required tool is an ad-blocker. There is a lot of debate on the internet as to whether it is morally right to use ad-blockers. The theory is, you are getting a lot of the available content on the internet for free with the only obligation being that you view the ads and click on those that interest you. I think if you want to make money from your stuff, charge for it. Don’t try get your charges through a back door, then cry about it when people avoid your back door.

The bottom line though, is that quite a lot of bad stuff can be delivered from the internet via cleverly crafted malicious ads (many of the security issues you hear about are delivered this way). Enable an ad-blocker and this is no longer a consideration.

Firefox’s ad-blocker is here, Chrome’s is here and Opera can be configured as is described here.

Next up (number three) is protecting your actual browsing session. When you are browsing the internet data to and from your computer travels a long route via many intermediaries. If you are using a wireless network data moves from your computer through your wireless network to the phone lines (or cable line, or fibre optic lines etc) to the ISP. From the ISP it takes a number of routes to the computer providing the website you are browsing. Along this way, there are many points at which a malicious person can intercept your data to see or steal your information.

There is a secure protocol to protect your data along the way using secure http. Some websites automatically require it but many don’t. If you log into your Amazon or Paypal account (or quite likely your bank account) you will notice that the “http” in the address bar of your browser changes to “https” this means that the website is requiring your browser to use the secure protocol and your browsing session is then encrypted.

Many, or most sites make this optional. Google allows you to chose whether checking your email is secure or not and Facebook is only now allowing you to chose to force all of your facebooking to be protected by secure http. This, to me is unacceptable. While there are many websites (mine, for example) which you will not care if anyone sees in an attempt to crack your connection, as a matter of course you should opt for security, especially when it can be easy to accomplish.

It is trivially easy to force secure http if you are using Firefox by installing this add on. There is no similar add on for any of the other browsers (that I know of) for now. Beware of any website offering such a plugin, ensure it is tested by the maker of the browser (the one for Firefox was created by a trusted organisation and has been tested by Mozilla).

Okay, now for the doozy; passwords (or number four on our little list). Even the most anal retentive, obsessive and compulsive people (like me) hate passwords. You know the rules probably as well as I. Come up with something unique . . . for each and every online account you have. And then remember each one of them. Oh, and don’t use your own name, the names of anyone you know, don’t use important dates (or even names and dates in combination). Don’t use your phone number, license number or any combination of birth dates. If you don’t follow these rules and have something someone wants badly enough, they will figure out your password (especially if you write it down on paper and stick it to your monitor, the bottom of your desk or keyboard or one of your desk drawers or if you file it under “P” in your filing cabinet).

One other thing, you need to change your master password regularly. It is a pain, but it keeps you safe (particularly considering that it is the key to the vault containing all that you need to keep safe). I find that if I write even the most complicated alpha-numeric password down and type it in regularly for a week, I remember it without any other problems. After, I make sure I destroy the paper on which I wrote the password. [Edit: since posting this I’ve learned that changing passwords regularly is not necessarily best practice. People who change their passwords regularly tend to write them down, thus reducing security. If you have a strong password which you can easily remember it may be best to stick with that password]

Alternatively, you can use many methods to create a password which you can easily recover; anything from taking letters and punctuation characters from specific, different locations in a favourite book, to choosing a word familiar to you, then alternating between using the character on a keyboard above and below the letters of the work you’ve chosen.

If you want to check relative strength of your password, have a look here. They will tell you whether yours is easy or difficult to crack. Just to be on the safe side, change the password once you’ve checked it. [Edit: This password checker is not a reliable tool, use LastPass to generate a password, or follow the guidance of the links in the paragraph above.]

LastPass

Password Accepted

So what are we to do. Unfortunately, there is no kind of certainty, there is no un-crackable password (it’s only a matter motivation and of time). There are, however, things you can do to make sure that when the bear starts chasing you, you are running faster than someone else. I use LastPass (the person who doesn’t use something similar is the one who’s running slower than me :). LastPass is a web application with add ons for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and many others. LastPass is proprietary software that is free for most ordinary uses, but which offers additional features for an annual fee.

LastPass gets its own section because passwords are arguably the most critical part of online security and as befits, it is a fairly complicated bit of software. This is one area where I can’t really give you an easy one-click solution. You see, even after you install LastPass, you have to then go change all the passwords for all your critical websites and services and most importantly you have to generate (and remember) the master password which unlocks LastPass’ vault. Anytime you click on a box to change a password LastPass will offer to generate a random secure password (which it will also remember automatically if you accept). You can invoke the password generator tool by holding the <ALT> key and pressing <G>.

Two guides from Lifehacker on using LastPass are available here and here.

The alternative to LastPass is a free, open source bit of software called KeePass. The reason I use LastPass instead of this is convenience. All LastPass passwords are stored online and synchronized among all the computers you use. You can achieve similar convenience with KeePass, but it is not quite as easy. The major benefit to KeePass (in my view) is that being open source, any qualified person can examine the code and ensure they are not doing anything suspicious, or leaving security holes. And many programmers do keep a close eye.

Blocking Facebook

Feeling Social

Facebook is one of the (if not the) premiere social networking site on the internet. And like their creator they have a questionable philosophy when it comes to your right to privacy. You see, the more of your personal information they know, the more they know about your browsing habits, the more they know about your offline habits and your likes, the more valuable they are a company, because they can sell very specific data to any purchaser in an effort to allow those purchasers (mainly advertisers) to determine what to sell you.

For most people, particularly younger people who aren’t appalled at the thought of someone else knowing everything about them this may not seem a big problem (until you are first bitten anyway). For the rest of us, there is facebook blocker.

Facebook blocker doesn’t stop you from browsing facebook at all. It also doesn’t stop you from logging into any site using your facebook credentials. What it does is stop facebook from tracking you across the internet using various methods (mainly cookies). Have you ever noticed that there are some sites encouraging you to “Like” them and giving you the pictures of some of your friends who have already “Liked” them? Every wonder how that site knows who your friends are? Isn’t it a little freaky that they do? Want to stop that from happening with little or no loss of convenience?

Use facebook blocker!

Miscellaneous Links

As usual, I was prompted by something to post this (and no it wasn’t yet another forwarded message from someone) it was this post from Cracked (a humour site, but often the writers of interesting articles which have to be taken with large spoonfuls of salt). It occurs to me many of my friends and relatives (and this is really the group I am writing this for) aren’t overly familiar with the things to watch out for and need a bit of a primer (or some links to click on quickly and be done).

If, however, you’d like to read a bit more I suggest you start here and also have a look at this one. Also, Google is your friend.

This writer explains 25 most common email security mistakes. I think it’s a good read, but it’s a little beyond what the audience of this post requires.

Last Wordy Bit

Unfortunately, although I’ve outlined a number of steps you can take, there is no add on that will beat being vigilant and smart. It is shocking the number of personal thing someone can find out about you online. And it may not even be your fault. If one of your friends uploads a photo of you and tags it with your name anyone around the world can easily find out what you look like. The same goes for your children and other family.

You can’t be sure anymore that anyone approaching you who might be familiar with your history and family is actually a “friend”. This means we have to be a lot more suspicious about everything. But here’s the silver lining; as easily as a stranger can google you, you can google them (and anything they are selling or promising). And if something makes you suspicious, even if you google it and aren’t successful, ask someone else you trust, in person. It’s tedious, but it ain’t rocket science.

The List – Email

1. Get a couple of free email accounts which you will use when any website you don’t trust implicitly asks you to sign up for something that isn’t really important. Or use bugmenot.
2. Never forward an email to more than 2 people without using BCC. This is why.
3. Don’t Click On Unsolicited Links or Attachments. It’s not smart.
4. Very smart people have been taken in by fraudulent schemes sent via email. If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
5. Read up on email etiquette. It never, ever hurts to know how to do things the right way.

The List – Browsing Sensibly

1. Get Mozilla Firefox (my personal preference), Google Chrome or Opera. See why here.
2. Ad Blocker: For Firefox, For Chrome, For Opera. Here’s why you need one of these.
3. Secure Browsing: Only for Firefox at this point unfortunately. I think it’s important.
4. For passwords use LastPass. You really should read why.
5. Do yourself a favour and stop Facebook from tracking you. This is sensible, not paranoia, and I promise, it won’t inconvenience you.

I know it’s all a lot to take in. But run through this post and you won’t need to worry as much about some idle or malicious person successfully attacking you. Governments now, that is another story. But if you need to worry about someone with government resources attacking you, then I’m afraid this blog post isn’t for you.

Hope I’ve been of a little assistance. If not, all reasonable requests for refunds will be entertained

Go Away, Nothing to Steal Here

The Pineapple Man

The debate on “editing” photos continues apace online (and elsewhere). And the distinction between “editing” and not editing is one I am struggling to understand. I’ve always maintained that a photo is not altered by merely processing it to bring it inline with what it is intended to represent.

Background: Mr. Damon Winters of the New York Times won 3rd place in a competition hosted by Pictures of the Year International. The photos were processed through an app called Hipstamatic on his iPhone.

What got me started off on this rant is Chip Litherland’s semi-hysterical rant on the death of true, pure, unadulterated, virginal photojournalism at the hands of Damon Winters and the judges of Pictures of the Year International. No doubt someone can suggest to me what the circumstances are that will produce the photojournalistic manna which might be acceptable to Mr. Litherland (on the basis of their own subjective criteria, naturally).

As an aside, for me, removing or adding elements to a photo moves it out of the realm of photography and brings it into the realm of photo illustration. And to me, there is nothing wrong with that either as long as there is no attempt to deceive. But this is not what I am discussing here. What I am targeting is simple (or complex) processing; cropping, colour, contrast, etc.

Refreshing Rain

The fact of the matter is that all sorts of manipulation can take place even before the light hits the sensor (be it digital or film). The photographer’s choice of lens will affect perspective, choice of aperture will affect depth of field, choice of shutter speed will affect the way motion is recorded.

And I haven’t even mentioned the most important source of manipulation yet; the photographer’s choice of where to point his camera.

Every viewer of every photograph, every reader of every newspaper or book, every listener of every musical piece, sermon, speech, news report (etc) brings to their consumption their own peculiarities and preferences.

It is all subjective and there are no absolutes (sorry). There cannot be, because of a roughly 3 pound bit of custardy meat called the brain. Each and every person has his or her own unique view of the world around them and that view varies by too many factors to consider; were they beaten in front of their friends at a birthday party, did they have a mix of races accompanying them to school everyday, did they have eggo waffles or bake and saltfish for breakfast this morning.

The point is; there can rarely be any one thing that everyone forms exactly the same conclusion about.

Basketed Bounty

Getting back to photography specifically; I’ve said this before but there is no right way to present a photograph to ensure that it speaks the truth (if it’s truth you want try the Bible, Quran or Bhagavad Gita). There can rarely be a situation where a photographer can record a photo without putting his or her own interpretation on that scene.

Do you think if you point a camera, pull the trigger and upload the resulting photo immediately, that you have shown the truth? Is it even accurate? Some software engineer at a lab in some part of the world put together a set of parameters that defined how your camera would record images.

That person decided how each and every image coming out of your camera would look, by default. There is no magic in it, no dust from the scene floats through the lens to embed itself on to the sensor making it magically true.

Is the photographer’s processing of the image after it comes out of the camera magically different from an engineer in a lab somewhere deciding how it will look, before the image is taken?

Even with film, there are varieties that will give accurate skin tones for type of skin tone, but not another. There are films that will bring accurate colours to certain types of light, there is black and white film. The point is, someone decided to alter the recording medium in specific way to record a particular characteristic. A conscious choice is then made by a photographer as to what option s/he will exercise.

Is it “true” or “honest” or “genuine” only when you use a neutral setting (as defined most likely by an engineer somewhere in Japan) on your camera, viewed through a lens which identically duplicates the field of view of an average person (as defined by a scientist speculating on the basis of the eyes of the 10 corpses he has dissected) and pointed at the scene that you are attempting to photograph by throwing the camera up into the air and snapping the shutter wherever it ends up pointing?

Damon Winters himself in the New York Times article makes the point much more clearly and succinctly than I do, but then I add that delightful element of ridiculing those who don’t agree with me, topped with a healthy serving of hyperbole, to flog my point to death :).

Forward Outlook

The bottom line for me is this: every aspect of photography involves a choice. Anything ranging from aesthetics to composition to equipment is a choice made which can affect the final outcome. To suggest that there is any “pure” representation of reality is absurd because we all view reality a bit differently.

I think the person drawing the line should be the maker and not the consumer. If the maker goes overboard, then the consumer will decide with his or her feet (or eyes). But I shouldn’t be the one to decide, nor any pundit/blogger.

It’s not my place to make choices for the people around me, certainly not when deciding on aesthetic issues.

There are degrees, certainly. I’ve been overly dramatic to make a point, but I acknowledge and agree with someone who says that a newspaper probably shouldn’t publish a photo as news when it has been processed to the point where it bears little relationship to the original scene (I think I’ll leave judging degrees of a photo’s relationship to a scene for another day).

Certainly, Damon Winter deserved his award for his superb photos, processed to reflect his impression of the scene. And I do not agree that either Hipstamatic on the iPhone, or any post-processing to strengthen the photographer’s interpretation of the scene can ever be wrong. Before that photograph is even recorded, too many choices have already been made to determine what it will look like. A little post-processing, whether automatic in camera or driven by the photographer’s hand, makes no difference. None!

Angled

P.S. Oh, and on the question of whether photojournalism can be art? Of course, it can and is! (See, I can also be brief on controversial topics).

P.P.S. And another thing, I think people who use Holgas or Dianas or Hipstamatic or any other gimmick thinking that anything that then comes out of their camera is “art”, are terribly annoying.

Weird Leaves

What focus stacking does is to take a number of images of the same subject, focused at slightly different distances so the end result is an image perfectly in focus from foreground to background. This is particularly useful in two situations; macro and landscape photography.

Macro photography in particular usually results in very narrow depth of field, as is always the case when the magnification is very high and the focus distance very close. The image above results from stacking 7 images. Without stacking you could see the top of the leaf structures in focus, or the base but not both. The problem is more pronounced in this case because the leaf curves away from the lens. Those little buds on the leaf are only about 4mm across.

