Photographers Rights

I read today that hundreds of photograhpers have staged a protest, outside Scotland Yard, against a new law under Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act which means they could be arrested simply for taking a picture of a member of the police, armed forces or intelligence services.

This is in fact news to me, and had I known earlier I may well have gone to London myself to join in. Whilst I understand the intention of the law, I find the way in which it could be interpreted and implemented hugely unsettling and deeply worrying. I feel it's just another step down the road to somewhere like Nineteen 84. A slow and inexorable impingement of liberties.

There are already a huge number of laws that as a photographer one might have to consider, which demonstrates that the statement "there is no law against taking a picture" to be a fallacy. A contact on flickr was recently trailed by uniformed police with video surveillance equipment simply for taking a photograph of a defence establishment building. I'm assuming this is because it contravenes the official secrets act 1911. Although I understand too well the tactic of police to intimidate the legitimate public when there is as yet no right to arrest.

So whilst I understand the spirit in which this law was passed, I don't necessarily think it's well defined or necessarily needs be implemented as law. Any law that puts a check on civil liberties should be extremely well considered otherwise it sets a dangerous and disturbing precedent.

Nikon Colours

I found this setting on my camera which I think is quite useful. I'm not entirely clear I understand what it all means, to me colour is colour. With something digital, reds, greens and blues are just a pattern of bits. So 0xFF0000 should look the same anywhere, bright red. I don't really see how you can interpret this differently. But seemingly you can.

This relates to my D80, so I don't know which other models have these features, or even if they have different names. But open the menu (press MENU on the back), and go to the Shooting Menu (the little green camera icon, second down). Select Optimize Image (first option.) Then select Custom.

For image sharpening I choose Auto. Apparently this is quite good at making it genuinely sharp without introducing artifacts. I'm not sure yet, but if it causes a problem I'll turn it off.

Tone compression is currently 0, but I might change that. I like contrast, and is the most common thing I change on a photo in lightroom. So I'll see how things go and change if if I feel I would benefit.

Color mode, which I understand is the most important, should be set to IIIa. I have lightroom setup to use the sRGB colorspace, because I read on flickr a lot of people moan about Adobe RGB. But this is where I get confused. Surely RGB is just RGB? And what is the different between I a(sRGB) and III a(sRGB). It really makes no sense to me, but I "read it on the internet" so it must be right. That and the fact I do seem to spend less time processing and quite often can just export direct from Lightroom without touching anything.

Saturation I have on +, or Enhanced. Because I end up doing this in lightroom at lot too anyway, because I like vivid colours.

Hue adjustment I have left at 0. I guess that would be useful if I was shooting under different coloured light (otehr than white) although because I always shoot RAW for the colour depth (yes 12 bit does make a big difference over 8 bit) I can do this in lightroom if it becomes a big problem.

Of course I would ideally never do anything in lightroom. I enjoy taking photos not sitting in front of a computer endlessly moving sliders. So the aim of these settings I hope is to cut down the number of things I do, and increase the number of things the camera can do for me.

Flickr Stats

I suppose I get about on average 60 hits a day on flickr. By far my most popular photographs are my Royal Marine set. They alone account for literally thousands of my page views and are probably the reason I can take such rubbish photos and still get so many daily visitors. Imagine how many would visit if I was any good?

Anyway, I was just browsing through my referrers the other day and it made me laugh. I've about twice as many refers from yahoo image search, which is perhaps not surprising given the owner of flickr. And given my stream, the top 4 hits are unsurprisingly "royal marines", "royal marines commando", "royal marine commando" and "kittens". Then a little down the list I get "crazy person", "basket of kittens" and "crazy maniac".

Why anyone would think I had any pictures of crazy people I don't know. I don't even know anyone crazy. Well other than myself. But I am intrigued by what a "basket of kittens" would be, and why so many people are interested in seeing one.

I'm also intrigued by the person looking for "cow that eats grass". More interesting I thought would be a "cow that doesn't eat grass". Perhaps one addicted to ice cream. Or even a cow that ate people! That would be crazy.

Down at 101 is "burger flipping" which is co-incidentally probably what I would end up doing if I tried to take photography seriously. If I did end up working in the food industry though I'd like to meet "kind cookies", I so hate the rude and selfish ones.

