Friendly and professional portrait and candid photographer in and around Reading, Berkshire and Hampshire

Sun 15 Jan 12

Yevnig’s yummy cakes

It’s been a while since I last updated the blog, and that’s not because I’ve not been busy – on the contrary, so much going on as well as working in Paris has meant that I left the website behind a bit.

So here’s a tasty update – Yevnig’s cakes.

I’ve known Yevnig (and Ian and their two lovely boys) for a few years know and have often been round to cover the boys’ birthday parties along with the occasional portrait photo shoot.

This time, it was different, and a bit of new field of photography for me: product photography of some lovely food.

And those in the know will say just how tricky it can be getting the lighting right, making them scream “Eat me!”. After a few attempts at placing a normal speedlight off camera right with a small reflector to the left to bounce some light back, we were off.

Next up, something a little smaller and fruitier. Stawberry smothered with a lovely chocolate sauce on a chocolate sponge cake. Perfect accompanyment to an afternoon cup of coffee or tea.

As well as the small cakes, Yevnig’s also doing some larger two or three-tier cakes. This one looked seriously good, so here it is along with the other ones.

Yevnig will soon be launching her website, and I’ll post an update here when it’s up and running so you’ll soon be able to sample these delightful delicacies for real!

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Mon 26 Sep 11

Nicola and Alex’s wedding

It had been some time since I’d been to a wedding purely as a guest and so it was very refreshing to go along and actually enjoy a wedding for once! And enjoy it, we did!

The Service in Risca was lovely, and the Reception at the Green Meadow Country Club was delightful, but more importantly, Nicola and Alex looked like the happiest people on earth.

The Ceremony was covered by a group of professional photographers and I made a concious effort to stay well out of their way – there’s nothing more fustrating than having someone peering over your shoulder trying to take a few snaps whilst you’re working at producing the best photography you can!

But once they had finished doing a great job, I couldn’t resist and brought out the camera for a few snaps.

Little Nathan was lovely and so happy – he’s always giving a thumbs up

In fact, it was contagious, Micael was soon at it too!

Nicola and Alex taking us in for the Wedding Lunch

Cutting of the cake. It was delicious!

I even had an assistant towards the end of the evening. Nathan was doing a pretty good job considering the D3s + 1.4 lens isn’t exactly a light combination!

Thanks again to Nicola and Alex for inviting us, it was a priviledge to be there on this special day.

I have uploaded the photos to a gallery: http://photos.xavimages.co.uk/Weddings/Nicola-and-Alex/

Those in the know will no doubt be able to work out the password. If you don’t, just drop me an email

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Mon 19 Sep 11

Montmartre, Paris

As my weekly trips to Paris continue, I thought I’d bring the camera along and try to photograph something less iconic than the Eiffel Tower. This time, I was staying in the Concorde Lafayette which I don’t particularly like. However, being on the 24th floor, it can give some nice views over Paris. I say “can” because it depends which way you’re facing, and if you’re the wrong side, well, you either get the bois de Boulogne with La Défense, or you get a south-easterly view over Paris (Eiffel Tower, Montparnasse, etc).

As it turned out, I was sort of in between: my room was north-easterly facing, so I had La Défense to my far left over past the butte de Montmartre on the right. At least, it’s something different to try to capture, and with Montmartre’s immense charm, albeit far away in the Parisian skyline, another pano was on the cards

Now, pop quiz: what do you get if you have a low coffee table, a suitcase, a hotel information folder, a lens soft pouch and a large wallet? Yup, an improvised camera support!

The window ledge wasn’t very deep and with the long 24-70 mounted on the camera (without hood), the wide angle end extends the lens making the body go over the edge of the window sill. I do have a photo of it taken with my Blackberry and it’s awfully heath robinson, but hey, it worked!

The multiple photo panoramic didn’t really work out in the end for the night skyline – I needed to hold the camera slightly for a portrait orientation and couldn’t get it still enough for the long exposures I wanted. Oh well, nevermind. Next time I’ll bring my tripod. As it was really late (around 1:30 am), I decide I needed sleep more than the pano and went to bed.

Following morning, I woke up, opened the curtains and was immediately blinded by the strong direct sunlight coming into the room. It was painful, seriously! (the curtains are seriously black-out material). But the bright light did give me an idea that would wait the following morning…

So, the next morning, I woke up a couple of hours earlier, and the sun was just starting to emerge next to Sacré Coeur.