In the case of landscape photography, a scene can be very deep from foreground to background. Using a view camera, the movements (tilt & shift) can be used to increase the apparent depth of field and render the scene in focus from front to back. But if you don’t have a view camera, then focus stacking can be your solution to high resolution landscapes, focused from front to back.

I don’t have any landscape photos done using the technique, unfortunately. Never got around to trying it, so here is a photo of a pawpaw (papaya) instead :).

Pawpaw

The technique is useful anytime very high depth of field and resolution are required, I’ve just given two examples (macro & landscapes).

Now as regards the practical aspects of focus stacking, you must have a tripod. For macros, you will need a lens that focuses closely (preferably an actual macro lens, as opposed to one marketers believe is a macro lens). You point the camera at a scene you want to photograph and start taking photos starting from either the furthest focus point and working closer or vice versa.

A fairly gently curved surface like the pawpaw above doesn’t require many shots. Using the macro lens, the depth of field is a milimetre or so when focused on this, so as the curve was greater towards the peak, more shots were needed to keep focus for each shot. Relatively fewer were needed as focus moved across the flat surface.

Because focus was significantly closer for the leaf above the depth of field was significantly less and more shots were needed to keep everything in focus when they were eventually stacked. The number of shots you need will eventually become easier to judge as you do more of these.

Although I haven’t completed any landscapes as yet, the system would be very similar save that depth of field would be greater (relative to a macro) for each shot.

When taking macro shots there is an issue to look out for; changes in field of view as focus moves from closest to farthest. You will notice that with the closest focus, the field of view will be narrower than at the furthest focus point. So you will need to set your composition with focus set at the closest focus point. The effect is not likely to occur with a wide angle lens used for landscapes (or is likely to be negligible).

The next step is the software. These is a variety of different software packages you can use. The ones I’ve tried are Zerene Stacker and CombineZM. I know Helicon Focus also has a good reputation. Helicon is well promoted commercial software and appears to be the most polished of the packages, but I’ve never tried it.

Zerene is also commercial software but is not quite as polished as Helicon. They do have a generous trial period which I made use of. It was clear to me though, having used it only once, that it would not be worth it to me to pay for something that I would use so rarely. It is a complex piece of software, as you would expect. I’ve made use of the guidance that is available on their site which quite a bit more competent that anything I can produce from memory.

Flowers, for a change.

CombineZM is the one I’ve used most often. Free, open source and very rough. But given the rare use I’ve made of the technique, the price is perfect. They have a very complete and useful help page. Again, their help is better than anything I can produce.

The bottom line with focus stacking is that, in the right hands and with the right motivation, amazing images can be produced.

17 images combined.

Red, Revealed

As much as I like to claim that I take my photos for myself and care not for what people think, I have to admit that is not entirely true. While I have my own viewpoint, I do enjoy when others like what I’ve taken and take the time to tell me so (usually with comments on my photos).

Over time I have come to get a feeling for what people like of my photography. I haven’t really modified my own way of seeing or taking photos, but I do tend to be encouraged in what I show off publicly. Essentially, what I mean is that having gotten a feel for what people like to see, I tend to show off those photos I think are going to meet with approval.

I have been using a Pentax camera since I decided to become serious about photography and one of the perks Pentax provides is a peer reviewed photo gallery to show off your best. Members of the gallery vote on each entry, and you are allowed to submit 10 entries to be voted upon each week. It may take six weeks or more for each photo to be accepted or rejected.

The gallery doesn’t publish the method it uses to determine which photos are eventually approved, but it is known that once a photo passes a certain threshold of positive votes it then enters a queue to be finally approved by a set of professional judges.

The bottom line though, is once the voting is done and approval granted, those photos have gone through a review process where peer approval is granted. And although I do get a sense from comments, on my website, of the images people tend to like, the Pentax Gallery approval process is even better at making it clear.

As one of my friends likes to point out (frequently) the Pentax Gallery is a marketing exercise. And he is quite correct, and as such it is safe to assume that their standards are not going to be true art gallery standards, but none the less it is a review system and making submissions does not automatically entitle you to approval.

I started submitting images in June 2009 and be the end of that year I’d had only 5 approvals. I had gotten quite upset that I had been submitting what I thought were my best images and consistently having them rejected. So I stopped submitting for a long time.

Then in the second quarter of 2010 I realized that while I don’t need peer approval to know what I like to photograph (or to validate me personally), some sort of validation process is valuable in helping determine direction, so I started submitting again. I was quite successful too, before 2010 ended I’d had more than 100 new approved images and had gotten much better at judging what images would be likely to be approved.

I have no doubt that the more challenging images will be rejected (as they almost always are) but every so often I am surprised at what gets approved. It appears that, sometimes, I can produce images I consider challenging, which are also crowd pleasers.

Anyway, I’ve put together a slide show of a selection of the approved images below. The full set can be viewed on my website here. And my official Pentax Photo Gallery page is here.

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 24 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 10 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was June 7th with 71 views. The most popular post that day was The camera that took the picture.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, forums.dpreview.com, guyanafriends.com, mail.live.com, and wedding.ebonito.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for kamal ramkarran, future line bar&restaurant berbice guyana, “brickdam cathedral”, gerhard ramsaroop, and hemraj muniram.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

The camera that took the picture. June 2010
11 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Off Topic. June 2010
8 comments

Pakaraimas Safari 2009. July 2010
3 comments

Five Best, Part 3 – My Top 5. July 2010
3 comments

Attempting Infrared Photography. August 2010
2 comments

I’ve been considering (once again) the question of the legitimacy of a photograph. Is a photography only legitimately a photograph when it displayed exactly as the sensor/film recorded the light, via the lens? How about when one element is taken from a photo and layered, using photoshop, to produce an amalgam that never could have come from a camera?

Can it be as simple as placing camera raw and epic photoshop production at the extremes of a linear gauge and selecting a point as the furthest which is acceptable as a photograph? Then whose selection will be the one? I am sure you can see the problem here.

I’ve been thinking of this again because of two recent incidents; my cousin’s absent minded (and charmingly antique) curiosity as to whether my photos were “filtered” and the inclusion by George Barr in his book Why Photographs Work of several photos which are heavily edited.

I’ve heard the question debated heatedly by photographers and non-photographers, but I’ve come to the view that it is largely an academic question. After all, if you are producing what you consider to be art, what difference could it possibly make to quibble over the process?

The usual response by less judgmental photographers would be to point out that even if a photo never passed through the circuits of a computer, there are many variable which alter and process the light which is passed through the lens.

The lens itself alters perspective, if you use film there is a wide gamut of variation; from super vivid, natural skin tones, cool, warm and everything you can think of. The use of black & white film (or converting to b&w in computer processing) is a change of perspective (I’ve never heard of anyone who sees in black & white). Are these not legitimate photographs?

Put a dozen people in a room and you are likely to get 10 different opinions (assuming 6 of them never held a camera in their lives) on what degree of manipulation changes the character of a photo so it is no longer “legitimate”. The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter. Makes for interesting debate though.

This is just one of the many things I’ve concluded as a result of my year of photos. If you are serious about photography, and you are serious about learning it would be difficult to avoid thinking deeply about the process. Whatever else you may gain from the process, I am convinced that a deeper understanding of photography itself is an essential ingredient.

Without this, any skill you develop from a year of taking photos daily will result only in more skillfully executed rubbish.

I read an article recently from Luminous Landscape by a frequent contributor (and well know photographer) Alain Briot. In it he suggests that talent is not something which you are necessarily born with, thereby ensuring the failure of anyone attempting a discipline for which they have no inborn talent. It is a sentiment with which I agree.

I don’t feel, personally, that there is anything that makes me take better photos than any other person other than a desire to see reproduced the things which catch my eye. I experiment endlessly to get the shot just right and make it represent my vision. I would find it preposterous to assume that each and every other person would have difficulty in representing their vision in an interesting way. And that is all I do.

Anyone putting the kind of effort into it, that I do, would have no difficulty producing images that are of similar quality. Don’t forget, I mostly put only the images I’ve selected as the best for others to view. For each the thousand or so images I’ve put online this year I have twenty that are just junk. That means that just 20% of the photos I took are keepers (and the true number is more like 10%).

I think the most important thing I can take from this year’s lessons is that I should not be discouraged by the fact that such a small percentage of the photos I take are what I consider good. It is quite likely that it will never change. What will change is the quality of those “keepers”.  The keepers get better and I take fewer photos to get them, but the outright percentage stays about the same. The point is to not get discouraged.

One other thing I’ve learned, once I’ve decided that I like a particular photo, it is really difficult to weed it out when trying to select a Top 10 . So, unfortunately, my Top 10 has become a Top 25. Please visit my website and enjoy my top 25; and if you are feeling adventurous, take a look at all of the 365 here.

Kingston Foreshore

This was taken on the 11th February, 2007 when Naseem, Andre and I decided we had to do something with our cameras other than take photos of things immediately around us.

3 years ago (Michael had to work).

We had quite a good time and got great images.

We repeated the trip just a week later, and again a few months later and this was the beginning of regular walkabouts with the primary objective being to take photographs. In the early stages it was as much about company as it was about taking photos.

The true genesis, if any, is in our days at UG. Photography was simply another way for us to connect and share time. Eventually, of course, it became more of a serious exercise for Michael and I. Andre and Naseem do take it seriously, but it is not as much a part of their daily routine.

The point of this is, generally speaking, when we go out as a group, even if that group is only 2 of us, we seem to take better pictures.

Kaieteur in B&W

It isn’t as simplistic as saying that we inspire each other, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that we tend to go to more interesting places together than when we are alone. But I believe that together, the camaraderie between us makes us better at photography together, than as individuals.

Andre has now left us permanently, so for the first time in nearly 20 years there is one of us who can’t be called for company when we decide to go somewhere. It may well be that he has gone to make a better life for himself and his family, but on a purely selfish level, it means that a friend who I have counted on for so many different things over the years, not least of which has been great photographs, is not going to be available anymore.

Last year I needed to get a few photos to include in a photo album I was getting for a discounted price, I called on Andre and Michael.

Sprite on Water.

Andre and I (among others) went to Kaieteur overland and I got great photos.

Johnson's View

We went to Berbice and I got great photos.

Colourful Decay.

I’ll still get great photos without him here, and the point of all of this isn’t that I can’t take great photos without my friends’ company, but somehow it just seems much easier when they are around, and in my opinion, the photos are just a little greater. For this and too many other reasons to count (drinking a cold beer in Ogle, using a screwdriver as a tent peg, threatening to climb on the roof of the vehicle to get a good picture, nearly falling off the Kaieteur Falls) I’ll miss the lunatic.

The Lunatic.

The problem lay in trying to fit the trip into everyone’s schedules. Apart from Andre, Michael and myself, there was also Naseem, who has not been out with us recently to take photographs, thanks to his schedule.

We were finally able, but putting everything else aside, to set on Saturday morning for our trip. From Georgetown the drive takes close to 2 hours, so if we wanted to get the sunrise an early start would be necessary. We decided that everyone on the East Coast would get started at 3 a.m. and they would reach for me by 3:20 a.m.

Typical of any of our trips instead of a timely departure at 3:20 a.m., we left my house at about 4 a.m. But we still made it in time for sunrise. Unfortunately, thanks to an overcast morning, sunrise wasn’t all that we hoped it would be (click on any photo to open it larger in a new window).

Overcast Morning in Linden

The area was an absolute cornucopia of fantastic photographs. It is an abandoned, mined out quarry with piles of sand, crushed rock, hardy plants and pools of poisonous looking, green water. A distressing area for naturalists, but beautiful in its ugliness for any photographer.

Linden was once a thriving bauxite (aluminium ore) production centre. Unfortunately, when prices for unprocessed bauxite crashed, the area was devastated and has never really recovered. Bauxite is still mined and shipped, but it is not the income earner it once was.

Even in this stripped and devastated landscape there is beauty to be found. We hadn’t had breakfast before leaving home this morning and we promised ourselves we would take our first set of photos, catch the rising sun, then when photographic urgency had passed, have a bite. Unfortunately, our stomachs had to wait, because ever moment we looked around there was something interesting to photograph. From fruit trees (fat pork) bravely surviving, the the lone stalks of plants making their debut.

Fat Pork fruit, don't ask me what the scientific name might be

Newly Sprung

The landscape was quite stunning and capable of presenting scenes of subtle, pastel colours and striking bold drama. The lesson to be taken here is that even in the most devastated areas, you can find reason to trigger that shutter. Have a look at the full set of pictures that I uploaded (only 17) here.

Mining Aftermath

They stole mobile phones from us, our money, my camera and wedding ring and a pocket knife that I usually carry. It was a traumatic experience for both of us.

We have often gone to this spot to take photographs, while it is a bit remote, it can be quite photogenic. And at the time we were there, a lot of people were walking around so we had no fears for our safety and didn’t keep a proper lookout. It may not have mattered if we had, but at least we might have had the chance to take ourselves out of a dangerous situation, if we had paid better attention.

What caught us, being typical photographers, was the stunning sunset. We were about to leave the area and were walking East, but we looked back and noticed the sunset and turned around and walked West to get a better scene to photograph.

It was while we were walking back West that we walked past the thugs and walked into a small area where there were no other people. The thugs took the opportunity and attacked us.

Two things worked in our favour; firstly, Mike, forever trying for that great shot, had taken a picture of the thugs before we had walked past them. He was looking for a silhouette of their two bicycles against the setting sun. And secondly, because there were people walking around the area, they didn’t have much time and hurriedly took what they could easily get.

Mike had his camera attached to his wrist with a strap and the thugs couldn’t get it free in the limited time they had.

As bad as Mike being beaten up was, both he and I have been diminished a bit. I wouldn’t say that we have walked into the dens of any lions, but we used to walk fairly confidently around Georgetown. Now, although we have been making the effort not to let our experience prevent us, I think we do feel a little less confident about walking around.

And that is a shame. Because Georgetown, the place and the people, are worth recording. And for a little while at least, it is going to be a bit harder for at least two of the people who think our country and people are worth taking photos of.

At least I got a good shot out of it.

Lots of people use Feed Aggregators, they aren’t anything new. I previously used a website based aggregator called Daily Rotation. They all tend to be similar in layout and function, but Google Reader is the one I now like the best.

