Bye

Ok. After considering what Blogger can do and what Wordpress can do I chose Wordpress. I will therefore not be updating this blog any further and if you would like to continue following my blog please go to
http://richarddalgleish.wordpress.com/

Wordpress versus Blogger.com

Am currently trying out Wordpress blogsite. Not really happy with this site and how it deals with positioning of images on the blog page. Pretty crucial thing when doing a photography course...

Don't really want extra work in migrating this document over but at same time don't want to spend my time fiddling about with layout and worrying over the look and feel of the blog and how the site appears to "interpret" what I want.

Will play about for a few days before I make up my mind.

Learning how to walk.

God am feeling rusty. Been such a slow start to course for me. Feel like I am having to relearn how to walk. Am having to learn study skills, time management and the general nitty gritty administration side that keeps coursework ticking along. On top of this am using digital camera that I am not as familiar with as previous camera which I had for years. Past week have been teaching myself Photoshop familiarising myself with histograms, layer masks and so on.

Ever feel like screaming...?

On plus side I found some useful guides to help. This about the most useful for me.

www.open.ac.uk/goodstudyguide/

Has some useful ideas plus there is a link to buy the guide or some excerts to download on pdf format.

Exercise 4 - Editing

This exercise is multi part and in summary is involved in taking a set of images and performing successive edits on the set to produce a selection of just two final images. In sequence the edits are technical edit, selects, first select, group review and final triage.

The initial selection of images comes from Exercise 1 - your own workflow -1. The shoot consists of a series of 46 portrait shots of my son.

My immediate first comment about the technical edit is that for the shots taken there are very few shots obviously out of focus, showing camera shake or badly exposed. This is partly due to exercise where it was controlled, well paced environment with time to consider each photograph, use a tripod and to consider where I wanted to the model to be in each shot. There are pictures where the sunlight had burnt out a little of the highlights in the hair. As this is fixible I have chosen not to reject such shots at this stage.

The next edit will be for the second exercise taken of a street scene and I can already see that this technical edit phase will capture much more faulty pictures just by nature of the exercise.

The next phase is the initial selection. This is a more creative selection and is subjective, dependant on personal preference, likes and dislikes. Of the intial 46 I retain 19 shots at this stage. I will show my inital selection below:

I will show photographs below which are the result of my first select. I will also detail my thought process for subsequent "passes" as I reviewed selection to further whittle down selection until we reach final choice difficult choice.

Choice 01 - What I like about this photograph is the compact relaxed pose and the slightly cheeky expression. slightly burnt out on hair but nothing that can't be fixed.

Choice 02 - I like the orange hedge in the background thrown out of focus by the apertur helps to focus attention of portrait. Background slightly messy. I like the off centre pose and not looking into lens.

Choice 03 - very happy pose cropped tighter than others. Again I like the background. Model looking straight into lens. Burnt out highlights in hair.


Choice 04 - My favourite picture. Very relaxed and manages to capture a certain happiness and cheekiness all at the same time.


Choice 05. Very simple pose with old shed in background. Direct look into lens.
Slightly soft focus which depending on point of view either adds to detracts from picture. Dislike the position of the hands and would prefer then either in shot or cropped.



















Similar to first shot, but like hand position more natural although lacking a little in the facial expression.

Dislike messy background although do like expression and tighter crop. Burnt out in face. I think of my first select this is my least favourite and so already likely to be dropped by next edit.

The final selection did prove difficult. I was able to edit down to final three. From here I did have an obvious favourite but choice between last two was touch and go and each picture had elements I liked. I will show final selection below.



My standout favourite picture of the shoot. was an immediate and obvious choice for me. Have cropped image and tidied this up very slightly from original, reducing highlights in hair and shadow in face.




I chose this picture and present here partially edited to remove some of the highlights. Imperfect in many ways but reason I chose it was because of the smile and the direct look into lens. Like the background although telegraph pole sprouting from Robbie's head not ideal and I might also have taken that out.

Conclusion
A very useful structured exercise in editing. Reducing from a large set of photographs using a series of "filters", starting with broad filter, getting rid of technically imprefect pictures although I did choose to qualify this by keeping pictures I thought worth retouching. Next looking artistically at photographs and removing those that don't satisfy creatively. Also removing pictures that were wimilar and finidng best of those From there to final selection was a process of applying successively finer "filters being more and more critical and discerning.

I have never used such a structured approach and instead would have jumped in at end stage looking for final picture as my first selection.

