This was taken at the groyne in Hopetoun yesterday. Fishing is a popular sport in Australia and there are usually around a dozen people fishing at sunset in Hopetoun each night. The time here has flown by and its hard to believe we are half way through our six weeks work here. We have both really enjoyed working at The Deck and will miss it when we go. I’ve been updating The Decks Website this year and have just put the new site online. I have a few more bits to add but most of it is there. Let me know what you think.

This Yellow Rose was taken at the end of the Garden in Grantham, UK. I used sRGB colour space instead of my normal Adobe RGB. Colour space determines the actual colour a specific RGB value corresponds to. Adobe RGB has a wider range of colour but this does mean each colour is further apart. For 8bit files you can visibly see a change when you shift a value by just 1. This is not great if you want smooth gradients but it does give richer Cyans and Greens. The narrower sRGB colour range is the standard for web output as it approximates the colour range of most common computer displays but for how long. The last display I bought boasted 100% Adobe RGB which means it will not be long before most can show these extra colours. For now I’m going to do some test posts in sRGB as no matter how good your monitor is you are limited by how your browser decides to display the colours.

N.B. After testing Firefox reproduces colours far more faithfully than I.E.

This sunset was shot in Montego Bay, Jamaica. It was taken in 2004 with an early digital camera. In those days memory cards cost 240 times what they do today. In fact the two 256MB cards I used almost cost as much as the camera I used then. In order to save space I was forced to use significant jpeg compression. The more a jpeg is compressed the more speckling occurs. This can be seen best in the dark areas of the left image below. Unfortunately this type of distortion makes it almost impossible to submit images for stock photography. If you want to sell your images always save them at the highest quality. Fortunately as this blog only needs images 800 pixels wide by the time the resolution is reduced the speckling is effectively eliminated. This can be seen in the right image below. The moral of this story is only compress your jpegs if you plan to put them on the web and nowhere else.

This is part of the ancient desert capital of Bahariya which is in present day central Egypt. The scene had a very wide range of tones and looked a little dull. In order to capture the detail one copy was processed using HDR. A second copy was processed using Camera RAW with some subtle Split Toning added to warm the light. The HDR copy is then imported onto a new layer in Photoshop. Its blend mode is set to Luminosity and 70% Opacity. By doing this you get the detail benefit from HDR without getting an unnatural look. A mask of the sky was made using the Color Range tool. The mask was applied to a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer so the sky could have its colour restored to a more saturated blue. A stamp layer was made by holding down Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E at the same time. The stamp layer is needed before applying Lens Correction or any general retouch as it stops you from having to repeat yourself on each effecting layer. If photoshop is running slowly you can flatten the image instead of creating a stamp layer. I try to avoid this as it can be useful to having the building blocks of the image on the layers under your stamp layer. Even though they no longer effect the image they can be called upon to make changes later by moving them to the top layer and adjusting the opacity.

This sunrise was taken on a balloon flight over the west bank of the Nile near Luxor in Egypt. In order to compensate for the cameras White Balance Guess a colour balance layer was used to bring back the sunrise colours. An advantage of using this method is the Highlights, Midtones and Shadows can be adjusted individually. This means you can control the colours in the dark foreground and the bright sky separately.

This was taken from a balloon above Luxor in Egypt. Split Toning was used to create a number of layers. They were then blended back together using a varying opacity and blend modes.

Last night we went to the Ferry Meadows Firework Display. This was taken at the end of the display. It was the second time I have photographed it with two cameras. I set up my prime lens to capture the reflection across the water on a fixed tripod.  The second body had my wide angle on a tripod I could quickly point at any point of the sky. Both cameras fire almost continuously throughout the display. This is one of the rare times I do not shot in RAW. By recording jpegs only you stop the cameras slowing down as the backlog of large RAW files fill up the cameras buffer while they wait to write to the card. Firework displays are very much a batch exercise as its hard to predict what you will capture in a 4 second exposure. I took 217 images, I cut theses down to 45, Cropped a few and submitted them to Shutterstock. After a couple of days just these 2 firework shots were accepted.

These are the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. This image began as five separate shots. Instead of developing each RAW I stitched them together as jpegs. Once stitched and cropped the resultant image had a low dynamic range. To fix this I used levels layers and in some cases individual channel levels to keep the sky blue. Finally I used a Fractalius layer to add some glow to the image.

These are my brothers wedding rings. As they are both fans of middle earth I decided to give the rings a little magic. I started by making a mask of the rings then used it to De Saturate and Blur background. Then I inverted the mask and used it to add some subtle fractalius to rings.

This is a Copper Mine in Wales. To add light to the darker areas of the image I increased the gamma value. Gamma shifts all the mid-tones towards the highlights or the shadows. By changing the Gamma value from 1 to 1.5 it increases the image brightness. I’ve added a faint mask over the brightest areas to preserve the detail.