Image 1.

I check a lot of websites on a daily basis. I have a bookmark toolbar which has a list of all the sites I regularly check (see image 1). It is getting quite full, and it takes up a lot of vertical space which is important on a smaller screen. Plus I am not checking a lot more sites regularly, including several blogs.

Google Reader is an Newsfeed Aggregator. Basically you add all the sites you regularly check to it, and tells you when there is something new. Google even helpfully lists it in the menu above your gmail screen (image 2).

Image 2

But the real beauty of it is that it makes the reading experience a lot like reading emails via imap. It shows in bold what you haven’t read yet and if you have it open in multiple browsers or on multiple machines, it synchronizes between them. So it will never show an article as being read on machine x, if you have already read it on machine y.

Image 3.

But the thing that puts it head and shoulders above Daily Rotation is that you can categorize your links and keep them segregated AND you can read some sites in reader without having to visit. So rather than going to James’ site to see what is new and having to wait will all 10 megabytes of images on the front page loads up just to see the new posts, you can go directly to the new post right in reader and load only that image (image 3).

You can even tweet, facebook, email links or multiple other things with each post, directly from reader (image 4).

Image 4.

I don’t need to tell you that you can mark things to come back later and read, or you can mark as already read all the things that don’t interest you.

If you are a relentless browsing addict like I am, there is no better way to see what you want to see, with minimal effort. And you can spend 5 minutes setting it up which is just a matter of pasting the link to your favourite site (you don’t even need to find the feed link, it finds it for you from the main url) into the “Add Subscription” box (image 5) and you are ready to go.

Image 5.

Believe it or not, I started using this only because someone has added my blog to their google reader and I saw the referral link and decided to check it out. There are other RSS readers, and they all offer similar features but this just works so similarly to my gmail that its like not having to learn something new at all. Brilliant!

(remember, click any photo to see it larger on my photo site)

Sunday 5th September

Botanical Branch

One of the biggest problems with displaying pictures on the internet is the low resolution nature of displays combined with the fact that you can rarely see an image at a reasonable size. You are limited by the physical size and low resolution of a monitor. As a result if an image isn’t flashily composed, or if a viewer can’t apply their mental rule of thirds grid to an image, then its no good.

If you were to look at a print of the image above, you would possibly see what I saw in it. You may still judge it as a poor image, but that is a matter of taste. I like it because of the depth and the textures and fine detail. None of that can be seen in a thumbnail, but in the image I can see the depth of the grass, the fine textures of the dead branch and the soft tones and shadows. Not a bad shot in my view.

Monday 6th September

The Tao of Self

Move along, nothing much to see here I’ve been taking photos for a few years now and have never managed to take a decent self portrait. I’ve either been too high concept, or too no concept. It was a rainy Monday, so no going out for a walk on the street with Mike. I decided to make some use of my father’s office which is endlessly stocked with photo opportunities.

I artfully tossed an open book on the desk, and artfully tossed my spectacles on the artfully tossed book, then artlessly arranged myself for the enigmatic photo of the enigmatic photographer

From the outset I wanted a high speed black and white film look, so the contrast is very strongly pushed to achieve a steep drop off from midtones to black and from light tones to white. It is not quite as high contrast as some b&w films, but I prefer it this way. There is also a significant amount of grain added.

Tuesday 7th September

Ol' Time Rebel

During the ’80s when I was in high school the motorcycle to lust for was the Rebel. I am still not sure who made them. And if you are wondering how I could be 29 now and in high school in the 80s, well, I was a child prodigy (in another 10 years it is going be really hard to explain how I am 29 and know the meaning of “hammertime” :)).

I passed by this spot during midday, but couldn’t stop. I had my fingers crossed all afternoon until I could come back. The light wasn’t as dramatic as when I got here, so the contrasts were a bit softer. The bike had also been moved from its midday position. Still, a photogenic scene.

Wednesday 8th September

Flooded Sidewalk

A typical occurrence in front of my office when it rains heavily and the tide is high, is that the water cannot drain off. Particularly if the Central Government and the Municipal Government are currently engaged in one of their love spats. I suppose if things were going smoothly, then I wouldn’t have had a photo opportunity. I might have to go find some butterflies or nice flowers (not that there is anything wrong with that :)).

This would have been a boring photo, of course, without the lady and her red umbrella reflecting in the water. I must have looked quite weird with my camera glued to my eye waiting for someone to walk past and reflect nicely in the water. There were other passers by, but  serendipity intervened and I managed not only to get a shot of her in the perfect spot, but she went out of her way to make sure she was sufficiently colourful to reflect nicely.

I did crop this one a tiny bit to get rid of a bit of the road which show above the puddle of water. Rather than the reflection going right to the edge of the frame, there was a millimeter or two of road showing.

Thursday 9th September

Reflecting Redly

This is the south western corner of Avenue of the Republic and Robb Street. I had already taken many photos for the day and had been, shortly before this picture was taken, trying to find out how many caipirinhas it would take before a caipirinha began to look photogenic. I came around the block to drop of Mike, and was on my way home. But the scenes just cried out for a good camera. Unfortunately, I was the only one around. So I circled the block again, and got out.

It’s hard sometimes to chose the picture I am going to post as the photo of the day when I’ve got a number of good ones. I asked my wife for guidance and she chose this one. Had I not gotten the shot above, I probably would have chosen the market stall photo myself, but the scene at the corner was different, taken at night with the flooded sidewalk reflecting the light and colour. I couldn’t resist.

Friday 10th September

Cool Move

No big story to tell here. I was just stalking the scene with the camera stopped all the way down to try and get a panning shot of a person walking along. I wanted specifically to capture a sense of movement, the rush of a weekday morning. This one happened to come out the best.

I took another photo of him on his way to collect his load of ice. In some ways I preferred that shot. It is less perfectly composed and gives a better sense of the rush and excitement of moving quickly to catch the shot, without time to perfectly compose and focus. Have a look here. This one just came out too well though.

Saturday 11th September

Delight in the Afternoon

Again, not much to say here. I actually wanted to try a technique I recently learned about called the Brenizer Method. It is a way of getting low depth of field of a fast telephoto combined with the wide angle of view of a wide angle lens; and involves taking a series of photos to cover a wide area, then stitching them to form a panorama.

Wide angle lenses tend to have very deep depth of field, even the fast ones. For a dramatic wide view with nicely blurred out of focus areas, the Brenizer Method is useful.

Unfortunately, I waited until the nice warm sunset light was almost gone before getting Sharon to actually pose. So when I realised that I had missed focus a bit, it was too late to get her to sit down again for another series. Thankfully, I took this shot as a backup in case the experiment didn’t work, which it didn’t.

As I write this it has now been about 24 hours since I took this photo. It already has 60 views. The self portrait that I took almost a week ago only now has 68 views. I guess I know now which of us people prefer to see

Have a good week.

(remember, click any photo to see it larger on my photo site)

Sunday 29th August

Clothes Dryer.

This one was inspired in a strange way. I had been reading a post on a site I check fairly regularly. The post was suggesting a few ways to keep being inspired to take regular photographs. At this point, having posted 240 photos for the year in my quest to take a photo a day, I was fairly familiar with the suggestions made in the post, but the photos used to illustrate the post provided my inspiration.

There was a photo of a library. I immediately noticed that my own modest bookshelf was lit by the most beautiful, golden late afternoon light. As I was going downstairs to get the camera I noticed that same light falling on some cord strung across our stairs to hang clothes during the rain that had blessed us a little earlier. The light and shadows, and the lines created by the crossing cord and straight balusters immediately caught my eye and was clearly a better scene to photograph than the bookcase. The bookcase has unfortunately been relegated to another day

Monday 30th August

This is how I do it.

On Monday Mike and I went looking for pictures up the East Coast. We saw lots of potential, but decided to drive out to the seawall at Montrose Village, just opposite Starlite Drivein Cinema. I like taking photos of the fishing boats moored near various places on the coast, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were lots of boats, but I just couldn’t get the right composition. As we were heading back to the vehicle we looked back and saw this tableau. The fisherman was casting his net into a canal which was draining out to the sea through the koker on the left. Pure serendipity had the other man bent over looking intently.

Unfortunately, I was a fair distance away and had only my wide zoom on the camera, so this is fairly heavily cropped to about 1/3rd of the original.

Tuesday 31st August

The only good news.

On Tuesday I dumped the accumulated newspapers of a couple weeks in the bin and noticed the interesting lines the folded edge created. As it turned out, I didn’t manage to take any other photos on Tuesday, so the old news is what I ended up with.

I usually like to use a narrow aperture to deepen the depth of field and perceived sharpness of an image, but in this case I slapped on my FA50 1.4 lens and shot wide open. This lens is very soft wide open, and low contrast. And that is precisely the look I was trying to achieve. It didn’t end up being a low contrast shot, because it was a fairly high contrast scene, but I do like the softer effect I achieved.

Wednesday 1st September

Green shadow.

My first colour image of the week and its still a monochrome, sort of Mike and I went to upper Brickdam to do some photos. On Tuesday on the way back to work I’d spotted a few interesting prospects and had decided to make a return to the spot. As it turned out we walked less than 100 feet and I ended up with 48 photos, a significant number of them “keepers”. For once I didn’t post my favourite picture as the photo of the day. My actual favourite was this one.

Thursday 2nd September

Bollards.

Having had such a good result in just a short stretch on Brickdam I decided to make another try starting from where we left off the preceding day. It wasn’t as compelling for me as the day before and we went over to Hadfield Street. These bollards were the first thing to catch my eye. Hard to miss in those colours.

Mike got a very nice shot of it, have a look here. I am more than a little jealous that I didn’t see that shot first

Friday 3rd September

Secure.

On Friday  moved by the need to do something I hadn’t done recently, i.e., get out on the street and do some street photography, I managed to convince Mike and off we went. I took off the battery grip from my camera and attached my 21mm Pentax Limited prime lens to make the camera seem as small as possible and much less intimidating.

The 21mm lens is a “pancake” lens; tiny and jewel like and oh so sharp. On a cropped frame sensor like my K7’s it works out to roughly a 32mm focal length, a nice wide normal. Just about perfect for street photography.

The gentleman who graces my daily photo is a person I’ve seen around Georgetown quite often. In a city of colourful characters, he is always hard to miss. I usually see him while driving past and I cannot tell you how pleased I was to spot him during my walk. He is always sharply dressed in his shirt and tie, and wearing those sunshades. I had the worse attack of the flu on this day, but this honestly made it a good day in my book.

Saturday 4th September

Lock up tight.

Weekends have become the hardest days for me to get my picture. I’ve lost the practice I had at the beginning of the year; finding suitable subjects to take photos of inside the home. And unlike some of the friends I’ve found doing similar year long photo a day projects, I don’t seem to have the creativity to create interesting scenes to photograph.

This suggests an obvious gap which I need to fill. I didn’t start this project in order to get better at one thing, but to improve my photography generally.

Anyway, this weekend was not tough finding photos at all. I got out of the house and went into town and had my poor wife hanging around in some questionable spots while I got my photography on. This particular building is probably known to Guyanese or every age and creed. Particularly the older ones. It was once THE place to get your medications. Fitting closing photo for the week.

I don’t write today to give you a list of what your rights might be, but to alert and remind you that you do have rights. Most importantly, to remind you what may happen if you forget to exercise some moderate degree of care with your rights.

This is how I do it.

I came across a photo competition announcement recently which someone sent to me because they know my photographs would be a fit for the competition; photos of Guyana. I took a look and read the terms and conditions of entering and was shocked to see that they presume to acquire all rights from the entrant to all of their entries whether they win or not.

The first thing that occurred to me was the moral wrongness of taking someone’s work, even if they are not wary of their rights as I, or other serious hobbyists might be. What the competition organisers are doing is taking your work; and if you don’t win the competition, you are getting nothing in return. No compensation, no reward, nothing.

If you are simply walking around with your camera taking nice snapshots you may well be wondering why you should care what happens with your photo. Let me give you a scenario: You are a devout muslim, you practice your religion and believe in its tenets. You take a photo of a beautiful, typically Caribbean scene which you show to all your family and friends and, having received some praise, you decide to enter it into this competition.

City Hall in the afternoon.

It does or does not win, but 6 months later you see the same photo being used by a liquor company to advertise a particular brand of alcohol. Can you object? Protest? Take back your picture? Nope, you have surrendered all your rights to that photo to the organisers of the challenge.

This is only one possibility, there are too many others to count. But what it comes down to is not a matter of money, or selling your photos, or profiting in any way. This is about control. You lose control absolutely of something you created. It can then be used in any way the organiser sees fit without your having any say in the matter. Would you like to give up control of the last picture you took of your grandmother before her death? How about the picture of your son catching a ball for the first time? These may only be snapshots, and you have many copies so physical loss of one is not important to you.

But loss of control is the important issue. Loss of the ability to say who can see your picture, or how it can be used, or even who it can be sold to. You may well want to give the photo away so that all can freely use your photo. You don’t get to make that choice anymore, once you have given away control.

Do not assume that this is a narrow topic related only to photo competitions. The ease of sharing photos in digital formats online has serious implications with respect to your rights. One story that may have escaped most people is that of Daniel Morel.

When the Haiti earthquake hit in January this year there was immediate and huge demand for photographs. Daniel Morel was one of the photographers who started documenting things immediately and uploaded his photos via twitpic. The links to the pictures on twitpic were then distributed via twitter. Twitpic’s terms and conditions of usage at that time maintained the copyright and ownership of the photos in the creator. Twitter, on the other hand assumes a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license, with the right to sub-license others, to use, copy, publish, display and distribute whatever is posted. One news agency took his pictures, mistakenly or intentionally applied twitter’s terms to the photos and used them for their own benefit without credit to David Morel.

Had Morel posted on twitter he might have indeed lost control of the use of his photos, as the terms provide. As it is, he has become engaged in litigation over the misuse of his images. The full story is here.

The point of all of this is, you need to know and be mindful of what you do with your property. The consequence of not being mindful is the possibility that you may, in the worse case, end up having to go to litigation to reassert your rights, and nobody wants to go to litigation. Trust me on this.

