Stuff from Conor & Ildica, mostly revolving around life with Evie & Ruairi
March 3, 2010
On the way to work…
Posted by conor at 10:22 AM
March 1, 2010
Ellesmere Sunset
A quick trip round to Lake Ellesmere for a potential sunset and a bit of sketching. We left it a bit late, making it a bit rushed when we got there, but still pleasant, and still enough time for Sheila to get a quick sketch in by moonlight.
Posted by conor at 1:31 PM
December 7, 2009
Star Trail stacking
Last night up at Castle Hill turned out to be as calm as could be, and I’ve been wanting to practise stacking star trail images (see here for a tutorial and some stunning sample images), so it was a good opportunity to take a few and try it out. Each of these is 5 x 300 second exposures stacked together with another 300 second dark frame to minimise the noise. If you look closely at the full-size image, you can also make out a satellite crossing the frame in the right-hand of the two images below. They’re not particularly interesting as is, but it was good to practise the stacking technique, and I’ll look forward to trying some more interesting ones in the future. It was a beautiful night to be out; I could hear morepork calls in the forest up behind the village.
Posted by conor at 4:34 PM
September 22, 2009
Post-makeover Portraits
A picture says a thousand words, so I won’t bother adding anything…
Posted by conor at 9:25 AM
September 13, 2009
Sunset at Lake Ellesmere
We had the last field trip of my University of Canterbury landscape photography course to view the sun setting over Lake Ellesmere, and the photo gods obliged. The conditions could not have been better.
Posted by conor at 7:12 PM
September 6, 2009
Photography overload!
Last minute decision to head to “Daffodil Day” at Otahuna House, Tai Tapu to check out the gardens there, and basically enjoy some beautiful spring sunshine.
Posted by conor at 10:17 PM
Landscape Photography on the Peninsula
I spent a great day out photographing on Banks Peninsula on another Canterbury University course, tutored by Paul Daly (who among other things shoots for NZ Geographic, a magazine which we avidly subscribe to). Another great opportunity to indulge myself with my camera. My newly acquired 10-22mm lens absolutely rocks.
Posted by conor at 10:04 PM
September 3, 2009
Improving Composition
I’ve signed up for a couple of photography courses at University of Canterbury over the next couple of weeks. The first one involves a walk-about session in central Christchurch plus a review session. Here are some of the shots I took during the walk-about.
Posted by conor at 12:45 PM
August 9, 2009
Sunset/Moonrise over Huntsbury
Snapped this on the way home from work one night this week. The “bright” house coincidentally belongs to friends of ours.
Posted by conor at 12:41 PM
August 1, 2009
Air Force Museum
I had a wander around the Air Force Museum at Wigram Airfield while Evie was at her Saturday gymnastics class.
Posted by conor at 9:45 PM
March 17, 2009
Lake Matheson revisited
Posted by conor at 10:00 AM
February 25, 2009
Scrabo Panorama from last year's UK trip
I've just revisited this panorama using a Photoshop plugin called
Topaz Adjust. Makes it a lot more dramatic, I think.
Posted by conor at 11:54 AM
October 31, 2008
Leaf, what leaf...
Adobe Lightroom 2.1 absolutely rocks.
Posted by conor at 11:51 AM
July 24, 2008
Hurricane plays
Posted by conor at 1:44 PM
June 27, 2008
I love Luminosity Masks
Luminosity masks in Photoshop are a great way of lifting certain parts of a photo. In the photo below, Evie's face is very much in shadow, and I wanted to lighten her face without simply raising the exposure of the whole image, which would have caused most of the image to become over-exposed. Luminosity masks (used in various ways and in combination with other masks) allow you to apply an adjustment to an image based on how bright/dark each individual pixel in an image is.
You can read more about luminosity masks
here.
Posted by conor at 6:05 PM
June 25, 2008
"Revisited" Warbirds photos
I've just been revisiting in Photoshop some of the photos I took at Warbirds over Wanaka in March. Here they be.
Posted by conor at 1:41 PM
June 2, 2008
Crisp starry weekend in Hanmer
Enjoyed a long weekend up in Hanmer Springs with a couple of cold starry nights (still enough for some 40 minute star-trail exposures), an enjoyable dip in the hot pools, a trip up to Acheron Homestead, a spin on the bike down Jollies Pass, a round of minigolf, and a walk in the forest in the rain.
Posted by conor at 11:20 PM
April 7, 2008
Warbirds over Wanaka
Okay, so I got a bit carried away, and pulled the trigger on about 700-odd shots at Warbirds. But I think I got a few nice ones, certainly enough for me to look forward to a few winter evenings rugged up in front of Photoshop. The event was great, well run, wide range of planes, etc, and even though the weather on the day we went wasn't great (and it was cold!), we had a great spot just beside the runway itself, and got to see a lot of the planes up close. We also headed up Mt. Irons nearer Wanaka itself on the other flying day, which gave us a different perspective on the planes and parachutists above the airfield.