That very evening, I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in over 15 years – we were just kids around 10 years old. We did go out for a fabulous meal at La Bonne Franquette. The food was upper class bistrot style and the wine list was, well, see for yourself on their website.

After a lovely dinner, we strolled past Montmartre and soaking in the light and cool crisp evening air. The area had quietened down (it was getting late) and so the beautiful setting reverted to its iconic romantic setting with the overly commercialised tourist trap shops closed for the night. We walked round Sacré Coeur and then proceeded to go down the infamous stairs surrounding the butte. What a pity that the lovely serenity of our walk was violently shattered as a uncomfortably strong smell of urine shocked our nasal senses! Hohum, it’s a shame, but after all, we are in Paris…..

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Mon 22 Aug 11

Panorama view from the Bergerie

Now that I’ve been back home for a few days, I did spend quite some time going over all the various collections of photos. I took around 6 sets in total, changing things slightly each time to then have a play around and determine what works best.

Setting it up

Having brought my tripod for the purpose of taking the panos, I set it all up, ensuring it was level (there’s a handy spirit level built into the Gitzo). Then, put the Kirk ball head on top, then fixed the camera to the head with the Really Right Stuff L-plate I bought a month or two ago. These items aren’t cheap by any means, but oh boy do they make setting up and adjustments an absolute breeze! I certainly have no regrets at all in forking out for these as it’s certainly paying off. In fact, I can’t remember last time I never cursed whilst trying to set something up!

Camera, tripod and support set up for panoramic stitching

Choosing the lens

I opted for using the 105mm for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there’s no zoom so it reduces the chance of my clumsy fingers changing the focal length half way through a shooting process. Also, despite being designed for Macro, I reckon it’s a very sharp lens when focused at infinity. Also, being of a fixed focal length, the hood is designed to reduce flare and vignetting as accurately as possible (or at least that’s what I thought). I didn’t do any tests beforehand to check it out. That focal length also gave me the most amount of photos and therefore detail in the final stitched pano without going absolutely insane. I’m not competing for those gigapixel titles, at least not in my first attempt!

With the 105mm lens fitted, I had a quick pan around taking light measurements. There was about three stops worth of variation between the brightest point in the sky and the darkest point in the grass I wanted to capture. I then put the camera in full manual mode, ensuring Auto ISO was turned off. That way, the camera didn’t try to compensate for exposure ensuring I had a consistent exposure from each photo minimising the risk of seeing the “joins” in the stitching which can be visible to dark to light transitions (or vice versa).

Go!

Then, away I started snapping! The 105mm field of view allowed me to have around 20 shots covering the left to right edges of the pano I wanted to make. There’s an overlap of about a quarter of the frame each time. Having more helps in the stitching as it allows the software to recognise more overlapping points and make fine adjustments during the warp and stitching process.

As the camera was in portrait mode, the longer side of the frame was covering the vertical axis and three rows gave me enough range from the sky to the grass in the foreground. I would have liked more sky, but you do need to have the mountains visible at the bottom of each frame to have the recognisable stitching points! I suppose I could have added some “fake sky” above, but I’m not that good with Photoshop or other editors and wanted to have a 100% authentic pano, at least for my first attempt.

The final result was about three rows of twenty photos, so 60 photos in total to process. Not having the time whilst I was out in France, I took the multiple sets with a view of doing some proper editing and stitching when I got home.

Post Production – generating the pano

And so I loaded up all the photos in Lightroom and went through making some fine tuning adjustments on exposure, contrast, saturation. I do a bit of pixel peeping to ensure all’s OK, and shock horror, there are lots of dust spots and even strands of what look like hair! Argh! Not only that, but those are replicated across all 60 photos so it’s not just one shot I have to tidy up.

That’s when I learnt (too late of course!) that it’s vital to ensure you have a clean lens, sensor, etc before you start. As the photos were taken with quite a closed aperture, all the dust spots really show up in the full resolution photos, and that was a quick check I completely forgot to do whilst out there. And so here I was stuck with those dirty photos.

Oh no, Dirt!

Fortunately, Lightroom has a handy dust spot clone/heal tool which allows you to quickly take a sample of an adjacent area and replace your dirty bit with a duplicate of the sampled area. As the dust sports (which are dark) were mostly visible in the sky, it’s an easy thing to fix because just about any surrounding area is of pretty much the same uniform blue colour.

Second saving grace was that you can synchronise your edits between photos, and that includes the spot corrections. So I was able to fix on one of my photos from the top row and then replicate those corrections across all the other top row photos. I did then spend a minute or so checking that all was OK. There were a few photos where the sloping hills had been included and so I ended up with a corrective sample of “trees” in the sky. Whoops, floating blobs of tree in the sky! But all was quickly fixed.