Enjoying the afternoon breeze at the Kingston Promenade

My focus (if you will pardon the pun) is obviously on photography, but you have to be wary of any type of work you surrender into the hands of another, particularly electronically. Your blog posts, your emails, your tweets, your photos; whatever it happens to be. If you genuinely do not care what happens, I hope you do not regret it later, but be knowingly careless, not unknowingly. In other words, do what YOU want with your property, don’t make the mistake of unknowingly allowing someone to make the choice for you.

On a final note, I find the organisers of that competition I mentioned earlier to be highly immoral and unethical. Their competition will probably be entered by laymen and young people who are not likely to careful of their rights as a professional photographer, or a serious hobbyist who happens to be a lawyer (like me). Thus, the entrants are far less likely to be cognizant of the need to read the terms and conditions of entry.

At the very least those organisers should have made it clear, in bold type, what it is they are taking from the entrants. Or better yet, not try surreptitiously to steal the rights of the people who will enthusiastically participate without proper warning. I’ve seen the terms of a lot of competitions online and while many of the more draconian ones acquire the rights for the winner’s photograph; this is the first time I’ve seen the operators of a competition take the rights of ALL entrants whether they win or not.

If you know someone arranging a competition or see unfair terms attached to a competition, ask the organisers to take a look here, and use terms that are fair for everyone.

School Day.

Toddler Angst

My original intention when doing these “making of” posts was to present a tutorial, whether that tutorial gave the technical details of a particular photo, or how to achieve and effect, or even how to duplicate my results; it didn’t really matter. The point was to give a reader the “formula” of the creation of the photo.

What it has turned into instead is the recitation of an anecdote of how the photo came to be. I will eventually start producing proper tutorials, but the anecdotes are a lot easier to write and a lot more fun for me.

The headline photo has become one of my favourites since I took it. I suppose it doesn’t hurt that it is of my son.

We were about to head off to the wedding, Kiran was well dressed and becoming quite restive, he didn’t really like being dressed up but not going someplace. I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures of him, so I asked him to pose. This is often a hit or miss exercise. Sometimes he enjoys posing for the camera, sometimes he seems to feel an unwanted obligation. And sometimes he simply won’t do it.

This I think was one of those occasions where he felt obligated, but didn’t really want to oblige. I think you can tell from the expression on his face, he was quite annoyed at daddy’s request. I am pretty sure he was quite full of himself at being so dressed up too I certainly didn’t ask or encourage the specific pose, I just asked him to stand in the slightly ajar door.

I had done a previous shot in this spot and I liked the defining line created by the dark interior of the house and the largely negative space provided by the white door. I hadn’t gone quite this far with the previous shot though.

As far as post processing (I use Adobe Lightroom) goes essentially, what I did was to ramp up the exposure 1 3/4 stops, increase the brightness to 68 (out of 100) and desaturate the photo. I usually prefer to use Lightroom’s black & white process as it tends to produce a nicer tonal mix than simply desaturating the photo, but in this case I wanted just very high contrast black against white.

I also increased the blacks to 40 (out of 100) which is very high for an accurately exposed photo. I also used a lot of fill light to lighten the shadows. The final step was to crop the image slightly to get rid of the security grill. The high contrast processing hadn’t blown the grill out (like it did the white door) and I felt it unbalanced the image to have another evenly weighted element opposing Kiran.

The bottom line is, as you can see from the completely unprocessed photo below, I had something good to start with and made real drama therefrom.

Angst Begins.

One of the things that I have now learned is of significant value is the number of fixed focal length (prime) lenses that are available for Pentax SLRs. Lenses that were made decades ago for Pentax SLRs can still mount the new digital SLRs that are available now. The Pentax “K” mount is well known and popular and has been around for over 30 years. And lenses from the preceding M42 mount can be fitted with a simple adapter.

The point of this is that, more than any other manufacturer, there are hundreds of cheap, excellent lens available for the Pentax DSLR. Most of them prime lenses. Having such an abundant resource is a major selling point for a manufacturer that always seems to appeal to the hobbyist, rather than the pro.

Zooms have become the pervasive standard but t wasn’t that long ago when the lens you got with your SLR would have been the standard 50mm lens. The ubiquity of the zoom lens sees most DSLR kits being sold with what is now called the “kit zoom”; a lens covering a reasonable zoom range usually from a wide angle to a moderate telephoto. These tend to be made as cheaply as possibly and, though competent for what they are, are not considered “good” glass. These kit zooms tend to be fairly slow also, having a fairly narrow maximum aperture.

Most camera manufacturers make a fast fifty, which is usually modestly priced. The fast fifty is a 50mm lens that has a wide aperture usually between f/1.4 to f/1.8. It is usually made out of plastic and is intended to be inexpensive. The Pentax equivalent is the FA 50mm which is a f/1.4 aperture lens.

Kiran at Kingston Promenade - FA50mm @ f/2.8

The real gems in the Pentax lens arsenal are the “Limited” lens. A series of prime lenses made to exacting standards, with metal construction and aiming to be as good as they can be. They were always fairly expensive, but they have become even more so with the recent popularity of Pentax DSLRs.

I have 5 prime lenses that I used to use quite frequently; the 21mm Limited, the 31mm Limited, the 43mm Limited, the FA50 and the Vivitar Series 1 105mm.

So why would you use a prime lens when zoom lenses are so much more convenient and handy? Firstly because the prime lenses are usually smaller and lighter than the zoom lenses. Pentax in particular advertises their “pancake” primes. Lenses so small that they become almost unobtrusive.

Boating down the Conservancy - DA21mm @ f/5.6

I remember a little while ago going out to take photos with some friends and facing the consternation and agitation (and dismissal) of a friend to whom I mentioned that I was confining myself to just two focal lengths represented by two of my prime lenses. Why would I “limit” myself rather than use the zoom lens I had available? Well apart from the technical superiority represented by prime lenses as against the compromises that are inherent in the design of any zoom (and particularly the kit zooms) there is also the way you see.

Although there is some correlation between the focal length of 50mm (on a full 35mm frame) and approximate angle of view of the human eye we typically do not see precisely the way a camera lens and image sensor combination “sees”. As a result, looking at a scene with your unaided eye is not going to look the way a camera sees it, even when you use the supposedly “normal” lens.

One of the attractions when using a zoom lens is the ability to adjust the field of view visible in the viewfinder to try and match whatever it might have been that caught your eye in the first place. On the other hand, frequent use and familiarity with a fixed focal length “prime” lens trains you to see the scene the way it is eventually going to look in the resulting photograph and causes you to be able to compose the photograph even before bringing the camera to your eye.

Bougainvillea Profusion - FA31mm @ f/6.3

The aesthetic consideration is not the only reason to consider prime lenses for regular use. The technical characteristics of the lenses are also a major consideration. It is not as simple an issue as to say that the Pentax FA50mm, f/1.4 lens (ouch, I paid about half of what it is now going for) is twice as fast at 50mm than the DA*16-50, f/2.8 wide open. But it does give a frame of reference. By the time you stop the FA50 down to f/2.8 it is very sharp, sharper than the zoom at the same aperture. And 2 stops faster wide open means you can use ISO400 instead of ISO1600 in a dark room (unless you need the greater depth of field).

Not every prime lens is faster than the equivalent focal length of a zoom, but the odds are that a reasonably high quality prime lens will not have been designed with the optical compromises necessary when designing a zoom lens and will thus produce a higher quality photo all other things being equal.

It seems to me also that the bad characteristics, technically speaking, of a prime lens can also become quite desired. Adding a character and personality to photos that you may not easily find in other lenses. My favourite of all the prime lenses I have is the FA43 Limited. Firstly, the focal length often immediately causes a query with people who aren’t familiar with Pentax gear.

Reputedly this represents the diagonal of a 35mm film frame and is therefore closer to a “normal” focal length (on 35mm full frame) than 50mm. Whatever the reason I find it to be an amazing lens when taking pictures of my favourite subjects, my children.

Mira on the Couch - FA43mm @ f/2.2

There is a sublime quality to the contrast and bokeh (out of focus areas) that I cannot explain. As long as the background is not too busy (grass or leaves, for example) the resulting image is just extraordinary to my eyes.

The last of my prime lenses which I use regularly is the Vivitar macro. This one is often a challenge to use because it is very heavy and manual focus (feels like about 6 turns of the barrel from infinity to close focus). Most of the virtues of prime lenses that I extolled above; light weight and unobtrusiveness, are simply not present here. But one outstanding quality is: sharpness.

Even wide open this lens is fiercely sharp. There is no zoom lens made that can match this lens for image quality although many of them claim to have a macro feature. But the lens is not usable only for macros.

Leaves of Grass - Vivitar Series 1 105mm Macro @ f/2.4

Many of the qualities I’ve mentioned before; lightness, unobtrusiveness and others, although I touched only peripherally on them, should not be underestimated. My DA*16-50mm zoom is a huge lens, take it out on the road and point it at someone and they get nervous.

The point of this extended post is to highlight the usefulness of fixed focal length lenses. While they do not have the flexibility in framing that you will get with a zoom lens, their utility and benefits cannot be doubted. If you find yourself stuck in a rut with you zoom, it may be time to explore the pleasures and simplicity that using a single focal length can give you.

Well I am, if nothing else, a man of my species, so when my good friends asked me to shoot Joan & Gerard’s wedding as a backup to her brothers, Mike and Andre it took me a very short while to say yes. They are no longer my friends.

Mr. & Mrs. DeFreitas

Nah, I’m just joking. It did teach me a valuable lesson though. Although I had accepted intellectually that weddings are challenging to photograph, it is different to actually do one and realise it for yourself. I did something right at least, I realised right at the beginning that it would be difficult and that I really didn’t know what I was doing.

Key to doing an acceptable job in these situations is to understand your limitations. Without a keen understanding of what you can and cannot do you, are quite likely to make a mess of things. Getting a shot of an important moment, even if not technically skilled (poor choice of exposure, not properly sharp/focused) is better than missing the shot altogether. And while a technically inferior shot is permissible when you are a backup, it is completely unacceptable when you are the primary photographer.

If you take on a wedding and you don’t know what you are doing you are not merely risking losing a client or friend, you are spoiling the memories of what is likely to be one of the most important events in the lives of a number of people.

My favourite photo to date with the 31mm

Knowing all of the foregoing I still decided to confine myself to two lenses (no zoom; gasp!). The first is the Pentax 31mm Ltd which has been described by some as one of the best 35mm lenses ever. What I like best about this one is the absolute pin sharpness and resolution. It is a very fast lens too (f/1.8), and works well in a dimly lit cathedral. This lens is a favourite because it gives a “normal” field of view on a camera with an APS-C sized sensor (smaller than 35mm full frame). This means that it approximates the angle of view of normal vision.

One of my preferred images with the Vivitar.

The other lens I used is the Vivitar Series I 105mm Macro lens. A mouthful of a name for a lens that is far bigger than its name implies. There is very little formal information available online for this lens because it was last manufactured sometime in the 80s! You can find some specifications, if you are interested, here (Kiron made the lens for Vivitar). I got mine as part of the close out sale of a camera shop that had a set of them new in box and paid less than half of what they are going for now, used. It is also a relatively fast lens (f/2.4) but manual focus. And not just any manual focus either; the precise 6 turns infinity to close focus that you need for macro focusing.

Another “difficulty” is that Guyanese are generally very conservative, and change or the unusual is not welcome. Anyone who has looked at my photos realises that I tend not to like the normal viewpoints for most subjects. I had visions of some low to the ground shots of the bride entering the church and something from a high vantage point obscuring by distance everyone but the bride who would stand out in her gown (since the wedding was at Brickdam Cathedral, I am not sure where I would find this vantage point).

I also wanted to get some photos of the bride getting ready and confusion in the house, the groom stepping out of the car that brought him (car door open, interior obscured by shadow, groom’s foot about to touch pavement :), etc. In other words I had a lot of ideas. Unfortunately, reality conspired to knuckle me in the head and things moved quite a bit faster than I had anticipated. I was quite shocked that they wouldn’t stop the proceedings to allow me to get THE shot And no matter how accommodating my wife and the bride, I doubt that either of them would have allowed me to start taking photos from the time the bride started brushing her teeth for the morning.

Wedding Music

I digressed a bit, but the point I was trying to make is that had I the opportunity and time to do what I wanted to do there is a good chance that the bride and groom would not have liked the result. So perhaps a good thing since the photos were not for me, but for the bride and groom.

The challenge of using the two prime lenses was mitigated by the location. The church allowed me to make quick changes in perspective, so if I needed to quickly get a closer view and had the 31mm lens on the camera, I could quickly move closer. And likewise, if I had the 105mm lens on and needed a wider view, I could quickly move back. This works only within limited parameters as the switch was between a wide angle lens and a telephoto lens, but was sufficient if I didn’t have time to switch between them.

At the doorway

The wedding reception after the ceremony was a different situation. No wide aisles and seating arranged in a grid. No space to easily move further away. Plus I got tired and lazy. Too much work to get a good composition with prime lenses, too much work to keep changing lenses. So I switched to a wide angle zoom; the Pentax DA*16-50mm. This is Pentax’s pro level wide zoom and as fast as a zoom gets (f/2.8, but very soft wide open).

Panning shot.

One of my favourite photos of the entire day was taken with this lens. A panning shot of the bride and groom making their entrance across the room. Someone asked me why I used a blurred shot. This one isn’t blurred, at least the bride and groom are sharp, but the background is blurred as I was panning the camera. I like these types of shots because they give a strong feeling of movement. This one came out better than I expected.

I did use an actually blurred shot also. Once again because it imparted a feeling of movement and action to the scene. But the very fact that I was questioned for these choices make it clear how conservative Guyanese viewers are. Aesthetics are bright colours and sharp focus; things like creative composition and unusual angles are frowned upon.

I did assert my own sense of aesthetics to some extent with the processing of the images. Although they appear to be monochrome, they are actually significantly, but not completely de-saturated. The contrast is very soft (although the images are sharp, the sharpness isn’t emphasized) and the tones soft also.

