While this image (and the next one I'll post) are not quite as striking as my last one, I am pleased with them, not least because both do a good job of demonstrating the capabilities of the Ricoh GR Digital III – my new compact camera. In this instance, I was testing the macro mode, and while the Ricoh can focus a lot closer than this (i.e. 1cm from the end of the lens), I was pleased with how much detail it recorded in the old rusty ring.

If you're interested, the original cropped image is here:

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"Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed" – Garry Winogrand

The above is one of my favourite photographic quotes, and one that tacitly informs a lot of my photography (e.g. my beachcombing images). It's also a very liberating motto to carry around in your head; i.e. anything and everything can form the subject of a photograph – it's the end result that counts, not the subject matter.

And if you're interested, the original is here:

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As you can see, my aim with this one was to bring out the detail. There were a variety of ways in which this could be done (including creating a psuedo-HDR image, as described in this tutorial), but in this instance I used a plugin called Topaz Adjust to enhance the local contrast.

Here's another daisy shot from yesterday, and I would write more, but I'm totally wiped out today. I think, having finally realised that Libby's going to be ok, that the events of this week are starting to catch up with me: I feel really tired, am probably getting a cold, and generally feel totally spaced out. I'll have an early night.

This morning, I thought we might be back to square one. Libby had a pain in her chest and difficulty breathing: the same symptoms as last Saturday, the same ones that the hospital thought might be down to either pleurisy or a pulmonary embolism. So, we went back to the doctor's (our local GP) and came away with two more possible diagnoses:
Costochondritis or Tietze's Syndrome. Both are characterised by inflammation of the cartilage that connects the inner end of each rib with the breastbone or of the cartilage between the ribs, most probably caused by a virus. So, hopefully, she should gradually improve over the next five or six weeks (or thereabouts).

Anyway, after we'd been to the doctors and her chest pain had settled down we went up to our local park for lunch. I took my new Cyber-shot T9 with me (which I recently acquired for a project, that I'll explain in a week or so) and took a few shots of daisies, tree blossom, and so on, as we took an extremely gentle stroll. One of the really fun features of the camera is its 'magnifying glass' mode which enables you to close focus to around 1cm. And no, it's not a world shattering photograph, but it's good to finally have something to put up. Hopefully - touch wood - things will be back to normal fairly soon, but in the meanwhile I suspect that I'm not going to be able to manage daily updates, but I'll see what I can do.

On a related note: thanks for all your support this week - it really is appreciated. And Libby wanted to add the following:

Regular visitors know that I hardly ever comment here (anyone remember the last time?); but I asked Dave if I could just add a 'footnote' to his comments as I wanted to thank everyone for their kind wishes. Its wonderful to read them all, and see how far around the world they've travelled. Over 2,800 people have read the comments page, from numerous countries around the world - which is pretty amazing! Not many people get over 100 'get well' messages - but I'm sure they're working as I feel much better :-))

Thanks, Libby x

I thought I'd continue the "I didn't expect this on chromasia" theme today as this is one of the very few handheld macro shots I've managed to pull off, especially at this aperture.

Oh, and if anyone can identify the flowers or the beetle(?) please let me know what they are.

I don't think I would have considered putting this up if my wife hadn't walked by as I was browsing through some older images. "Did you use that one? You should". So I have. That said, she doesn't much like the way I've processed it. To her mind, and I quote, "floral erotica should have more depth and texture". So, there are two versions of this shot: this one, that I like, and another one (which I really don't care for) that's more to her taste:

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In this case I suspect that you'll prefer my version, but whenever I've said that in the past I've been wrong, so feel free to tell me that as usual my wife knows best ;-)

Update: The version that's up now is a bit sharper than the one I originally posted. The version that's up now is my second attempt at sharpening this image and is quite a bit sharper than the first one I put up.

I took this one last week but didn't put it up at the time as the centre of the daisy wasn't focussed – f/3.5 and a shutter speed of 1/250s wasn't a good choice ;-) But while it certainly wouldn't make a decent print it was possible to sharpen it enough at this resolution and I thought it would be a good choice for today.

So, happy Easter :-)

Oh, and if you haven't had a chance to vote yet the Photobloggies, 2005 Awards finish at midnight today; so if you haven't already done so try and stop by and vote. Thanks again to everyone who nominated chromasia.

