The Fire and Steam photo

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I’ve been doing a lot of event photography lately, mostly in low light.

I’m happy to help out some local organisations with free images. Usually there is a usage agreement, but I seldom take the time to look at how they have been reproduced in a newspaper or whatever.

Last week I discovered one of the images from last year’s Fire & Steam festival in Oamaru had appeared in the Otago Daily Times and caused some comment. You can one such article here.

I thought it may be useful to explain how it was made.

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Audio Visual Talk in Dunedin

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I will be giving a presentation on audiovisuals for the Dunedin Photographic Society (www.dps.org.nz) on Monday 9th September at 7.30pm. The venue is the Mornington Presbyterian Community Centre, 16 Maryhill Terrace.

We’ll be covering some of the internal construction of my AV “Why We build The Wall” and I’ll show some examples from the 2016 Trophée de Paris. Plus extracts from the FIAP AV training.

If you’re near Dunedin come along and say hello.

 

FUJIFILM GFX100

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This weekend in Christchurch Fujifilm NZ had an exhibition of photographs curated from the work of 26 New Zealand amateur and professional photographers.

Ira and Craig from Fujifilm NZ were on hand to help with questions about equipment and I had the opportunity to play with a GFX100.

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Converting Colour to Black and White…

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…and Learning to see in Black and White

Often colour can get in the way of the image content we want to show. By converting the photograph to black and white our work becomes more abstract. We can then make changes in luminosity without the viewer making a comparison to the original. So skin tones or landscape elements can be lightened or darkened in ways that would look odd if the image was in colour.

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Advice for those of us still learning

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Much of what we teach is the nuts and bolts of photography. The exposure triangle, how to edit a photograph, what camera to buy (a tiresome question), how to compose an image, and so on. All important to know but my concern is that technical skills will merely make someone competent. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, but many people would like to go beyond that level.

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I try Capture 1 and On1 Photo Raw

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Now that Adobe have changed Lightroom to a subscription only model, I knew that if I upgraded one of my Fuji cameras I’d need to look for an alternative raw converter.

I’m not going to list the problems I’ve seen with a subscription software. Let’s just say I would need a very good reason to go there.

Lightroom’s Fujifilm conversions are okay, but mostly not good enough for large prints in my opinion. My workflow has been to use Iridient Digital’s X-Transformer to convert the file to a dng, and use Lightroom to make a fairly flat file with the shadows opened up and then send it to Photoshop for further work.

I recently sold my X-T1 and replaced it with an X-H1. This has now become my primary camera and is not supported in Lightroom 6, so it’s time to ditch Lightroom for most of my processing. Continue reading →