I came away from this experience with one abiding vow. I won’t do anymore weddings. Plus I gained a whole new respect for people who do this for a living (at least the conscientious ones). If the bride or groom flubs a line during the ceremony, they get to do it over. If the photographer fails to take the right shot at the right time, no do overs + very annoyed client. Not an easy job. But looking back at the photos that I consider good, I can see how it can be very fulfilling.

Michael’s photos are here; and Andre’s are here. My full set is here.

P.S. If you want a complete set of applicable acronyms, have a look here. Quite an amusing article.

I’ve been trying a new (new to me) photographic technique recently. It is referred to as infrared photography. Most of the people who end up reading this post will probably know that what we see as white light is actually composed of a number of different colours. You can see those colours every time you see a rainbow.

When you see a rainbow the colours you see go from red at one side, to violet on the other. Beyond red is a part of the visible spectrum (of electromagnetic waves) that our eyes cannot see, called infrared (strongly heated metal, like the heating element of an electric stove produces lots of infrared). For the curious, beyond violet is ultra violet which can cause sunburn and eye damage if you go out into the sun unprotected. But to avoid misunderstanding, the infrared photography I am discussing is not thermal imaging, which is photography or videography of radiated infrared. What I am discussing is reflected infrared light.

It is the reflected infrared light that photographers are usually interested in, either trying to block it out completely or to make use of it to provide some very interesting photographs.

The visible spectrum, what you can see in a rainbow, runs from 400nm to 700nm approximately. If you want the gory details, see here. The part of the infra red spectrum that photographers are interested in runs from beyond 700nm to approximately 1400nm. This is sometimes referred to as near infra red.

Why I want to do IR.

My primary reason is because of the surreal, false colour images you can get with IR. Unfortunately I have not yet been able to produce any false colour image that I like, either I am not finding the right scene to photograph or I am not doing it correctly or I don’t have the right equipment. I have taken the liberty, for demonstration purposes of hunting for an example image and found the image below. It was taken by Talke Photography, who I found on Flickr.

Eiffel Tower in Infrared by Talke Photography

This is a great example of false colour IR photography and has the additional benefit of being copyrighted under a creative commons license which allows me to use it as long as I attribute the photographer. I could not easily find a way to contact the photographer, so I haven’t been able to specifically ask permission, but the license he uses allows me to use the image without specifically seeking permission.

If you would like to see some more examples of false colour IR photographs, the new Google image search works really well.

As you can see, when properly processed, the images have a surreal but dramatic colour that is attention grabbing and very interesting. It is not straightforward to get the picture to this stage because, regardless of which method you use to take the photo, quite a lot of processing is necessary.

Bamboo in a Pond (IR)

As I said before, while I am not getting false colour images to suit my demands, several of the images I have gotten work well in black & white. Characteristic of black & white IR images are supposed to be white foliage, as leaves reflect infrared light, and black water as still water absorbs infrared.

I am not sure though, what is causing my failure to get the false colour images I want. It might be a failure of technique, or I am choosing the wrong scenes to photograph. Or it may be that the filter I have isn’t the correct one.

The electronic sensor in digital cameras is very sensitive to infrared light. In order to prevent this from causing problems with colour rendering (causing the black of some fabrics to render as a purplish/reddish colour, for example) it is necessary to build in front of the sensor a filter to prevent most of the IR light from reaching the sensor.

Over the course of the last few years those filters have gotten stronger and stronger and it now seems like the camera I have is not suited for this particular type of photography as a result of that filter blocking almost all IR light. This is just speculation though, I may be doing it wrong.

Equipment and technique.

If you do not have a camera specifically altered for IR photography (by the removal of the built in filter to block infrared light) you will need a special filter for your lens. I have a Marumi HB700 (because it is the cheapest). This filter blocks visible light to permit only infrared light to reach the sensor. The filter you will hear referred to most often though is the Hoya R72. The Hoya is quite expensive.

As you might infer from the names of the filter IR cut off frequency for the Marumi is 700nm and below and for the Hoya it is 720nm and below. This means that light above ~700nm (699-390nm, which is visible to the naked eye) is mostly blocked.

It is a bit of a kludge (scientific term) because as a result of having a filter in the camera which blocks most of the IR light and a filter in front the lens that blocks most visible light very little light (IR or visible) gets to the sensor and exposure times are fairly long. A tripod is a necessity.

Additionally, to minimize exposure time and the effects of movement in the scene if you are using a filter in front the lens like I am, it is probably best to photograph at midday or the peak of daylight to shorten exposures as much as possible.

Generally speaking, the camera works the same way even if you use a filter. It should automatically set the exposure correctly and also autofocus even though you won’t be able to see through the viewfinder (my comments are specific to digital SLRs). If the camera has a live view feature where it displays the scene on the screen at the back, then it is possible to compose the image even with the filter on.

As the IR filter lets through very little visible light, if you don’t have a live view feature you will be required to compose the picture before attaching the filter.

The other possibility, which is considerably more expensive (unless you are willing to DIY and risk permanently damaging your camera) is to buy a camera with the internal filter already removed, or to send an existing camera to one of the services (here and here) which will perform the necessary surgery. You can also purchase a pre-converted camera sensitive to IR.

The major benefit of these cameras that have the IR cut filter replaced is that you can handhold, see through the lens and switch lenses without worry. Of course, you pay for the privilege.

One last thing that I feel important to mention is the issue of white balance. You cannot judge whether you have the correct white balance merely from the picture as you might in ordinary circumstances. It is necessary to set a custom white balance based on the green of tree leaves or grass, after placing the filter on the lens.

Post Processing.

The other aspect of technique involves post processing. Most of the time the image out of the camera is not aesthetically pleasing. It will have a heavy red/magenta cast. I have seen at least one image where the heavy red cast is actually pleasing, but I suspect that most of the time it won’t be. This is where it gets (even more) complicated. To achieve the false colour look of the image at the top (Eiffel Tower) you have to swap the red and blue channels in photoshop or its equivalent.

I don’t want to go into the process of doing this as I am not sure that I can explain it correctly. This is the best guide I have been able to find that outlines the whole process. I believe that the post processing is simple enough to be achieved by someone with moderate expertise handling post processing software.

Conclusion.

My experiment with this technique is, of course, nowhere near concluded. When I get the false colour image I have been looking for then I will conclude that I am proficient. Until then I will continue to experiment.

I think my major problem so far has been finding the right scene to photograph and I am now fairly certain that I have the right scene in mind. Unfortunately I have not yet been able to visit the scene as either I don’t have the time when the time is right (midday) or the weather has been cloudy when I need a bright blue sky. Ah well, soon enough I suppose.

Unsuccessful Infrared

Karasabai Village, we started our drive through the mountains from here

On vacation you are supposed to experience exotic foods, meet interesting people and see unusual sights. I might have expected to achieve two out of three of those on the Pakaraima Mountain Safari 2009, but it never occurred to me that I would have an exotic lunch of curried chowmein after driving six hundred and fifty kilometers over three days into the heart of Guyana’s interior. Curried chowmein is certainly not something I had ever eaten before, but it was an unexpected treat on a journey where lunch is usually a handful of fried plantain chips or crackers.

Hillside House at Kato

Started in 2003, the rather unfortunately acronymed (my own word ) Pakaraima Mountain Safari (PMS) was intended to honour the opening of the first road route which connected several remote communities in the interior of Guyana, from Karasabai to Yong Peru in Region nine to Paramakatoi and Kato in Region eight, by traveling the roads connecting those communities with the eventual aim of reaching the Orinduik Falls in Region eight.

Pioneers of the safari included Mr Harripersaud Nokta MP, then Minister of Local Government and Regional Development and Dr Bheri Ramsarran MP, now Minister in the Ministry of Health.

This year’s safari began on a sad note when the participants were told, just before driving off from Georgetown, of the death of Mrs. Janet Jagan, a former President of Guyana.

Traveling as a group were my friends and fellow photographers, Michael and Andre Lam, as well as Nicholas Lam and Frederick Low. We used two vehicles and traveled along with fifteen other vehicles, two motorcycles and a four-wheel ATV. This year’s safari attracted the largest group of vehicles to attempt the drive to Orinduik Falls so far.

For us intrepid amateur photographers, this trip was long anticipated. Traveling through some of the many breathtaking areas of Guyana, which untravelled coast dwellers would find it hard to believe existed here, we expected an abundance of photographic opportunities; and were not disappointed. Interesting people, unusual sights and, apparently, even exotic food.

Our first day was, at the same time, the least interesting and the most tiring. We began driving from GUYOIL’s Regent Street Service Station, in the centre of Georgetown, at just about twenty minutes before two in the morning on Saturday, 28 March. We did not end that day’s driving until ten minutes to six in the night when we drove into Karasabai, nearly six hundred kilometers from where we started.

Driving off the Kurupukari Ferry in 2005

The drive from Wismar to Karasabai can be a wonder of sights and experiences. But even this well traveled road is rarely visited by the most of the Guyanese who make their homes on the Atlantic Coast of Guyana.

Among the attractions on the way from Wismar to Karasabai is the magnificent Iwokrama Rain Forest Reserve and its Canopy Walkway. The three hundred and seventy-one thousand hectare Iwokrama Reserve described in their own words is an “extraordinary ecosystem encompassing a range of habitats which…contains an extraordinary biodiversity, including over four hundred and seventy-five species of birds and the highest recorded number of species of fish…for an area of comparable size”.

Canopy Walkway taken in 2005

The Canopy Walkway, which forms part of the Iwokrama Reserve is a series of suspension bridges and decks which are as high as thirty metres and as long as one hundred and fifty-four metres in the forest canopy (right at the top of the jungle). This is an experience which ought not to be missed, even if you are afraid of heights, since you can join the high-fliers like the harpy eagle in the rainforest tree-tops.

To complement your experience and to give you a change from the forest, you can spend some time on the savannah, which you meet after leaving the Iwokrama Reserve. The remainder of the way to Lethem is through Annai and the savannah. There are a number of hospitable facilities in the savannah where you can stay, including Rock View, a resort facility located at Annai. It is an experience that travelers will find impossible to regret.

Small waterfall at Kato

Our journey, however, took us off the main road to Lethem into the Pakaraima Mountains. This part of the journey defines off-road driving and should not be attempted, without a local or experienced guide, by anyone who has not driven off road before. It is quite a challenging drive through savannah, forest and mountains and drivers have to be very careful so as not to allow their vehicles to slide off the dangerous sides of the mountains.

First dangerous ascent

Mike and I were forced at one point to imagine ourselves being immolated in flames as our vehicle started to slide off the edge of the “road” carved out the side of a mountain. Fortunately, after a few seconds of screaming like teenage girls (and Mike permanently affixing his handprint on the passenger side grab handle) I remembered how to drive, goosed the throttle a bit and pulled the vehicle out of the slide.

The vistas and scenery of the Pakaraima Mountains must be seen in person to be believed. A common question, accompanied by raised eyebrows, among fellow travelers was whether we were still in Guyana.

Villages such as Karasabai, Monkey Mountain, Paramakatoi, Kato and Kurukabaru and others all have airstrips and are accessible by airplane. Experienced tour operators can arrange packages via air which would require less time and effort but provide an outstanding experience. In my opinion, though, the only way to properly experience the magnificent sights is by hiking or driving.

Orinduik, one of the more accessible waterfalls

Although my primary purpose was to take photographs, I enjoyed the drive and the opportunity to simply sit in quiet contemplation of the views around me. I think that our group of travelers all agreed that this was a fantastic trip with something different to offer each of us. And while we each had very similar reasons for participating I am certain we each had a unique experience.

The organiser of our safari this year, and for many years previously is Frank Singh of Rainforest Tours. Frank is the man who makes sure that participants have a good time safely. Unless you have been making trips like this for 10 years or more, Frank is the man to listen to if you want to avoid tears. Disregard his advice at your peril. It is a tribute to Frank’s experience and professionalism that everyone returned from the trip safe. It is also a tribute to him that everyone I spoke to thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

I know one rather large young man will never forget his experience. Frank stopped the convoy and walked down the line of vehicles telling everyone that the way forward was flooded and for safety the passengers would have to continue on foot to climb an extraordinarily steep trail while the drivers braved the flood waters. Andre, the lunatic, immediately announced that he wanted to climb on top of the vehicle to get the best vantage point to take photos.

Frank, realizing the type of people he was dealing with in our vehicle, immediately admitted that he was just pranking us and went to the vehicle behind us looking for more fertile ground for his prank. Approximately 30 seconds later, we saw this . . . bountiful young man, wearing a pair of slippers, taking off at a determined pace towards the mountain, jiggling all the way. 5 seconds later we see Frank, also a bit bountiful himself, trying to walk quickly behind the young man while doubled over laughing. I bet that young man won’t soon forget the trip.

So what about our group of intrepid, amateur photographers? We returned to Georgetown with over three thousand photographs. It was a successful and thoroughly enjoyable safari.

Enthusiastic Photographer

Villager

Masked Men

Early Morning at Karasabai

Navigating Kato Falls

Orinduik, handheld long exposure in the evening

Orinduik from afar

Afternoon Repose

The picture on the right is a good one. No point in false modesty. It is good not only because the composition is good, but because the exposure is exactly right and the focus and sharpness are perfect. Seen full size it looks far better than the little thumbnail on the right.

How did I spot the shot? Most people (non-photographers) would just have walked past it. I spotted it because I have been working hard at improving my photography for the year so far. Not only actually taking photographs, but looking at photographs from good photographers and reading voraciously.

Do what I have been doing and the odds are, you will never walk past a shot like this; or an equivalently good scene for the various different types of photography.

There is an unending supply of talented photographers around and the ubiquity of cheap digital cameras has allowed a vast number of people to explore their talent. It is hard these days to make your voice heard in the huge volume of good photographers now trying to be heard at the same time.

There are a few things that are key; lots and lots of practice, lots and lots of superior photographs in your portfolio and knowing the rules (and when to break them).

This one photograph, good as it is, is not going to get me anything. A few people will see it, a smaller number will like it, and nothing much will come of it. This is the reality of competition.

What will get me recognition (and you too if you are interested) is relentlessly producing good quality work, recognising that any kind of success can take a while and lots of self promotion.

Have a look at my photographs here.

And while I consider my picture above to be good. Have a look here to see what I consider to be a great photograph (photographs that can change the world). The depressing nature of that scene and others he had to witness were thought to have contributed to Carter’s despondency and later suicide.