Gave me a useful insight to process that photo editors might go through to find successful competition entrant or photograph for publication.

Exercise 3 - Histogram - Average Contrast

I have taken pictures of a little burn (stream) at side of a wall. The green of the foliage, with the darkness of the water and the paleness of the stonework in the wall produce a good average contrast image.

I have take pictures across a wide exposure and show three examples below with associated histograms.

Average exposure.

Over exposure by approx -1 stop.

Under exposure by approx +1stop.

As can be seen as the exposure lengthens and more light falls upon sensor, the resultant histogram shifts towards the right . As the picture has no clipping moving the exposure in this way does not make the exposure too black nor too white, although changing exposure by more than 1 stop would start to produce clipping as seen in previous examples.

Exercise 3 - Histogram part 2 - Low Contrast

I have split up the histogram blog into 3 just to make it more readable.


For the low contrast category I initially took some pictures of a heron fishing. Sadly perhaps not best choice of subject as birds do have a tendancy to move or fly away. How inconsiderate. The reason I took pictures of the heron was that the loch where it was wading was almost oily with grey feathers of the bird made for quite a flat, if dark scene.

As I didn't get all the pictures I wanted I have chosen a picture and adjusted the exposure manually by using Photoshop to get spread of exposure across several stops. Sitting at computer making picture 1 stop lighter or 1 stop darker and seeing how the histogram responds is actually quite interesting. Histograms not something I have ever paid much attention to before.

Below is the original photograph.



And here are the manual adjustments made in Photoshop.



-2 stops from original


-1 stop from original



+1 stop from original



+2 stops from original

As can be seen every time exposure changes by +1 stop the histogram moves towards the right hand side of graph. similarly changing exposure by -1 stop will move histogram towards left of the graph. It is worth noting that graph does just move, it also expands as it moves. So +2 stops from original has a wider range of light and dark.

Exercise 3 - Histogram part 1 - High Contrast

In this exercise looking to familiarise yourself with histograms by relating each to the actual image as as aid to recognising the basic characteristics of an image.

Before I continue I think it is worthwhile explaining quickly what a histogram is. Basically a simple graph where tone is plotted against quantity. A histogram will show the distribution of brightness values of individual pixels in an image with deep shadows at the far left hand side and towards right hand side will show bright highlights. Useful to show distribution of tones across a wide dynamic range. The vertical height of the graph shows the relative number of pixels at each brightness level between black and white.
If any of the graph shows as spikes on either of the extreme right or left hand side of graph then this indicates that parts of the captured image are outwith the maximum and minimum brightness levels detectable by the camera sensor.

Ok enough of the theory onto the exercises and some practial examples.

High Contrast

For this part of the exercise, I took some pictures for this in Edinburgh's High Street, looking through closes (or alleyways you might call them). The pictures were difficult to expose with bright daylight through the far end of the close and the actual walls and road of the close very dark. I bracketed exposure and so got some under exposed, over exposed and close to well exposed.



When looking at output histogram I could see that the under-exposed photograph had most of the tonal range contained in the left hand side of the graph with a spike at this point. We are seeing lots of pure blacks with some of the image too dark for the sensor. You can see from screenshot below that there are large areas of shadow clipping represented by the blue. For completeness I have also shown picture without the clipping turned on.



The over-exposed photograph does have a wider spread of tone although this is partly due to the amount of the frame which is over exposed in relation to rest of frame. There is however a large spike at the right hand side of the histogram which I will expand on below. The red areas in the screenshot above show the areas of highlight clipping in the frame. for completenss I have shown the same image with clippingturned off.

If I crop frame just to show the over-exposed section (shown below) then it can be seen that the histogram shows a spike at the right hand side of the graph, at the opposite side of the graph from an under-exposed photograph. The graph below shows that the section of the photograph in bright sunlight has lots of highlights or pure white and that the spike shows that the captured image is too bright for the camera sensor.

Lastly I show a picture which is close to being correctly exposed. As picture is very high contrast, it still shows small amount of both highlight and shadow clipping. As these are quite small I could adjust the shadows and highlights to remove this clipping. The histogram tells me that the image is still too dark.

The tonal spread in this shot covers a wider range than in both the previous examples although still tends towards black. As an aside. I have played with this picture and can remove the clipping and make the tunnel far lighter. As it happens I think the darkness adds to the picture.

As a final illustration, I have adjusted shadows and highlights within Photoshop and the resultant image with histogram is shown below.