Then, it’s exporting all the corrected photos to high resolution high quality JPEGs to send to the stitching application. For the utmost quality, I could have gone for TIFF, but I already knew my PC would struggly with the JPEGs and it would just collapse if I were to send 60 TIFFs to be stitched together!

Stitching it all together

It was then a matter of loading up all the photos in the stitcher (I’m playing around with PTGui at the moment) which is a pretty powerful stitching program allowing you to really control how the photos are merged, what perspective they are, etc.

Once it had aligned all the photos, the final output is a massive 43267 pixels wide by 11653 pixels high! This will then need cropping slightly as it still contains the jagged edges of the photos. I started the stitching process just before I started writing this post, and it’s now only about a third of the way through and that’s on my Quad core 3GHz desktop with 6GB RAM! It looks like I’ll have to upgrade my PC next if I want to speed this up a bit…

20 minutes later…

All done! However, due to limitations in Photoshop and PTGui, the biggest JPEG version is about 30000 pixels in any dimension. That means that the biggest JPEG I can make is scaled down. I’m not sure why that is the limitation, the JPEG standard allows up to 65535 x 65535 pixels resolution.

A scaled down version can be downloaded from here. It’s sized at 3840 pixels wide so feel free to use it as a wallpaper on your desktop

If you’d like a copy of the very large JPEG (around 35MByte file size, 30000 x 6830), please drop me an email and I’ll send you a link to it.

It’s certainly been a very informative experience doing this for the first time and I’ve learnt a lot to make things run smoother next time. There’s no question that having a good support with a camera on a head you can just click, rotate, click, rotate, click, etc not only makes the actual photo taking process a pretty quick one, but also maximises the quality as you won’t have any rotation between your photos that need adjusting.

In fact, this is probably the widest ranging photo I’ve ever taken in terms of distances. It covers approximately 180 degrees of view, and has the grass just a few metres away to the nearest hills a few kilometres away, to the further mountains around 20km away all the way out to the moon (top centre of photo) around 360,000km away!

Thanks for reading this rather long post. I’ve certainly enjoyed the whole process and the time taken to compute it all gave me the opportunity to write this up whilst I was waiting

Till next time, happy snapping

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Sat 20 Aug 11

Nature close up

Several months ago, I bought the Nikkor 105mm VR Micro lens which does true 1:1 macro and I’ve hardly used it. I initially justified its purchase for ring shots or weddings – although it’s a pretty weak alibi considering I don’t really shoot many weddings!

However, I did bring it along with me to France with the firm intention of using it even if no wedding rings are in sight!

In the end, I did take many photos – I used it for the panorama as I wanted a fixed focal length for my first attempts at trying to do panos properly. The last thing I wanted would be my clumsy fingers altering the focal length of a zoom lens half way through taking all the photos! I also managed to get some close ups of various things nature. It’s certainly made me realise how much detail can be found just by looking, and the geometric and fractal patterns which are often out there and go unnoticed.

First up, a small section of a tree trunk. I opted for a black and white version as there wasn’t much colour and preferred the slightly more dramatic quality with B&W

Moving on to a still living tree, I loved the almost pattern like imagery of the cracks in the bark. The different types of lichen growing were all unique in their own way and I particularly liked the high contrast white type towards the bottom, I think it’s Lecanora rupicola. If you happen to know what it is, please drop me an email and I’ll confirm or correct

One particular tree had a lot of ants furiously marching up and down. I found it surprisingly difficult to get a good shot of an ant moving at speed! With the very small area covered clos up, you don’t have a lot of time, and the narrow depth of field makes focus a little tricky; focusing on the tree bark is too far back and would be behind the ant as it walks past. Below was probably one of my better attempts. I was intruiged by the slightly shiny coloured strip around the middle of the rear gaster section.

Eight legged friend with eight eyes staring out! Not exactly the friendliest of looking spiders with its spikey hairy legs!

Then, a stroke of luck. A butterfly paused against a tree and stayed there long enough to give me a change to take a few snaps. I reckon it didn’t move as its camouflage was pretty effective. From a distance, you couldn’t really see it at all from certain angles. Or maybe it was the morning sun. The lighting is just natural sunlight, and it was probably just basking to warm up a little. I’ve had a quick search on the internet but cannot find what species it is. If you know what it is, please drop me an email.