People are always asking me if I edit my photos. The answer is a qualified “no”.

To a photographer, editing a photograph means altering the image to either put something into it that was not there, or removing something that is in the scene, but unwanted.

Even then, it is a matter of degrees. Famous portrait photographer Ann Leibovitz (pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair) often produces composites.

She takes the photo of the person in front of a neutral background while her assistants look for and photograph suitable backgrounds. The portrait of the person is then placed on the background. There are opinions that while the result might be art, it is not a photograph. Opinions are divided.

The vast majority of my photographs are processed, but not edited. The images that are produced by my camera are in a special format called “RAW” or digital negatives.

Digital negatives, like negatives from a film camera, cannot be used as is. They have to be processed, like a photographer would have to process film from a film camera.

Serious photographers, in the film days, would have had their own darkrooms (and there are still a significant number of photographers who still use film and have darkrooms) and done their own processing and printing.

I use software to process my digital negatives (called “Lightroom” in a brilliant bit of naming by Adobe). The process is entirely analogous to the “washing” of film to produce negatives, and subsequent printing of the negatives.

A modern digital cameras, that you might carry around in your pocket is more like a Polaroid instant camera than a regular film camera. The processing of the image to produce something you can put online, on facebook or print is done within the camera. So you have a usable image milliseconds after releasing the shutter.

All the things that I might do in Adobe Lightroom or a film photographer might do in his darkroom are done for you, by the camera itself.

Because all the decisions as to how to process the image are done by the camera itself a lot of the flexibility is lost, but you get an image that can be used immediately. The convenience of having the usable image immediately, outweighs the processing flexibility of having the digital negative, for most people.

Even professional photographers, sports photographers or photo journalists, often prefer to have the finished photo straight out of the camera as deadlines have to be met, and the subtlest nuances of a scene are not of great import. Their need is to have a usable image as quickly as possible.

When I photograph a scene I will often take a significant number of photographs that have only the subtlest differences in composition and lighting. I then take all the images into my lightroom see which one(s) I think is best. If more than one I then process them to see which looks best as representative of what I want the photograph to say. And it is that final selection that I might print or put online.

Processing decisions I might make include adjusting the contrast, cropping the image, changing the white balance (if the camera got it wrong, or if for aesthetic reasons I prefer the image warmer or cooler), sharpening the image (this is a requirement for digital images because of the way the sensor captures the image) or converting colour to monotone.

I’ve seen negative reactions when I have tried to explain this to people in the past. But what I do is no different from what the average camera does automatically in order to produce a pleasing JPEG. The difference is that I make all the decisions myself for reasons of control, whereas most people prefer the speed of allowing their camera to make the decisions automatically for reasons of convenience.

I’ve had people look at a monotone image of mine (black and white) and commented favourably, then looked at a nicely saturated colour image and asked if I’ve “edited” the image. I’ve always wanted to ask if that person sees in black and white and how come I didn’t get the dreaded “edited” question when they saw that photo?

Most, or all of the processing that I might do in lightroom were (and still are) done by film photographers save that film processing is a lot more difficult, time consuming and expensive.

I do edit (by my own definition) my photographs from time to time. I have no easy way to check, but by recollection, of the fourteen or fifteen thousand images I’ve taken over the last four years I’ve edited less than five. The edits usually consisted of removing (cloning out) electrical wires from a scene.

Unedited

I’ve put two versions of a photo I took yesterday, below. The first one [to the right] is the original straight out of the camera without any additional processing by me. The top of the image is overexposed because I exposed it for the reflection in the water. You can see the result of the overexposure in the City Hall tower. It is very white and little detail of the windows or the wood can be seen (its “blown out” in the parlance). The white balance is also incorrect. This was after 4 p.m. so the light was very warm, golden afternoon sunlight. What is white in the image, should really be yellow.

The second image results from my processing [below right]. I’ve applied a -1ev gradient (graduated darkening, more darkening at the top, less darkening towards the middle), raised the black clipping point (made the deepest shadows pure black rather than just shadowed, very subtle) and some slight sharpening. This processing was done in less than a minute and the result more closely matches what I saw through the lens.

Although the white balance is inaccurate (the camera made the wrong choice), for aesthetic reasons I’ve not corrected it.

Edited

I’ve also edited the image. I cloned out the electrical wire at the top right.
I take photographs for strictly aesthetic reasons, I am not an archivist and not overly concerned with accuracy. What I want to achieve when I take a photograph is to convey the impact that the scene made on me. Usually, in order to convey that impact it is necessary to compose and/or process the image in creative ways.

Choosing a five best overall though was difficult; in part because there are so many I really like and there are also quite a few that even if they aren’t very good, have an interesting story to go with them.

Anticipating

Only one part of judging a photo is assessment of outright technical merit. Often the photo taken with consummate technical perfection is the least likely to please viewers and obversely a photo which is technically flawed will win compliments.

Far more important to judging whether a photo is good or not is the viewer’s own preferences and prejudices. The photo of my wife (on the right) was taken just 2 days before she delivered our daughter, Mira. Any expectant mother will know that look on her face and will probably like this shot.

I deliberately boosted the contrast in this photo to give a harsh feel to the photo and accentuate Sharon’s distressed and uncomfortable look. The blown highlights are mostly deliberate, but degrade the technical aspect of the photo.

She was very annoyed at having to pose for me when she was so uncomfortable, but I expected that and used it to my advantage. I didn’t really want a photo of her where she looked comfortable and relaxed.

Shelter on a rainy day

Next up is the best shot in this post. On the left is an image that won a challenge on DPReview (one of the premiere camera review websites). Nothing major, but gratifying nonetheless.

I reached to work a little after 7 a.m. on a rainy day. There were several large puddles of water and I went out to try and get some nice reflecting shots. On the way back to the office I spotted him out the corner of my eye and stopped and asked to take a picture.

He was reluctant at first, but eventually obliged. I was in two minds about stopping and asking, not really an easy thing to do, but I am so pleased I did.

Because of the soft, even lighting resulting from the heavily overcast sky, the colours were very saturated, almost cartoonish. I did like how it looked initially because I like bright colours. But the bright colours didn’t really suit the mood of the image. One of the largest changes I made was to reduce the saturation of the image.

Brothers

If you have had a look at my photographs you might notice that I really like to take photographs of people. It doesn’t really matter much to me what situation they are in; posed, candid, street photography or any other situation you might find people.

I think there are cases where people can be intrusive; landscapes and architectural for example. And there are specific types of photography which cannot include people. But I think almost any scene can be livened up by having some people in it. One of my favourite albums to post to is my people album. I am always happy when I have an image to post to that album.

The point is, of my top five images for the past six months three of them are of people. It is no coincidence.

In this case I tracked the brothers for a while, as they were walking down the sidewalk. When I saw them about to cross the street I was almost hopping up and down in anxiety hoping for them to cross where I wanted them to. The next issue was for their steps to synchronize. I must have take a dozen photos of them in the 10 seconds or so it took them to cross the street.

Knotted

I had to include this image (to the left). Quite apart from the fact that I do think it is one of my best for the year so far a lot of thought went into constructing this one. I am certain that I would not have been able to take this photo had I not started this photo a day project.

I did a comprehensive “making of” post on this image a short while ago and don’t propose to repeat that.

I didn’t find the scene having looked specifically for it. I just saw the juxtaposition of the knotted rope set against the diamond pattern lattice wall and recognised the potential.

It is an enhanced ability to recognise this potential that taking a photo per day for a year has brought me. I started taking photos seriously early 2007 when I got a new camera. I had that camera for nearly 3 years and took about 8,600 pictures in that time. Since I sold that camera and got the new one (and thanks partly to my photo a day project) I have taken over 11,000 in nine months.

This quantity comes not only because I have to take at least one photo each day, but because I am recognising more interesting scenes and actually stopping to take a picture, when in the past I might have moved on.

Taking on passengers

With respect to this final image of my top 5 I think I may be biased because it happens to be one of the more recent of my favourites. There is a good chance that it may not survive in my top photos list, but at the moment I really like it.

At least part of that liking comes from the fact that it is an accidental photo. I had intended to take a photo looking up the street. I set my tripod and carefully waited until the traffic lights at the corner (out of frame) said go, so that I would get some light trails as the vehicles drove past (see here for an example).

Unfortunately (or fortunately) this minibus pulled up right there to offload his passengers. At the time I thought it was a disaster. Had he moved off quickly enough the bus would have faded to a ghostly shadow as he would not have been in the scene long enough to firmly expose on the camera sensor. I was so annoyed when he refused to move.

It was not until I got home late that evening that I decided that this totally accidental shot was the one I liked best. It just goes to show that in photography, as in anything else, luck can often play a big part.

Given the difficulty I’ve had picking my top five for the last six months I am not sure I am looking forward to repeating the exercise at the end of the year to chose my top ten.

Anyway, one of the areas I have been exploring significantly more since this year started, is photography of people. Not only posed portraits and semi-casual portraits, but street candid photos or candid photos generally. By “candid” I don’t necessarily mean photos taken surreptitiously (although that is a part of it) but photos where people continue what they are doing even though they know they are being photographed.

Birth

The first of what I would consider my five favourites is this image (to the left) of my daughter, minutes after her birth under the warming lamp, being examined by the doctors.

There are a lot of things I like about this one; firstly I did a decent composition considering the circumstances, it was fairly well planned. Everything from the suction machine in the lower right corner to the silhouetted doctors on the right were intentionally in the scene.

Secondly the intensity of the light on her pushed everyone else (except the doctor who delivered her) into deep shadow. It is fitting that she should be completely the focus of everyone, including the camera.

Midday in the Arcade

This (image to the right) is one of my absolute favourite photographs of people. My friend Michael and I went to the new vendor’s arcade on Water Street (opposite Republic Bank). I had been refused permission to take a photograph by one pavement vendor, but others had seen us. One vendor from the arcade asked us to come take some photos and this lady added her consent to take photos of her also.

This scene is so typically Guyanese that the second I snapped it I knew I had a winner. The place was very dark the exposure was fairly long, so I crossed my fingers all day hoping that when I saw it on the bigger screen I wouldn’t see the dreaded blur of hand shake.

I was so happy that I printed her picture and a couple other people who I had photographed distributed the photos to them. They were so pleased that I have a standing invitation to return and take more photographs of them. I fully intend to, but haven’t gotten around to it as yet.

Kite Vendor & Child

Another favourite is my photo of a kite vendor set against her wares. I actually intended to take photos of the kites only and asked permission to do so. But after taking the kites, she was rather taken aback when I made no move to photograph her also. I was all too pleased to mollify her by taking her picture. She is very photogenic and what I had initially assumed was shyness was just her trying to be unobtrusive.

The photo is surprisingly contrasty considering the very bright midday sun directly overhead. Usually in these circumstances, everything is washed out and flat. I did help thing along is post-processing, of course. I am no great believer in either “natural” results or in true from the camera results.

Just the conversion to a monotone completely subverts any argument about natural results. I’ve never met anyone who sees in black & white. But you can see surprisingly passionate arguments on the internet on how “right” the rendering of a particular black & white film is.

Longing for Home

The next of my favourite people shots is not quite candid, but not quite posed. The gentleman was among a group of friends/acquaintances on the pavement on Water Street, just in front of Guyana Stores.

They were waiting to make delivery of rice loaded on their trucks. I think the wharf was not ready to take the rice so several heavily laden trucks were parked on the street waiting.

I asked if I could take a picture and initially several of the men, who were all sitting next to this one, or congregated in the same spot, initially said yes and as soon as I raised the camera they scooted out of the area. Mike and I are often taken for newspaper reporters/photographers. After all who else in their right minds would be walking around in the hot midday sun taking pictures?

So he didn’t pose, but he knew his picture was being taken.

Finally, everyone knows that Guyana is a country rich in colourful characters. This is one of the main reasons it is so enjoyable to photograph people here. In fact, I think you would be hard pressed to avoid meeting someone on the street who isn’t worth of a great photograph. If I were restricted from every taking anything other than photographs of people, I can make a decent go of it here.

Stepping Orange in the Afternoon

I took this photo from the top of the new Chief Office of the New Building Society, currently under construction. I was on the rooftop, about 6 or 7 stories above the street and one glance spotted this goodly gentleman. He was impossible to miss in the afternoon sun.

I promise I have not altered the saturation or colour of this image in any way. In fact, I used a colour calibrator (X-Rite Colour Checker Passport) to make sure that the colours are absolutely accurate for the light conditions.

It is fairly heavily cropped because I was so far away, but no other work done on the image. Another technical flaw is that the bright sunlight on the back of . . . suit, cause the orange to overexpose. I rather like it though, technical perfection does not necessarily a great photo make.

Like I said, I could happily photograph Guyanese for the foreseeable future.

Colour

This is more of an anecdote than anything else, and just goes to demonstrate how much of a part luck or happenstance plays in getting a good photo, for me.

I made an unusual move on a Sunday, going with my parents to a memorial service for a former president. This is not the type of event that I would normally even think of attending.

On the other hand, it was being held in Berbice which is significantly off the beaten path for me. So this was more about a photographic opportunity, than the self-congratulatory and self-praising event that these memorials tend to be.

About 2/3 of the way there, in Corentyne, we stopped to have some lunch and relax for a while, as we were quite early. We found this open bar/restaurant called Future Line Restaurant and went in.

In these less populated areas of Guyana, far out of a town or heavily populated area, you can have either of two things happening; either there will be a significant number of very small “bottom house” rum shops, or what we had here, a big entertainment facility catering to be all things to all people.

This was a restaurant, nightclub, bar, pool hall and cafe. All things to all people.

So I walked around the place for a while taking pictures. Got some decent shots, but nothing special. I was quite disappointed as this was likely to be the last particularly interesting place I was going to be that day (“they” are so right about assumptions). After sitting down for a bit my son ran around and escaped the clutches of his handlers and ran into a closed off and partially hidden section of the bar. This as it turned out was the “bar” section of what I have been calling the bar.

Absolute beauty; green painted stools with multi-coloured leatherette covered seats, set against a partially red and partially green painted walls. But so dark, and there I was without a tripod. The entire bar, a very large space at least 1,500 square feet, was filled with photogenic nooks. But so dark.