I'm really not sure about this one, mostly because it's not quite what I was after – it's close, but, to my mind at least, there's something missing. I guess that part of the problem is that although I've had my macro lens for a couple of months I haven't spent a great deal of time trying to take this sort of extreme close-up, and I've discovered that they're a lot harder than you might expect. Part of the problem is the very limited depth of field, but the lighting is really difficult too, particularly if you're trying to use flash.

More practice needed ;-)

Oh, and through shooting at f/18.0 I've discovered that I need to clean my sensor, ... which I hate doing :-/

I know this is pretty similar to yesterday's shot, but I couldn't resist putting it up as I think I probably prefer it. It's not as serene as yesterday's, but on the whole I think it's a stronger shot. Let me know which you prefer.

Update: I've decided to enter this one for this week's Photo Friday challenge – Glow. It's not quite as directly relevant to the theme as I'd like, but I think it's close enough :-)

We went to one of our local graveyards today, the oldest in Blackpool, so I could take some photographs and the kids could have a wander around. And I took 70 shots, or thereabouts, and absolutely all of them were terrible. Lately I think I've been trying to produce more 'straight' photography, more naturalistic perhaps, but I have to confess that I've been finding it something of a less than satisfying struggle at times.

So, having spent an hour or two going through today's graveyard shots, and getting more and more miserable about how bloody awful they were, I decided that it was time for a radical change – so here's today's shot :-)

Update: Fellow Eskimo's comment reminded me that I first read about Rain-X (used to 'encourage' the water droplets to be round) at round-here.net.

With shots like these I sometimes miss my G5, in that you could just set it on the ground and compose through the LCD. For this shot though I ended up laying on my stomach after digging a small hole in the sand to get my camera low enough to take the shot.

And I don't have too much more to say about this one other than that I thought it was quite a fitting image with which to begin chromasia's second year. And try it with the dark theme, it looks much better.

Oh, and as it is a new year for chromasia I thought I'd up the width of my images to 800px (from 784px). This is something I've thought about doing for a while, and I guess that now is as good a time as any.

And finally, thanks for all the wonderful comments on yesterday's birthday picture, they're much appreciated. And if anyone would like a printable version of the collage please let me know. I have two versions, one set up for printing on 6x4" and the other for A4. Both include the collage and the following text:

chromasia.com
David J. Nightingale (5th February, 2004 to 5th February, 2005).

Drop me an email (djn1 AT chromasia DOT com) l if you'd like a copy letting me know which version you'd prefer (both versions are 1.2MB).

On and off, I've wanted a macro lens for about twenty years, and this morning mine finally arrived, and in between doing a million and one other things today I managed to take a few shots. What I hadn't realised was just how difficult it is to compose a shot with the shallow DoF at maximum magnification – it really can't be more than a couple of millimetres at f/2.8, ... if that. Anyway, this shot isn't quite what I was after – that will have to wait for another day – but it was the best I could come up with while hand-holding the lens and trying to photograph our fidgety three year old ;-)

More small things to follow ...

I'm much happier with this shot than yesterday's, and other than that I don't have a great deal to say today: which is good, because I have no time to say it anyway ;-)

As I've mentioned, I won't be around tomorrow but hope to put something up from the wedding on Sunday.

When I took this shot I didn't expect that I would post it, on the expectation that a picture of a shell, despite the composition, probably wouldn't be all that interesting. But having looked at it I like the detail the close-focus has revealed. Besides which, I don't have anything else to put up ;-)

There are some things that work about this shot, and one that doesn't, in my opinion at least. The colours, DoF and composition are exactly what I was after, but the clarity/sharpness leaves something to be desired. A lot of the time I'm really pleased with my camera – it's small and unobtrusive, it takes pretty decent shots, and I didn't need a second mortgage to buy it – but on occasion I do wish that it would produce slightly more detailed images. There isn't anything majorly wrong with this shot, but it is a little less detailed than I was aiming for, and no amount of sharpening will restore detail that isn't there in the first place. Anyway, let me know what you think.

Oh, and we finally got a moving date yesterday – the 19th of this month. We were originally aiming to have moved by late June, so I don't suppose the 19th is too bad, but it does seem as though the whole process has been somewhat more complicated than necessary. Anyway, hopefully – fingers crossed – there won't be any more changes of plan.