Just over half as popular is the google image search. This actually makes me wonder about the relative popularity of search engines actually. Do I get twice the hits from yahoo because twice as many people use yahoo to search for images? Is it purely because yahoo own flickr? Or do I take more yahoo-ee images. You know, the sort images that people who use Yahoo prefer and I'm being shunned by the more sophisticated google audience. Where do the most sophisticated people do searches for images. Other than flickr itself, I actually prefer live.com for image searches because I like the AJAX funkyness and you can't just keep scrolling down the page and don't have to click next. But I have no referrers from Live.

Again top of my google searches are "royal marines officer" and "40 commando". Over half the first 50 refers relate to the Royal Marines, or 40 Commando in some way. And ironically amongst the google results are a number of "site:flickr.com" searches. Do people really find it easier to search flickr via google?

There are less bizarre searches coming from google. The only one that really jumps out is "marines in sing", whatever that means. I thought ""joe townsend" +legs" was almost bad taste though.

I don't know how "guava+thai" found anything of mine. Nor some strange unicode search which I have no idea what it means, nor even what language it might be in. Probably Korean it looks like.

There were a couple from google.com that made me laugh (i.e. normal search, not image search.) Among them a grockle asking "what does ark at ee mean ?" And someone who wants to see images from "planet fish". I'd like that too! Then there was some odd ones like "site:www.flickr.com 2598186246" (a picture of brent knoll), "site:www.flickr.com 2580973670" (rusting tractors) and "site:www.flickr.com 2577596337" (purple flowers). I don't know if this is indicative of some craze where you can search for random images on flickr, or systematic of something else. I find it hard to believe someone would remember a number and go "Oh where was that really cool picture of brent knoll I saw the other day...hmmmm oh yeah I remember, it was image 2598186246 on flickr."

Sadly there was only one refer from google for someone searching for "Jamie Gordon". And that might well have been me. Or my mum!

Holy Cow

Chase Jarvis and Kung Fu. Need I say anything else?


Okay I will. Some of the stills can be found on Chase's site.

Enjoy!

I could be who?

40 Commando Royal Marines
Originally uploaded by Nostromoo

On Thursday the 31st of July, 40 Commando Royal Marines exercised their right to parade through Taunton town center. This happened at lunch time so I took an early lunch and went out to watch, and see if I could get a few pictures.

It was a fantastic parade, with thousands of people lining the streets and I got some great images. Well great for my standards anyway. I posted them up on flickr and managed to get nearly 500 hits in one day!

So come Tuesday I figured I could snd my photos into the local newspaper, surely they would have a page for readers images right?

Well sadly it turned out that Tuesday was too late as they had already layed out the Marines page, but the lady promised she would forward my images to the sub editor, although it was unlikely they would use them. She could however add them to the website if I liked. On Wednesday however, I got a curious email from the gazette telling me one of my images "was on the front." On the front of what? Surely not the paper? Surely you just mean "home page" right?

Anyway, come Thursday morning I stoppped of at the paper shop on the way into work, and low and behold, front page!

Well this was fantastic news. So I bought two copies, one to read and one to be copied by monks onto high quality archive paper, then covered in clear resin, dried, smoothed and locked in a climate controlled bomb proof safe. My partner sent the image to her parents, who evidentally were also quite impressed. I saw Pixie after work, all bright faced, saying her parents said I "could be the next David Bellamy!"



Thank you, I think.

High Dynamic Range

Someone was asking the other day about HDR photography, or high dynamic range. This is a process whereby you take several photographs of the same subject with varying exposures, then mathmatically combine them to produce an image with greater dynamic range.

What is dynamic range? Well the simplest way to describe it is that amount of detail that is exposed correctly so that it can be seen (i.e. that isn't blown out or completely black).

Have you ever looked at a beautiful sunset and tried to photograph it, only to find the sky is a beautiful red colour, but the foreground is in silhouette even though you could see it when you were there? Or it's a beautiful summer day, with a clear blue sky and you try to photograph someone, and they come out correctly exposed but the sky is blown out? Or that film camera images always seem to look nicer than digital camera images? Well that's because the human eye has a much greater dynamic range than a camera, and film has a better dynamic range than digital. And essentially the greater the dynamic range the more detail in the image. So what we see isn't necessarily what we are going to capture with our camera.

True HDR

But here is where the maths come in. We can actually take multiple exposures of an image and combine the best bit from each. To do this I use a piece of software called Photomatix. This comes in PC and Mac formats, and is pretty cheap. And it works well.