As it turned out, none of my photos came out right except this one. Either I screwed up the exposure or I didn’t hold the camera steady. It was very distressing when I was reviewing images to see well composed images ruined by hand shake.

This photo (above) was taken in a shaded area exposed to the outside. Even so, it was also fairly dark.

The photo is cropped square. This is deliberate, and while I didn’t take the photo with this precise square framing in mind, I did intend from the beginning to have a square image and photographed the scene accordingly. I tried my best to cut precise diagonal across the tiles on the floor, while keeping the circular vent blocks visible in the image.

I believe in being honest about my photographs. I think if it is a good photograph, then it is so whether you arrange it or not. This doesn’t hold true for all types of photography, but I in cases where this is not true, then you shouldn’t arrange anyway. Anyway, I moved the yellow stool from the front of the scene to the back. It was between the blue and green stools in the foreground. I didn’t like the gap at the back. This was the only arranging I did.

In the end it worked out quite well, the square format was a good call as it maintains a fair bit of geometric tension with the tall rectangular stools and the circular vent blocks, while echoing the square tiles on the floor. And in addition to the angular tension, the image has a very strong colour contrast.

It looks good in a monotone too, but the colours were simply too dramatic to go that route.

I’ll try not to be too tedious today, but having completely impulsively decided to take at least one picture a day for the year on the first January, I am now stuck doing this for at least six months more.

The First

I supposed that I had some vague and ephemeral idea that I would try to take good pictures everyday. Though surely not. It certainly hasn’t worked out that way, in any event. As you can see (to the right) things didn’t start off with a bang.

It was a scene I liked, with the backyard and snow through the sliding doors and the soft and dreary light in my aunt’s kitchen. But this gives an idea of where I was in terms of what I was seeing at the beginning of the project. Nothing much.

So it was hard at first, partially because there was a challenge finding something to photograph in dreary suburban Scarborough in the heart of winter, but also because I was (and still am) working on seeing when I look.

Returning to Guyana made things a bit easier at first. I had my own transportation and could get around to places whenever I wanted. But it also gave me a much wider range of subjects.

Urban Hurry

The suddenly easier hunting probably set me back developing that “eye” to spot the scenes that I would like to photograph. Because they were all around me, for a while it was less of a challenge.

On the other hand, what had been forced to develop in Canada stood me in good stead and I think the overall quality of my compositions went up noticeably after my return. So did the number of “good” images I was taking.

Like all good things, however, the easy run has been slowly tapering off. I have had to get back to being very determined and directed in my search for a shot.

Why is it worth all this headache? Because in six months so far every aspect of my photography has improved tremendously. From ease in composing, to control of my gear, to the ability to “see” a good shot. I’ve even gotten better at being in the right place, at the right time.

Right Place, Right Time.

Bel Air Beach

This week I’ve decided to start with landscapes. Landscape images tend to be the most generally appealing images for most people. Who doesn’t like a good landscape?

Unfortunately, in my case, landscapes are not a type of photography I find that I typically do well with. I haven’t yet been able to figure out why, but I find my compositions somewhat lacking in drama and interest.

The first photo (on the left) is actually the first landscape I took for the year in Guyana. It is here mostly for that reason, but also because I am pleased with the textures and earth tones that I got.

This was a snapshot more or less. I had returned to Guyana the previous day I think and was still getting things on track. I hadn’t take a photograph all day and was in a rush later in the afternoon to look for an appropriate photograph.

After having been house bound in Canada in winter for a while I was anxious to find something to photograph out of the house or yard so I went for a drive to the seawall and ended up having to be satisfied with this one as I’d taken only a few and didn’t have anything else.

There is very evident barrel distortion from the wide angle lens in the horizon. I can correct that, maybe at some later stage.

Birds in the Sunset

The next image is actually my favourite of my landscape shots for the year so far (on the right). It is an image of a flock of birds flying towards the setting sun. It is a very generic image though; generic in that it has been done many times before by many people, and there is nothing here to distinguish this scene from a similar scene in any other country.

I was driving on the west coast heading south to the Harbour Bridge when I saw the sun reflecting in the drainage canal. It was still relatively early in the evening, not anywhere near as dark as the photo makes it appear. But what caught my eye was the very yellow/orange sun and the green fields.

I crossed the road and probably annoyed the hell out of a number of people chatting by the corner, but standing up there taking pictures, walking around the place and generally getting in everyone’s way.

It was immediately evident that I had to make a choice between beautiful green fields and a blown out sky (all white) or a deep orange sun and no green fields. The dynamic range of the light, from brightest to darkest was too much for the camera to capture without a tripod and multiple exposures overlaid on each other (HDR).

The thing that made me decide was, of course, the birds in the sky. Without them, this image would never had made if off my computer. In order to get the birds and the nice orange glow I had to underexpose the scene severely. It is much darker here than it was naturally.

Secluded Grove

The third image in my list is on the left. It is a small area located at the Bounty Farms location at Timehri. It is a beautiful and restful spot. Verdant and cool and rich in Guyaneseness (believe it or not, I just made that up). When you stand there you realise why it is that migrants want to return home to Guyana and why some of us stay despite the hardships we may face.

It is by no means a unique spot in Guyana, they can be found in many places and guises, but it is quintessentially Guyanese.

At my friend Michael’s kind invitation the family and I went one Sunday. It was to have been an opportunity to take some photographs in a scenic location. But with spots like these to sit and relax, it would have been just as fun to drink a couple beers and talk nonsense.

The photo did present some challenges, it was quite dark under the trees and on an overcast day there wasn’t much chance of a steady shot without a tripod, particularly as I had to stop down to get a decent depth of field. Fortunately, luck played an important part and one or two of the photos I took here were reasonably sharp. It was a lesson I took to heart though. I have my tripod with me always now. I’d prefer not to need it, than not to have it.

It is a bad idea to rely on luck though, I highly recommend preparation instead.

Stormy Benches

My fourth favourite so far is of a scene that is very familiar to most Georgetown inhabitants. Coincidentally, it also happens to be to only one of my favourite landscape photos for the year so far that is also in landscape orientation (wide rather than tall).

People who regularly look at my pictures will notice that I have taken quite a few of these (and other) benches. Benches are a subject of fascination for some photographers, myself included. I could explain why they fascinate me, but this post is already too long

This particular photo was taken just after a heavy rainstorm. As soon as I saw this scene I knew I needed to take a nice photograph, but I had no idea how to do it. Because the benches are in a line along the horizon it was difficult for me to visualize a composition which would show the reflections, the benches and the sky without overexposing the sky or turning the benches into silhouettes.

There is also a lot of background clutter in the vicinity that I didn’t want in this shot. As it is I think it turned out pretty well. I got another shot, very similar, that is actually one of my favourite shots of the year so far. But that is another post.

Burnham Memorial at the Botanical Gardens

The last of my favourite five landscapes for the past six months was taken at the Botanical Gardens about a week ago. It was very carefully composed to take advantage of the line of rocks leading the eye to the monument, while the monument is framed to some extent by the palm trees on either side.

There is also the white structure set below the warm blue sky (warmed and deepened by a polarizing filter). As far as these things go with me (which is not that far) I put a fair amount of effort into ensuring all the elements are where I want them to be. I am not always so planned in my compositions. It may not be the greatest photo, or even the greatest photo I have done in the last six months, but what it represents for me is important.

This is an image that results from a significant degree of practise and effort. I am sure others could do better, but I am proud of this one.

Hope you enjoyed the set.

Water in Egypt

I decided to chose an easy image to write about in today’s making of post. It isn’t a brilliant image, certainly not one I would count as my best, but a great deal of effort went into its creation.

Lots of people have taken these types of images before and you can find lots of guides online, but I thought I would add my bit to the tower of babel. I got the idea having seen this Shooting Challenge on Gizmodo a little while back and always intended to try it for myself.

If you have read any of my similar posts before you will know I don’t really give a tutorial on how to do these images yourself, I just give a description of what I did to achieve my photo.

If you do want a proper tutorial, this is the place to go.

Anyway, I decided that I wanted something more than simply a drop of water, and one of the images on the Gizmodo challenge was of water apparently on an exercise book. There were a lot of entries but that one really caught my fancy.

I have this framed image on papyrus, bought in Egypt a few years ago. I placed a dish of water on it and “borrowed” one of my daughter’s medicine droppers. The camera was on a tripod and I used an off camera flash placed on the side of the dish opposite to the camera. Unfortunately, the framed picture was so large that I was unable to place the lens at a shallow angle to the dish, at least not initially.

Because of the awkwardness of the placement of the camera, and the fact that I had to hold the medicine dropper it was necessary for me to use a wired remote to trigger the camera shutter. It would have been very difficult for me to press the shutter release on the camera itself. Had I set things up differently I may have been able to eliminate the remote. As it is, I am glad I had one.

After a while of getting fairly blurred drops I decided to switch to manual exposure so that I could up the shutter speed and hopefully “stop” the motion of the drop a little more effectively. In order to use the flash with a higher shutter speed I needed to use high speed sync on the flash. This allows you to use a higher shutter speed than the native sync speed of the flash. Unfortunately, you cannot use the flash off camera if you want to use high speed sync.

I placed the flash back on the camera, but since the camera had to be fairly close (I decided to use a fairly wide lens, a 31mm) the flash would no longer point directly to the water. So I pointed the flash to a white paper placed opposite the dish, in order to bounce the flash to the water.

I did get a few good shots that way, but curiously enough the shot I chose to put to upload is one of the first ones I had taken. The reason is that the drops were fairly even and well focused (plus no motion blur) and the lighting was a lot more even than in later shots. I did prefer the way some of the other drops were placed, but it would have taken too much work to even up the lighting satisfactorily. If this tell you anything, it is that luck has a part to play with these types of photos also

I’ve put some of the failures below, and you can click on the image above to see the larger version on my photo site. In all I must have taken 50 shots to get that one above. Like most other things you have to keep trying until you are happy with your shot (or too tired to try anymore

Failure, fig. 1

Failure, fig. 2

Den Amstel Quarrel

This is partially a follow up, or maybe follow on, to my post “the camera that took the photo“.

There are a lot of photographers taking pictures these days. And there are a lot of good pictures to be seen. If you are just taking photographs to please yourself, then read no further. If you want to do something more, well why don’t you let an expert like me provide some guidance. After all, one person actually bought a photo from me once And if that doesn’t qualify me as an expert, I don’t know what will.

Joking aside, you need certain things to take a good photograph. A good camera helps, a good eye (or two) is useful, practice is essential and a critical, but sometimes overlooked component, opportunity.

Venetian Shadow

A significant component of opportunity is the ability not just to look, but actually to see. I am not trying to be obscure or obtuse. I will elaborate. One of the questions I’ve been asked, by literally . . . one person is; “how did you spot that?” This was asked with regard to my take on a fairly routine scene (not the image above).

The answer is, I make a strong effort to see what I am looking at. My friend Michael in a recent post on his blog suggested that to gain inspiration you should change your environment a bit and see things with fresh eyes. I agree entirely, but that is not the only way I find something to photograph.

A significant part of my process is to simply look around me to see things that others may notice in passing but never glance twice at, simply because the world moves at such a speedy pace. I try to keep my eyes fresh even if I am in an environment that I see every day.

My approach then, is a contemplative one. To go somewhere different is to see a scene with fresh eyes, but I believe that the biggest gasp you will ever get from a viewer is to show them in a new light something that they have been looking at every day, but not really seeing.

The image posted at the top of this post is a classic example of the approach Micheal suggested. Going somewhere different, even if it is familiar, and looking around with fresh eyes. It is also an example of being in the right place at the right time, luck in other words (look closely at the window of the abandoned building). But Venetian Shadow (above) is the real example of what I am talking about.

Initially, it is a lot of work, this whole looking and seeing at the same time. At the beginning of the year when I started my picture a day project I was faced with an apparent dearth of subjects (suburban Scarborough in winter). It forced me to look and see in order not to break my project so early on. When I returned home two months into the year that practice stood me in good stead as it seemed I was spoiled for subjects. I was seeing interesting scenes everywhere I looked.

Within a couple of months that stopped and I had to start making an effort again to see what I was looking at. No bad thing really, but certainly challenging. The point of all of this is that with practice you can become skilled, with talent you can occasionally produce good images, but unless you see what you look at, you will never consistently produce good images. Each aspect of good photography is integral to the subject as a whole. Do one less well than the others and the whole will suffer.

Afternoon Light

Alone I sit, I count the time passing things, never sublime. Seconds pass, minutes crawl hours move, shadows on the wall part of the scene, am I now sitting beneath the leafy bough warmth of sun, breeze so cool keep away, deathly ghoul strength me mine, time to rise, home I ride 'neath darkening skies. … Read More

via The Michael Lam Collection's Blog

When crossing the road, look later.

I hesitate to suggest that Guyanese road users are a unique bunch, better to say in my experience they are a unique bunch. Just a few weeks ago there was a grizzly accident. A minibus conductor had the misfortune to have his head and shoulders out of the bus window when the bus was in an accident and rolled over.

Hard road, hard bus, not so hard head (except metaphorically), I think you can see where this is going.

This sticking the head out the window thing, is a regular practice of minibus conductors. Prior to the accident they all did it. No doubt, because I used the word “prior” you now think I am going to say they have stopped doing that. Nope, they have not. This is where the uniqueness comes in; they really do have hard heads. It does not appear that they can be taught a lesson.

They are not the only ones. I’ve had some degree of experience with road users in other countries and none of them share the apparent sense of entitlement and indiscipline with which Guyanese road users are afflicted. People will walk across the road in the path of oncoming trucks carrying huge containers without a look right or left. I see this everyday. Thank goodness for strong brakes.

I wonder if any of these people have ever seen a truck in the emergency section of the hospital? Or in a mortuary?

I hate to sound like an old fart, I am only 29 after all (maybe if I say it often enough the universe will make it so), but in my day road use was nothing like it is now.

Undoubtedly, a significant part of the cause is that there are more and more uneducated road users; both vehicular and pedestrian. But that cannot be all there is to it. Education first; I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t being told by a parent, or a relative or a teacher that I must look both ways before crossing a road. Apparently, the implication that you must not cross if there is a vehicle coming is no longer part of the lesson. But while educational standards have dropped, this is a matter of commonsense and no matter how uncommon it may be, I cannot believe that so little exists.