Judging from the number of entries for this week's Photo Friday challenge, Clouds (there are already 488 as I write this, and it's only Monday), it seems that everyone already had a 'clouds' picture they were happy to put up, or found it relatively straightforward to take one. I had a bit more trouble, and wasn't sure I'd be able to come up with one at all. And, if I'm honest, this shot doesn't really have too much to do with clouds ;-)

Regular visitors will remember this starfish/shower curtain from a previous entry – my shot for the self-portrait challenge – and I wouldn't have thought to stage this shot, but my wife had washed the curtain and hung it over our washing line to dry. Anyway, it's hardly the greatest theme/shot match I've come up with for Photo Friday, but I do like the way it turned out. I also took another shot, of a house across the way from ours – I'll put that one up tomorrow.

Oh, and this shot is cropped, a bit, but only because it's nigh on impossible to photograph a shower curtain in a strong breeze with a camera that has a 0.5s shutter lag and still get the compostion right ;-)

One of the presents I got for my birthday last week was a Manfrotto monopod, and this shot started out more as an experiment to see how useful it would be at slow shutter speeds than a serious attempt to take something to put up here (and on the whole I think that it did make a difference to this shot, though it could probably have done with being a little sharper). But when I reviewed this one I decided that I quite liked the combination of colour, detail and blurred reflection so decided to put it up.

I'm still in Bristol but am travelling over to London later today. If I can get to an internet café tomorrow morning I'll post tomorrow's shot, but if not I'll put it up in the evening when I get home.

I'm not overy impressed with this shot. I like the colours, and the generally muted feel, but the focus is a little too confusing. Ideally I would have liked a more clearly defined plane of focus – blurred foreground, focus, blurred background – as I think this would have made for a stronger image, but it didn't quite work out.

But this is another of shots I've taken recently documenting our house (well, garden) before we move, so I'm not quite so bothered that it isn't perfect.

Oh, and I was really pleased yesterday to be awarded a noteworthy for my entry for the Photo Friday Landscape challenge, not least because it's my current favourite shot (my other favourites are now in my portfolio category), but also because there were 530 entries. So many thanks to everyone who voted :-)

And finally, I'm now in Bristol (UK) for the next couple of days and will be in London on Thursday evening and Friday, so posting times may vary, or may not manage to get anything up at all. I'll be back home on Friday, and hopefully will have managed to take something reasonable while I'm away to put up over the weekend. Do keep commenting though, and I'll respond when I get home.

This isn't quite what I was after for this week's Photo Friday challenge – Macro – but I've run out of time. Don't get me wrong, I do like this shot, but I had wanted to come up with something a little more off-the-wall than a shot of a dandelion and one of our daughters; i.e. as Photo Friday entries go this is rather more predictable than I would have liked. That said I haven't even had the time to even think of something off-the-wall, let alone take it, so I suppose I should be glad that I have this one to put up.

On another note: I'm still working through uprgading the way this site is coded but still haven't managed to get around to sorting out the archive pages. And from various emails I've received today it seems as though there might also be a problem with my news feeds (index.xml and index.rdf). Both of these should start with the image's title, underneath which should be the image that appears in this popup (approx. 200x150px), followed by the image description. If you're using a newsreader or online service and the feed looks different (e.g. no image, or just the image but no text), could you let me know which reader/service you're using. Thanks.

When I first looked at this shot I was quite dissapointed with the way it had turned out as what I was after was a very sharp, clear shot of this reflection. But, and this is probably to do with the fact that these sunglasses were only a couple of pounds (piled up in a rack of similarly cheap and tacky ones), the image is dirty, noisy and lacks clarity (and I don’t look too great either ;-). So, while these sunglasses might look ok, they’re probably manufactured from fairly cheap plastic, and the optical quality is clearly somewhat short of spectacular.

But when I thought about it, a dirty imprecise image seemed more fitting for this shot, mainly because it reflects some of the tackiness of the seafront stalls that sell such items – a cheap dirty image reflected in a cheap plastic lens. All that said, I don’ think this is one of my best efforts.

Yesterday I said that I thought I preferred the shot I was going to put up today, but today I’m not so sure. And whenever I’ve posted two similar shots in the past, and said I prefer one of them, invariably everybody else likes the other ;-)

Anyway, I don’t really need to say too much more about this shot, or yesterday’s.

