Archive for January, 2008
Ebay song
Sun Jan 27th - 6:03pm
Someone's home-made video for "Ebay" by Weird Al Yankovic. There are several versions floating around but I think this is the best…
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYokLWfqbaU]
More from Strathpuffer
Sat Jan 26th - 7:28pm
Lots of my Strathpuffer pics in the Ross-shire Journal and the North Star this week. Shame that all four of the ones in the North Star were wrongly credited to a different photographer but oh well…
Strathpuffer
Sun Jan 20th - 5:02pm
If you're a keen mountain biker or a stupidly-enthusiastic photographer in the north of Scotland then chances are you'll be needing a good night's sleep tonight, as no doubt you'll have been getting plenty of exercise at the 24-hour Strathpuffer mountain biking race.
Here are a few of the photos I did for tomorrow's Press & Journal, all of them using a combination of ambient light and subtle flash light to create a slightly surreal but still fairly natural look.
How's this for a close-up action shot? It's wide angle @ 24mm, not telephoto.
That bony fellow on the right of this photo is Bill the Biker, a skeleton made of bicycle parts that lives about a mile from the end of the course. I was absolutely shattered after walking to the location with all my gear to get this photo, and the only really good angle had a vehicle parked in the background so I had to settle for this less interesting angle.
More of the Kessock Bridge fireworks
Mon Jan 14th - 10:15pm
These are my four favourite photos of the Kessock Bridge fireworks. If you saw today's P&J then you'll have seen that they used the staff tog's pic from somewhere in South Kessock, and I can see why, but on this occasion I do think mine from North Kessock were stronger images. I wanted to show the scale of the fireworks in context and I think my photos achieved that fairly well.
Several people have been posting photos of the event on Flickr, and a search will find lots of blurry and badly-timed examples but also some very nice ones, especially this one by a guy who actually got into the water near where I was standing and made great use of the shoreline in the foreground to produce a superbly rounded image. Best I've seen so far. (I've seen some from high above the bridge that could have been really good but unfortunately they're way too soft.)
I'll also take this opportunity to link to Inverness graphic designer Sarah Patience's web site, for no reason other than she linked to mine in her blog and I'm always happy to give a shout out to anyone else representing north Scotland on the web!
Anyway, here are the pics…
Kessock Bridge fireworks
Sun Jan 13th - 3:40am
Short but perfectly formed, I think that would be a fair description of last night's fireworks display on the Kessock Bridge in Inverness. I'm sure the surprisingly short run-time will add more fuel to the fire of complaints about it being a waste of money, but I liked it. It was tasteful and elegant, and some parts were very clever. Have you ever seen fireworks dance before? I just wish it had been longer!
The P&J's staff photographer did the torchlit procession and fireworks from somewhere in South Kessock, I did the fireworks from the end of a very slippery ferry ramp at North Kessock, and then the lovely ladies at the picture desk will decide whose work makes it to print.
I'll post some more pics early next week, and link this one to a larger version, but for now here's a small version. Just look at the scale of the display! That bridge is a mile long, and the display must have spanned at least half a mile.
Update: Now linked to a larger version, and click here for more.
Portrait of a truck
Sun Jan 6th - 12:53pm
Seeing this image on a computer screen can't possibly do justice to how good the prints look, but here it is anyway. It's a high dynamic range portrait of a new truck done for the proud owner, Port Services of Invergordon.
The reason for using the HDR technique is, frankly, because the weather was horrible and I needed to do something to make the image pop. (I'm not exactly cheap so when I'm hired to do something, the client expects it to be done. Bad weather is no excuse.) Here's a single unedited exposure to prove the point:
It was raining quite heavily and the most time-consuming part of producing the final image was digitally removing the streaks of rain from the sky. And with four exposures used to make the HDR, there was four times as much rain! Took several hours. I dread to think how long it would have taken to remove the rain streaks from the truck, but if you view the large version then you'll see that I left them as I thought they looked nice how they were.
Restaurant review photos
Sun Jan 6th - 10:24am
Yesterday's supplement in the Press & Journal had a review of the Il Padrino restaurant in Brora, a 2-page spread illustrated with lots of photos by yours truly and with the photo of the garlic mussels full-page on the cover.
These photos were done well in advance, way back at the beginning of December in fact. Nearly everything was shot using ambient light with the camera on a tripod. For all of the food photos (and lots more not shown here) I did multiple exposures at f/3.5, f/8 and f/22 so I could later pick the ones with the most attractive depth of field. The staged shot of the customers being served was hand-held and lit by a big strobe with a shoot-through umbrella.
Vivitar, Sunpak flashes banned in Europe?
Sun Jan 6th - 9:57am
The popularity of classic Vivitar and Sunpak flashes went through the roof over the last year thanks to the Strobist movement, as they are cheap, powerful and reliable. But if you're in Europe then you'll be having trouble finding a new one and here's why: According to Speed Graphic (UK retailer) they have effectively been banned by European Union legislation on the use of lead. There was a rumour that the Vivitar 285HV might be re-issued in a lead-free version early this year but apparently that is now unlikely. So for European folk it's back to the bad old days of having to order from the US and pay import duty, although that's not such a bad thing as you'll still end up paying less than the extortionate European retail prices.
Happy New Year!
Tue Jan 1st - 4:09am
Time to wipe the slate clean and start updating the site anew. Now that I'm out and about working most days it's difficult to find the time to update the site in the regular way that I used to, and the longer I leave it the more pictures get queued up and we end up with these month-long gaps between updates. So to avoid that happening again, from now on I'll be going back to regular updates but posting only the photos that I've got something to say about, whether that's the background story or some technical details, or if I just particularly like the photo.
Let's kick off the new year with this view of the fireworks over Tain high street during tonight's Hogmanay party. This isn't the photo you'll be seeing in the paper as it's a composite of three frames, which of course would be totally unethical for editorial but it's fine for posting here.
Update:
Here's a better version. Ridiculously complicated to make but I thought there was potential for a good image here so I persevered. This is a composite of 4 images. The first 3 images were tone-mapped HDR versions of 3 separate frames, each made from 5 raw conversions with exposure compensation ranging from 0 to -4 at 1-stop intervals. The 4th frame was the original composite of the jpegs. So really there was a total of 18 images used to make this version!