I saw an accident a few days ago; a lady was crossing the street between cars caught in a queue. She walked straight out into the path of a car that was attempting to “jump” the queue. She didn’t look, plus she was crossing in clearly dangerous circumstances and the driver was in such a hurry that he couldn’t stop. She was hit by his wing mirror and didn’t appear to be injured, but it could have been significantly worse had the timing of their meeting been just slightly different.

It may be cultural or a sign of hard times financially, but people genuinely don’t seem to care what may happen to them if they don’t use the roads properly.

I think the biggest problem is a sense of entitlement; that they are entitled to use the road and act in any manner that they please, and goodness help those who get in the way of their entitlement. This sense of entitlement either exacerbates the problem or causes the problem. I happen to think it is the cause of the problem.

Drivers don’t seem to understand that 2 tons of steel traveling even at relatively slow speeds will kill, and pedestrians don’t seem to grasp this basic concept of physics either. Speeding drivers invariably get the blame for collisions with pedestrians, but I have personally experienced pedestrians walking straight out into the road in front of me; and have seen it happen to other drivers.

When crossing at a busy intersection, look straight ahead.

I witnessed the death of a cyclist when he was decapitated after being struck by a truck. He (and his passenger) rode across first one lane then into the other lane of a busy highway from a small village street. He nearly caused an accident in the southbound lane which he crossed first (and in which I was traveling) and he crossed the northbound lane right into the path of a truck. I saw the truck swerve to try and avoid him and I also saw that the truck was traveling fairly slowly.

What could have prompted the cyclist to do something so obviously foolish and dangerous? And this wasn’t some youth who you might expect to act foolishly. This was a grown man with children. Fatalism? He didn’t really care what would happen? Or a sense of entitlement? Did he think he was entitled to use the roads in any manner he chose?

When stopping at an intersection, ensure you place yourself in maximum danger.

Drivers rarely extend courtesies anymore, minibuses certainly don’t save for exceptions that merely prove the rule.

I was being driven by my wife somewhere the other day (a fairly rare occurrence) when another driver jumped a stop sigh and crossed right in front of her. No accident, thank goodness. But when she had the temerity to toot her horn at him, he stuck his head out his window and launched a tirade at her. We couldn’t hear what he said, but he was clearly very angry. Why?

A lady traveling in the opposite direction to me, crossed into my lane to pass an obstruction in her lane. I had to reverse to allow her to pass. In passing, she told me I should have seen her flashing her lights and stopped earlier so she wouldn’t have had to wait on me to reverse. I didn’t know how to respond to that, I was so bemused.

I strongly suspect that many of the fatal accidents in Guyana can probably be laid at door of that sense of entitlement that Guyanese road users have. I once thought that this might be curable, but a quick look at our society as a whole reflects that this sense of entitlement and disbelief at the temerity of other to question this entitlement begins at the very top and works its way all the way down to the bottom.

Breaking the law and being road hogs, minibuses and private car alike.

On Monday I went to some extent to explain what I though a photo should be, at least by my judgment. One of the consequences of my position is that I keep my eyes open for scenes which may not be inherently interesting to most people, but which I believe will make an interesting photo.

This is one such. Taken fairly late in the afternoon, I was fairly desperate for my photo of the day for my project. Curious how it seems like I get some of my favourite photos when I am taking a photo out of desperation.

There isn’t much complicated to this one. It is a knotted cord set against a diamond pattern lattice screen. The composition was very carefully done so as to make the pattern in the background as symmetrical as possible while simultaneously placing the very unsymmetrical knotted rope so that it would not obscure the diamond pattern behind it. It is entirely coincidental that it happens to conform to the “rule of thirds“.

I used my very, very sharp, but cumbersome to use Vivitar Series I 105mm macro lens. It is a manual focus lens, which also weights about 2 pounds and requires what feels like about 6 turns from infinity to close focus. It was made in the 70s or 80s back when lenses were made of metal and glass.

The fairly narrow telephoto field of view of the  lens prevented too much of the pattern behind the rope from being visible, thereby reducing complexity to a pleasing level, while compressing the perspective to reduce the apparent distance between the rope and the background.

The other major aesthetic decision I made when taking the picture was to open the aperture to the maximum (f/2.4 in this case). The reason for this choice was to blur the background sufficiently so as to enhance the over picture and to avoid distracting from the actual subject.

Lest I give the impression that this all happened in one shot all taken by a flawless hand, I actually had to take about half dozen shots before I got it right. All part of the process.

This is only half of my process. The other half began after import of the RAW onto my computer system. I would say that I’ve done a moderate degree of processing to this photo. The first, and major process, was to convert the image to monotone. I never intended it as anything other than a black & white. For this photo it was always about form and not colour.

In addition, I added a significant amount of film grain. The original photo was quite smooth and detailed, and thanks to the lens, superbly sharp. A significant degree of sharpness was lost due to the addition of grain. As I said, this photo was from the time I saw it about form and composition.

Originally, I had often thought that to use a location or subject that you are comfortable with is the ideal thing if you are looking for something to photograph, but, for me, because of the familiarity with the location or subject everything looks "normal", nothing inspires you to take the photograph and you think to yourself, there's nothing here that interests me. It's always the same, you see these items or these scenes everyday and you are s … Read More

via The Michael Lam Collection's Blog

The issue is this; what should a photograph be?

Anyone who is passionate about photography will recognise this as the loaded question it is. To a professional the question likely doesn’t matter much. The question of what a photograph should be is usually answered by the parameters of the job.

An amateur (people like me), however, with nothing to do but talk about photography endlessly; about how bad their cameras are, how much better their photographs would be if they had better camera, how noisy brand x is, how much better than their own camera brand y is; in other words, anything but actually going out and taking photographs; relish these questions. Questions like what a photograph should be, are endlessly fascinating.

To my point: For my friend (with whom I always argue) a photograph should be representative of the scene in front of the camera and should only be taken of something that is inherently “interesting” (a nice sunset, for example). His position isn’t that simple, of course, but I have to simplify for the sake of illustration. My understanding of what my friend is saying is that a photograph should not embellish or represent the scene in any way, other than the way it is presented on the frame of a camera pointed directly at the scene. A forensic approach I call it.

I don’t want to give people what they expect, I want to give them what they didn’t originally think of. That way, after they have seen my picture, it will not be what originally attracted them to the scene that they remember. It will be my picture.

I believe that when people see a picture of a particular “feature” of what the scene originally was, as long as they recognise it, it will hopefully evoke the feeling that they originally felt (like a smell evoking a memory, for example). If my photograph is of something they have never seen before, then it should evoke an emotion which will cause them to remember my picture of the scene.

And that is the bottom line, people don’t remember something that doesn’t arouse a feeling in them. People remember the things that make them think. Whether it is disagreement, pleasure, puzzlement, anger or something else.

So all of that didn’t really answer the question I posed. Sorry. This is my answer, it may or may not be the right one and it most certainly is not the only one. Photography is an art form, it is what we want it to be. So even though my friend and I will continue to argue about this endlessly, I believe that even his forensic approach can be art. A photograph should be, then, whatever the photographer determines that he wants it to be.

So why did I name this post “Shadows”? I did mention that I have a different (not necessarily unique though) take on most scenes than most people. For me, this (and many other things) is what a photograph should be:

Or this:

Or this:

The Conversation Tree (for all the [one] people who visit my blog who aren’t Guyanese) is a historic landmark on the east coast of Demerara. The tree is to be found at the intersection of the Rupert Craig Highway and the road to which it has given its name (Conversation Tree Road). It was reputedly first planted by Napleton William King in 1876 to celebrate the birth of his son Napleton Walter.

My father named his blog after it.

I took a photo of it years ago, just before the photographed tree finally gave up the ghost. It is a nice picture, counted as one of my best for a long time and it is one of the images that made me think I could be a good photographer (ironically, I did a fair bit of editing on it to produce the final image, but at least I had the raw materials).

I owe that picture (or at least the subject) to Boyo Ramsaroop, who passed away recently. The tree in this picture was probably planted many years ago by Mr. Ramsaroop, and is the tree I’ve known my entire life as “the” Conversation Tree. My recollection is that Mr. Ramsaroop told me he had planted this tree to replace the previous tree (possibly the first) that my father knew during his youth. My recollection may be mistaken, but in any event I do know that he planted the tree that replaced the one in this picture, which was destroyed in an accident shortly before his death.

Boyo Ramsaroop was a well known political and social activist. He was a noted horticulturalist. Among his many other accomplishments he bore the betterment of his country firmly in his heart. Of all the things I could have chosen, I chose his planting of a flambouyant tree on which to comment.

It may well have been the least of his accomplishments, but it is significant to me because he did it from the purest of motives. Not for profit, not for fame (I doubt very many people even knew he had anything to do with it) but perhaps simply because it brought a bit of beauty to an otherwise dreary corner.

I believe that there are still people who do these things in Guyana, though in the past there were probably more. People who uplift their surroundings simply out of a desire to live in a nicer environment, or out of a bit of civic pride. It is not something that is seen much anymore.

A new tree has been planted and fenced. Done, no doubt in his father’s honour and memory, but very likely also in the same spirit as his father, by Gerhard Ramsaroop. These days in Guyana, if you do anything ostensibly in service of your country or community it may well necessitate press conferences, billboards and newspaper reports.

Either I missed the press conference, or Boyo taught his son better. I am inclined to the latter view.

When all the people like Boyo Ramsaroop leave or die, this country won’t be worth living in anymore. By then there will probably be too many self-congratulatory billboards “beautifying” the country for any of us to fit anyway.

The Conversation Tree Today

Apple Exposed

This is one of the very early images in my project this year to take a photo every day for the year.

It was taken on 17th February this year while I was sojourning in Canada.

Only a month and a half into the project I was lost for inspiration with the scenery around me. It was the middle of winter in suburban Canada and I had no one to take me to any of the interesting places.

There was good and bad in that situation, I wasn’t guaranteed a good picture, but I was forced to step outside my comfort zone.

The setup for this shot should have been fairly simple, but to compose it I needed a tripod ideally, as this is a long exposure. Didn’t have one so my big heavy DSLR with a big heavy 105mm macro lens attached had to sit precariously on a plastic storage container with the lens cap under the lens to keep the camera level.

I had seen an article, I can’t now recall where, on a portrait photographer who took long exposure photographs of her subjects in total darkness, while selectively lighting them with a handheld flashgun triggered manually. Her photos were very interesting so this is what I wanted to try (except without a breathing subject to annoy).

I placed my camera to compose the image, set it in manual mode, stopped down to give me the maximum exposure length without going into bulb mode (shutter remains open until you determine it should be closed). It was evening, but not night, so there was still a degree of ambient light and lots of clutter in the background. Stopping down radically to f/20 also helped obscure the background clutter. So the settings were, manual exposure mode, f/20 aperture and 30 seconds shutter speed. Manual flash, handheld, triggered via the “Test” button on the flash.

The reason for the long exposure is to have maximum control of the lighting via the flashgun. Unfortunately it is a trial and error process. I can’t remember now but I must have taken at least a dozen shots, fine tuning the exposure.

If you look at the apple, you will see three highlight spots, I didn’t manage to aim the flash at the same spot each of the three times I triggered it. This matters on a highly reflective surface like the apple, but may not matter as much if you are taking a photo of subjects that are not shiny and reflective. I also didn’t particularly care for the straight line of light cast by the flash in the foreground. Another flash exposure aimed at the counter in the foreground with the flash set at low power would have probably eased that harsh line.

After importing the images into Adobe Lightroom, I had to boost the black levels a bit to hide the background completely and fiddle a little with the exposure and contrast, not much was done.

The technique is a very intriguing one, but requires a fair bit of patience. While my image might not be great, it is sufficient to see that the technique has some merit and is worth some additional experimentation.

The reason some take offense is because this is the equivalent of asking Michelangelo what brush he used to paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. The analogy is exaggerated, of course, for effect. Even the most unrealistic photographer would hardly be likely to equate his latest photo of a butterfly or rosebush with the Sistine Chapel. The Mona Lisa, maybe, Sunflowers, sure, Guernica, almost definitely. But comparisons with the Sistine Chapel, why that would just be absurd.

I don’t take offense at the question. I sigh a little, if only internally, but I don’t take offense. And I will let you in on a secret, the camera does matter, so the question isn’t entirely unfair. It is likely that a good photographer with a crappy camera can take a good picture, but given the exact same scene that same good photographer will have an easier time taking a good photograph, and may take a better photograph.

A camera cannot produce a good picture without a triggerman to direct its point of aim. So when someone unwittingly implies that it is the camera that is responsible for the good photograph that they are admiring, it can cause a degree of irritation even if unintended.

The point is, a camera is a tool. Some tools are better than others, but the bottom line is no one looks at a nice house and asks the carpenter what hammer he used. So if you see a nice photograph, do the photographer a favour, don’t ask her/him what hammer s/he used.

Rest

I took umbrage at this (perhaps unfairly) because a good photo is a good photo, regardless of the method used in its creation. We have all these rules about what should be done and not done to create a “proper” image and I do think that it is critical to know and be intimately familiar with the rules, because it is only when you are than you can know when the rule book should be thrown out the window.

So why “Bad Light, Good Light”? Because it is recited as dogma that certain light is “bad” for photography and certain light is “good”. High noon is bad, sunrise/sunset is good. It is dogma. I read it somewhere sometime ago, where it was said that light can’t be bad or good, it is merely different. It was quite the revelation. I’ve never forgotten that, I used to recite the Bad Light, Good Light dogma myself, without a second thought.

The dogma is no different whether you are told that a particular lens is the “wrong” lens or the Rule of Thirds/Golden Section/Diagonal must be applied or Sports requires fast shutter speeds, and cetera.

I am certainly not suggesting that the “rules” be discarded, whatever they might be, but it seems unfortunate to assess a photograph first on the basis of whether the rules were followed and only in passing, whether it is a good photo or not.

In conclusion, may I present what I think is quite a good photo, taken in very “bad” light; late afternoon:

Bad Light