Firstly you need to take your source images. I always start with RAW, but in theory you could have multiple jpegs. You need at least 3 images, with varying exposures, but you can have up to 5 or 7 or even more if the light dictates. I generally do 3 though at +/- 2EV, that is 2 stops below and 2 stops above the metered reading.

You can do a little processing such as setting the colour temperature, but I mostly just leave them as they are. If you modify one though you ought really to modify the others in the same way. This is why I generally leave the images as they came from the camera.

You then load them into Photomatix and let it create the initial blend.


Notice the image will look utterly wierd. This is because at this point the image has a higher dynamic range than your monitor is capable of displaying. You can move your cursor around the image to reveal things. You will see the bightness adjust just like the human eye would as you move around the image. It's good here to check for noise or any artifacts that will ruin the final combine. If all looks good though, you can tone map and compress the image into something your monitor can handle. In the image above I have focused in on the window detail which show the detail of the brickwork inside the building even though on the large view this is completely black.

When you do this there are many different options you can choose from. It can be a bit trial and error because until you have processed the image you won't know 100% what it will look like.


Ever again the loupe is focused on the interior detail through the window. This view gives you a pretty good idea what the image will end up like, but it could still be a long way away. It could eaily be far too bright or far too dark. So this is where the trial and error comes. Basically you just have to pick some settings and try it. Then look at the end result.


If you like this image, you should then save it, either as a 16 bit TIFF or an 8 bit JPEG. If it's not right though, try to go back and fix it. Photomatix has the highest dynamic range and colour depth to work with. If you save the image you're locking that compressed view down, so you can only work with that set amount of data. If you try to fix any images in Photomatix this will yield a better final combine, although it will be much more work to do this.

Eventually though you'll have something you are happy with. At this point I would then run any shaprening, cropping or tweaking you want, to create your final image. Here is mine


I just did this quickly as a test, I think the end result it slightly 'overcooked', the blue is too saturated for my liking although the brickwork colours better resemble the glourious summer sunset we had that evening. I may revisit this image and spend an hour or so on it.

Pseudo HDR (Tone mapping)

There is another technique you can create better images from just a single file. Usually people use RAW images for this. In theory you could use a single JPEG. I tried this although it's debatable how much of an improvement it made. You could spend time doing this, although I can't say that it would be worth it. However with a RAW you can extract several different 'exposures' and save these. Then load them into photomatix, tell photomatix what the EV differentials are (in 1/3 EV increments) then process as above.

Actually I do things slightly differently. I begin by teaking the image in lightroom to the best of my abilities. I'll crop, rotate, and adjust contrast, saturation and levels to make it look as good as I can. For example


Then I'll save three 'exposures' from that point and combine these in photomatix


Again I try to do as little processing afterwards as I can, and prefer to try to get photomatix to create the image correctly in the first place. The results can be quite pleasing however.

Exmoor Ponies, Day One

Finally I managed to get up to go to Exmoor! Woooo.

Well I suppose I can get props for that, but sadly the pictures didn't come out as I wanted. Basically the light was too poor, and there was too much cloud cover for what I wanted. I'm thinking for the shots I want I might need to wait until a cloudless night, although when that will be I would hate to guess. I tell you though, I can't do too many starts like a month.

I left the house today at about 03:50am, and headed up to Winsford Hill. This is quite a nice place that good commanding views across Exmoor. I figured this would give it a good chance of picking up the the morning sun and give some really nice backdrops. Another good point about this location is that the 1,760 acres of heather moorland are home to the "Anchor" herd which is quite a large herd of Exmoor ponies. And the more ponies the greater chance of spotting some.

There are actually two peaks of interest in this location, Winsford Hill proper and Draydon Knap. You can see the peaks and the route I walked overlayed on the following map:


I started at Draydon Knap becuase it has a better car park. There are only limited areas where a non high ride 4x4 can comfortably go. A saloon car like mine tends to scrape the underside on the rocks in certain places so it's not all the much fun.

I found a small herd of ponies, two foals and about 5 mares spread about. As the sun came up the light was absolutely fantastic. The sky went though so many glorius shades or red, yellow and orange. Well, the very small strip below the clouds did.


