Why Dont You Blog?

Scrabo Tower - Pinhole Effect,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

This blog has been a bit text-heavy of late. Heather has posted some excellent, thought provoking articles (example, example and example) and I have been slack - spending most of my time working or travelling.

In an effort to try and lighten up the blog, I am going to (irregularly) post images here - hopefully to get some feedback and constructive criticism, but if not it will cheer me up

My first choice is “Scrabo Tower” from just outside Newtownards, Northern Ireland. This is an odd little tower and I am not really sure about its history, however it is picturesque and the views around it are amazing. As this is a fake-pinhole (a picture edited to look like it was taken on an old-fashioned pinhole camera), it doesn’t really add much in the way of “colour” to the blog - but it looks nice!

[tags]Pictures, Flickr, Pinhole, Photography, WhyDontYou, Photoshop, Scrabo Tower, Digital Photography, Photo Editing, Black and White, Photos[/tags]

Popularity: 51% [?]

Popularity: 51% [?]

Taking some snapshots today led me to thinking about the “value” of using the on-camera processing options to take pictures as Black and White or Sepia (or even low colour), rather than taking every shot as high colour and doing any processing in Photoshop. Now for clarification purposes, I do not have a “real” DSLR (Kodak Z650) so taking the pictures in RAW is not an option and therefore some camera processing is inevitable.

Today, as I was snapping some pictures of country houses and landscapes, I realised I was often switching between Black and White, Sepia and High Colour. Not a massively difficult task but time consuming - in some instances I was taking three pictures of each “shot” rather than a single high colour one.

Common sense was screaming out to me that I should just take the high colour, but the residual technophobe in me seems to distrust Photoshop, so I had to experiment a little. I took three shots of a fairly neutral landscape scene, black and white, sepia and high colour, then passed the high colour JPEG through photoshop and made copies in black and white and sepia. The only other PC processing these images have had is a pass through Advanced Batch Converter to resize them into something which can be shown here.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 34% [?]

It has been a while since I posted some quick edit photographs here, so I will try to make amends. These are two photographs of Stonehenge (World Heritage site in Wiltshire) I took in December when the ground was frosty and the visitors were thin on the ground. I have pushed them through a variety of Photoshop filters to create the additional effects:

On an additional note, in addition to massive visitor numbers, Stonehenge is often inundated by “druids” and new-age hippies in the summer, come the cold weather and they are noticeable by their absence. For some reason the idea that Stonehenge is a “summer” monument.

I can understand, say, 50 years ago, people thinking this but surely almost all modern studies point to any religious significance of this site being focused on the midwinter solstice?

I should point out, there are die-hards who turn up for the midwinter solstice - even if they don’t know what the correct date is - but no where near the scale of the midsummer one.

Maybe modern people just cant take the cold as well….

[tags]Stonehenge, Photographs, Pictures, Images, Photoshop, Image Effects, Black White, Sepia, Megaliths, English Heritage, National Trust, Wiltshire, Druids, Solstice, Midwinter, Midsummer, World Heritage Site, Religion, Stone Age, Cults, Culture, Society[/tags]

Popularity: 60% [?]

Popularity: 60% [?]

bodiam,
originally uploaded by adrians_art.

Brilliant use of black and white imagery to make this, gorgeous, castle really stand out.

I have just come back from a weeks holiday where I took gazillions of photos, but only on the last night did I work out how to take Black and White / Sepia photos with a digital camera (yes, I am actually that stupid!).

However, now I know how to do it, I have become a lot more aware of other people’s photos in that regard - and this one of Bodium castle is amazing.

It does help that the castle is almost fairytale-like anyway, but this photo really does catch it well and hightlights how dramatic the place can look.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Popularity: 15% [?]