Category: Photography

I love photography. For me, it’s like painting, but better. And more accurate. And unlike painting, I can actually participate. I am not a big success or great master by any means. But I enjoy taking pictures. I also enjoy looking at other people work and sometimes sharing it. When I do, this is the category that I use.

No processing vs. Postprocessing: Postprocessing wins


Ok, I’ve finally made my mind. I will postprocess images before posting them. I will not postprocess all of them, just those that I think that will benefit greatly from doing so. I have lots of pictures, and I don’t think that I will have time nor will to work at each and every one of them.

Just so that you know how much of it I will do, here is an example. On the left is the picture of the car from Troodos Rally 2004 before any processing, straight out of the camera (resized only for web). On the right is the picture of the car, which I think looks much better and was worth the effort.

Picture of the day

Mitsubishi GalantOlga and I went for a walk on a seaside promenade in tourist area today. I didn’t want to photograph anything, since I just finished with “Egyptian Bazaar”. But there was this boat with lights on the water and a nice reflection of it, and I had a tripod nearby, so I decided to try. I took a few shots, which looked nice on the LCD monitor, but which I threw away when I saw them on the screen. Apparently, the water wasn’t calm enough, so the boat came out blurry and the reflection wasn’t all that good.

I’ve also took a picture of promenade itself, forgetting to adjust the white balance for the flurescent ligts, and a another picture of my car which came out more or less OK.

Anyway, I did learn to pay more attention at the environment I am about to shoot. And I’ve got three pictures which are good enough for posting. The album is here.

Picture of the day

Hitachi

I’ve almost paniced when I remembered that I haven’t made a picture today. It was just a few minutes into the new day, and I was all relaxed and resting while watching a movie. I had to find something fast and photograph it without loosing too much time over it.

My quick look around got stuck on the Hitachi label of my fridge. That turned out to be much more fun than I originally expected it to. Firstly, I don’t have any studio lights to play with, so all there is available are one tungsten ugly yellow light from the ceiling of the kitchen and my on-camera flash. With sparkling grey fridge shot set as a measure for camera white balancing and a flash over it, I got an interesting blue light effect. This is totally not how it appears in the kitchen, but it does look pretty cool. The 3D shape of the label and letters on top of it provided for a nice macro subject.

I wanted to postprocess it a bit, but I was so in love with this image that my hands didn’t dare to touch the editor. There are just a couple of things to improve though and maybe I will do it one day. There is an edge of the fridge visible in the upper right corner and there are few dust and reflection particles on the label. I also wanted to slightly sharp the ‘HIT’ part of the brand and slightly blur the ‘ACHI’ letters.

On digital postprocessing

Non-obviousObviousAs I’ve already mentioned before, I am thinking a lot recently about digital postprocessing. It is not only the question of wheather I should do it, but if I should than how much changes are OK. Also, if postprocessing images say in the photo album, should I process all of them or just those that suck or stand out the most.

At times like this, opinions of other people are appreciated at most. If you have anything to say on the subject, please use the comments or email me. In order to show you where are my borders of a lot of changes and of a little changes, I postprocessed the image from yesterday submission to ‘Picture of the day’. To the left is image with few touches. To the right is image with slightly more obvious alterations.

Picture of the day

Morning shipToday’s submission is yet another sunrise from the windows of my office. Three images is all I need to disassemble the sunrise. A ship by itself, a sun by itself, and a combination of ship and the sun in the single image. That’s it.

Also, I am slowly coming to the idea of doing some postprocessing of the images. I have played with some pictures in Gimp and the results can be much different. Sometimes for better, sometimes… well, I am learning you know. I haven’t decided completely yet, but I am coming to that decision. Some say that postprocessing digital images is something comparable to darkroom processing of film. Maybe they are right.

I have several reasons for postprocessing. Firstly, cropping is something that I need, since the viewfinder of Digital Rebel covers approximately 95% of view area. That means that I cannot fully control of what gets into the frame and what not by using only a camera. Secondly, camera lacks some common features like black-and-white photography, sepia effect, a couple of others, which are simple and might improve the image sufficiently. Thirdly, any means that help to express the idea better are good enough. And fourthly, I don’t have to reason everything I do – sometimes I can do something just because I can. Here, I said it. :)