Today, I made two changes to this blog, one hidden (hopefully) and the other a little more visible. The hidden change is that I’ve recoded the main page, individual archives, comment popup, and the various information pages as pure css (rather than a hybrid of tables, divs, and various other clunky bits of disorganised layout). So that’s the first change.

The second is that I’ve made the site skinnable. There are three new links in the navigation bar, light, default, and dark. ‘Default’ is the scheme you’re used to, ‘light’ is a mostly white scheme, and ‘dark’ (unsurprisingly) is a dark grey scheme (which, IMO, suits today’s shot better than the other two). Let me know what you think. Also, if you come across any layout problems please let me know. I’ve tested it in a few browsers, and it seem ok, but there’s a good chance that it might not work for everyone.

Oh, and both changes only apply to the pages I mentioned above. The various archives (other than the thumbnails page, which I have changed) will have to wait.

I took this on Saturday outside the house where my last two shots were taken. It’s the first of two shots (of which I prefer the other which I’ll post tomorrow) of an old wall mounted lamp. It’s clearly seen better days and, judging by the state of the filament, I don’t imagine that it works all that well at the moment :-)

This shot, and tomorrow’s, were both much as they’ll appear here; i.e. there wasn’t too much that needed to be done to them other than a basic Curves adjustment and an increase in saturation. What I particularly like about both these shots is the rich, warm evening colours. While such lighting can be emulated in Photoshop, somehow that isn’t quite the same and it’s much more rewarding to take a straight shot of something that’s inherently beautiful than to generate a contrived version of the same look and feel.

For those with an interest, this is a remote volume control for a Michell Orca pre-amp (approx. 2" in diameter). The item to the right is a Michell Gyro Dec, and the speaker is a Tannoy Definition D700 Series 2; various components/parts of a good friend’s audio system; all of which prompted me to enter this shot for this week’s Photo Friday challenge – Parts.

This is a reasonably straight shot and the only significant PS change was to remove a distracting shadow from the wall. Other than that the only other modifications were a bump in contrast and saturation and a minor bit of sharpening. The shot was lit with a 420EX Speedlite bounced off the ceiling.

I prepared this image at the same time as yesterday’s entry, and at the time I far preferred it, mostly I think because it includes our 15 month old playing in the grass; i.e. it isn’t just another flower shot. But now I’m not so sure.

Often, when preparing an image, I’ll spend five or ten minutes playing around with Photoshop’s Curves tool, and at some point during that relatively short space of time I’ll hit on a setting that I’m happy with. With this shot though that didn’t happen, and at various points this evening I’ve ended up with a version that looks ok one minute and unbalanced the next; either too bright, too dark, lacking in contrast, or having too much. So I really don’t know what to make of it now.

This is the first of a couple of macro shots that I took in our local park, both of which started out as more as experiments than anything else. Much as I like my camera, like all digital compacts it has a massive depth of field compared to an SLR, and while this is great for some shots, it’s irritating when you want to isolate a subject by using a shallow DOF. That said, the macro mode does a much better job of limiting the DOF as this shot testifies.

As for this shot: while I prefer the one I’m going to put up tomorrow, I like the vibrancy and composition of this one though do think it would probably have been more appealing had it been less cluttered.

It was a lovely bank holiday Monday yesterday – the sun was shining, and it really felt like summer. This was taken in our local park and is another shot of our youngest asleep in her buggy. The DOF is slightly off, but I do think that it captures something of the beauty of this time of year.

On a side note: I’ve added a my top ten archive which includes, as you’ve doubt guessed, the ten images that I consider my personal favourites. There’s a sense in which this is a bit arbitrary, as I frequently change my mind, but I thought you might be interested. A good proportion of them are relatively recent, but there are some older shots that you might not have seen. Oh, and for the time being at least, I’ve made this category accessible from the navigation bar. (Update: 15th January 2005 – now superseded by my portfolio gallery).

And finally: Brandon Stone, founder of photoblogs.org has set up a new site – blog.photoblogs.org. The site has a number of functions, including drawing attention to noteworthy photos, providing a forum for the discussion of photography related matters, and so on. The blog’s about page includes a fuller description of what the site is about – it’s definitely worth a visit, and should prove to be a useful resource. If you’re interested, I’ve added a brief review of Radio Uruguay to the site’s Photo Spotlights section.