The problem with the clouds meant that the light level was very low. My telephoto isn't the fastest, and is f/5.6 at 210mm. An f/2.8 will have to wait because it's too much money. So at f/5.6 I was struggeling to get any better than about 1/6 second at ISO800. That's pretty slow, and grainy. I only had my monopod with me so camera shake has been a problem, but the ponies are not stationary so even their small movements, let alone when they were actually moving, has been a problem. Also the high ISO has caused a lot of noise, and the low light has caused a lot of problems with the auto-focus. It was forever hunting which take about a second to go from infinity to close and back out again.

This is a rather good image compared to some that I collected.


Eventually the ponies decided they didn't like where they were, or perhaps they didn't like me, and moved off to north down into the valley. That lost the angle I wanted and it was even darker anyway so I didn't follow. I scouted around for some more but seeing nothing moved the car up to Winsford Hill proper and looked around there. I found another few keeping close to the road, and I followed those for a while. They headed off into the heather so I went down to Spire Cross, then across to the Caractacus Stone. Seeing nothing I made my way back in a round about sort of way to the car.

Low and behold, as I neared the punch bowl I found a group of maybe 25 ponies. I'd lost the colour in the sky by then but I thought I'd try and get something. It's a funny thing about the exmoor ponies, or maybe this herd in particular. You can drive right up to them on the road, so close that with the windows down you could probably touch them. But get within about 200 yards on foot and they decided they want to be somewhere else. And the noise I was making with waterproofs on they could probaby hear me coming from a mile away.

So here is a group that was already well underway by the time I had gotten close enough for a picture:


This was quite a nice group really. They decided to head roughly south from their position so I was able to intercept them and close the distance pretty well. I got pretty close at times:


As we neared the road, I was able to get some really nice angles and use the terrain to sneak up on some. But the lack of adequate light still caused a shutter speed problem. I think this could be really good if he had his head still or I could have used a faster shutter.


I did get one really nice capture though I think. I'm quite pleased with this, although I had to HDR process the image to get the colours ricer and get some light back into the image. I basically underexposed it by quite a lot (1/50 @ f/5.6, ISO 200) because I was concious of the noise and I wanted to control the shutter more. I figured a dark image is easier to lighten in photoshop than a light image can be darkened so I'd hope I could bring it out.


I gave up shooting at about 7am, which meant I could be home by 8am. Time for a quick nap and then some breakfast! I got just over 100 exposures, and I've probably culled about 20 or more so far. I'm just going to see if there is anything I can recover from the others.

Next time I'm hoping for a little less cloud and a little more more light. I might also take some carrots or suger cubes or something. Or I'll get some camo gear and crawl around on my belly. I really need to work out how to get closer to those ponies.

Trains, cows and ponies

I've got it in my mind just recently to go to Exmoor at dawn and take pictures of some of the Exmoor ponies. Trouble is I need to get up at about 3:30am, and I just couldn't motivate myself enough this weekend to get up that early and go out and hope that it wasn't raining on Exmoor and that I could find ponies in the right place. I've been up scouting and there are a couple of interesting places that I will try, I just need to get there in good weather. And the weather being as bad as it has this past week, it's a really big ask to convince myself that if I get up so early and drive for an hour, the sun will come up strong and the sky will be beautiful and I will get some nice pictures.

So instead on Sunday I attempted to take a picture of a steam train! Well that's not strictly tue, actually I wanted to take a picture of the River Tone but with a steam train in the background. There is a bridge in Bradford-on-Tone that crosses the river, that I thought might be promissing, so I visited that.

There are some nice bridges on the Tone, and I thought the river running under such a bridge, while a train went over might be a nice idea. This location wasn't really suitable though sadly. I couldn't legally get to a good point to shoot the scene; the bridge was quite high; the river was quite narrow; and there was a lot of tree and shrub growth obscuring the view. Even if I could trespass into a better position, I can't really see how the scene I want could work here. So instead I decided to climb up onto the track, get the camera about wheel level and shoot the train just zooming down the tracks towards me.

The train in question on this day was the Tangmere, number 34067. There is a public footpath that takes you across the tracks themselves and you can get really close. But trust me, don't get too close when the big cross-country services hurtle though. They go really fast, I mean really fast, past here. It's flat, and a fair distance still from both Tiverton and Taunton and there are no stations left between them so it must be nigh on full speed. A couple went past about 15 feet from me and the ground shook and the wind really whipped about. It was quite awe inspiring. I figured a little steam train might be slower but actually even it managed a fair old pace down the line. It's a good job I didn't go with my initial idea of lying in the track and shoot the train from ground level as it came towards me.

I also met some new friends on this little day out. So it was quite a nice day out.