It’s fast getting to the stage where if I don’t get out of the house, with a camera, in something approaching daylight, then my image-a-day plan may well founder. We were going to go out yesterday, but the weather was atrocious (and we had too many other things to do anyway), so yet again I ended up having to find something to take.

Following my bubbles in water shot from the other day I thought I’d have another go – but this time I attempted to capture dripping rather than running water. And having attempted this shot my admiration for studio photographers has increased dramatically. I must have taken around 200 shots in an hour, of which I saved around 50, of which about two or three are semi-reasonable. The major problem I had with this shot was of my own engineering; I lined a bowl with silver foil (and a few bits of red foil), but I really should have used something much less reflective – not least because I’ve had great difficultly in getting the overall level of the background sorted out. My attempts have either led to an overly grey/flat background, or one that’s ridiculously blown out.

The major problem with this sort of shot, as I see it, is that they stand or fall on their technical merit; i.e. if you don't get it spot on then it really doesn&rsquot amount to much. By way of comparison, one of Jon’s latest shots (over at ground glass) is truly wonderful. Technically it has some problems – aspects of the foreground are over-exposed, there’s quite a lot of colour noise in the background – but it’s a great shot nonetheless, because its subject is engaging, the shot is beautifully composed, and it immediately grabs your attention.

Dripping water, on the other hand, isn’t quite so inherently interesting ... I really must get out more ;-)

When I started working on this shot I was aiming for a reasonably straight shot of this lily. It was in a vase with a bunch of other flowers, and while it’s clearly dead, I did think it was rather beautiful. But, for one reason or another, I couldn’t get it right. Every shot I took left the subtle colours of the dead petals looking washed out and devoid of any interest.

So, as with my shot of the blackboard from a couple of days ago, I decided to exaggerate what it was that I thought made this an interesting subject. And on the whole I’m not sure that it’s all that successful, but I really don’t have anything else to put up today.

So, it was either not post anything today (and spoil my run of 39 straight days), or put this one up. And on the basis that I don’t think this is a total disaster, I chose the latter ;-)

I wasn’t too sure what to do for this week’s Photo Friday theme – Clean – so have gone with an image that captures some of the things that first came to mind – bright, vibrant colours, and water. And the reason I’ve gone for an indoor shot, or at least a major part of the reason, is that UK winters are normally quite a miserable time of year for photography, and the chances of finding anything outside that doesn’t look grey and washed out (and not overly clean) are rather small.

As for this shot: it’s water running into a glass fruit bowl, and is lit by a single diffused flash. One of the features on my flashgun (a Speedlite 420EX), that I overlooked when I got it, is a high speed sync mode; i.e. it will sync at any shutter speed. And while this image doesn’t really demonstrate that feature to great effect, it did help when taking this shot; i.e. I didn’t need to worry about freezing the movement of the water.

And finally: very little has been done to this image other than a slight increase in saturation, a Curves adjustment, and some sharpening.

Of all the shots I’ve taken recently, this is one of the ones I’m most pleased with; not because I think it has a considerable amount of artistic merit, but because – for once – I actually managed to sharpen it in a way that I’m reasonably happy with. I don’t know about anyone else, but one of the exasperating problems I have with many of my shots is sharpening them after reducing them in size – what looks great at 2592x1944px often doesn’t translate all that well to 700x525.

Clearly it’s possible to produce extremely sharp images (see this absolutely stunning example from Emese Gaal’s site), but I’m not normally all that pleased with my efforts. This one though, I quite like; and while it isn’t perfect I do think it comes close to being pretty reasonable. And for anyone who’s interested: this one was sharpened in four stages – an unsharp mask (of 300%, 0.3px, 0 threshold) for the whole image, some selective blurring of the borders between the dark background and the top of some of the drops (the sharpening made these look unnatural), then some selective sharpening on the detail in the drops (using the sharpening tool (set to a strength of 50%), and then a final overall unsharp mask of 300%, 0.2px, 0 threshold. All of which is probably overkill – but it seemed to work ok for this image.

So, if anyone has any killer sharpening tips, I’d be really interested to hear them.

Oh, and the other thing I like about this shot is the detail in the raindrops, particularly the large one near the middle/bottom of the image. And if you can’t work it out; it’s shot through my car windscreen, the two dark, blurred vertical areas are chimney stacks, and the roofline of the houses (including the chimneys) is reflected upside down in many of the raindrops ;-)