Posted by conor at 6:25 PM
Late (great!) summer holiday
This year's holiday (well, summer holiday, since we've already got a holiday to the UK in August lined up too), was a bit of a
tour round the South Island culminating in the
Warbirds over Wanaka airshow at Easter. We started off by heading up to Golden Bay for nearly a week at Ligar Bay (same bay as last summer), which was great, and got us in a relaxed mood for the rest of the holiday. Then we spent a week camping down the West Coast, staying at Westport and Fox Glacier. Great weather for the Coast, and I was pleased to be able to get down to Lake Matheson to get some nice photos of Aoraki & Tasman reflected in the still waters of the lake - a beautiful spot. Then it was on through Haast Pass to Lake Hawea near Wanaka where we had rented a large house on the waterfront for 10 days. Among other things, Ildica & I had a great overnight in Brewster Hut, high above Haast Pass, with some beautiful weather, and a scramble up to the top of 2154m high Mt. Armstrong, where we had great views north to Aoraki, and south to Mt. Aspiring.
Posted by conor at 4:00 PM
February 18, 2008
Beautiful Castle Hill (again)
Spent an overnight at Castle Hill again, leaving Christchurch in torrential rain (long overdue) to find the rain had stopped in the mountains an hour and a half away. The next day dawned beautifully clear and calm, and with an extremely photogenic "pond" in place at Kura Tawhiti (Castle Hill) Conservation area. I've also got a new lens for my camera (a
Canon 55-250mm IS lens nominally for the
Warbirds over Wanaka air festival we're going to at Easter), so it was an excuse to practise with it - great for long range candids of the kids for a start!
Posted by conor at 12:22 PM
January 21, 2008
Revisiting older photographs
Here's a photo from 2007 I've just revisited with Photoshop, and I'm quite pleased with the result. It's one of my favourite photos of Ruairi. This was taken in a cottage at Lake Heron only a couple of months after his second birthday.
Posted by conor at 7:39 AM
November 4, 2007
Before & After
Here's a photo I took on Quail Island a couple of weeks ago that I'm really pleased with. But I just thought I'd post a version of the photo before and after I've photoshopped it.
Posted by conor at 7:42 AM
October 24, 2007
Getting a reasonable workflow in Photoshop now
I finally feel as though I'm building up a reasonable workflow for dealing with RAW images from my Canon 350D. And I've also managed to automate most of it which takes the grunt out of easily getting an initial set of images good enough (by that I mean there's no point in having a reasonable DSLR if the images at the end of the process don't do it justice) to upload to the website (we don't print a lot of them out, and get most enjoyment out of our photos by seeing them popping up on our desktop/screensaver via my Gallery2 screensaver
GLoSS).
The advantages of adopting a workflow like this are:
- reducing visible noise,
- minimising filesize while maintaining quality,
- maximising sharpness, and
- minimising time processing multiple images.
Anyway, here's my workflow if anybody's interested:
- Manually use Adobe Camera Raw to set RAW processing parameters (exposure, white balance, saturation, contrast, etc) for each image.
- Batch process all the images using the following steps.
- Open image.
- Automatically run PTLens to correct lens aberrations (mostly barrel distortion with my current lens)
- Automatically apply default Capture Sharpening from the TLR Professional Sharpening Toolkit (free, although definitely deserving of a PayPal donation) to reduce initial out-of-camera softness.
- Automatically build a Surface Mask using TLR Professional Mask Toolkit from the same place as above.
- Automatically apply Neat Image Pro+ noise reduction on the image masked by the Surface Mask. This step relies on a reasonable number of pre-made custom "noise profiles" which I've created for my camera using Neat Image.
- Resample the image to fit 1280x1024.
- Automatically apply Output Sharpening from the TLR Professional Sharpening Toolkit.
- Drop the bit depth from 16-bit to 8-bit.
- Save the image as a JPEG.
For example, the flower image linked to from this post has a filesize of only 579kb at full JPEG quality while remaining what I think is a nice crisp image when viewed on a monitor.
Batch processing time on our old Dell takes about 5 minutes per image; I just use ACR to set the RAW processing parameters, and then leave the PC to chug away overnight churning out all the JPEGs. Alternatively, if I want a Photoshop PSD I can do further processing on, I've got a similar script which just performs Steps 1-5 and saves the result as a PSD file.
Now all I need is to find some time to actually take some photos worth processing!
Posted by conor at 1:05 PM
September 10, 2007
Got a new lens recently
I finally took the plunge and got myself a new lens for my camera. So far (2 weeks later) I'm very pleased with the results, which I should be given the price (gulp). It's a
Canon 17-85mm IS USM, meaning it's got Image Stabilisation, and Ultra Sonic Motors for autofocus etc, all contributing to much sharper images, and faster focussing in lower light, with less audible noise. Some sample photos in this folder
here, which I know I would never have been able to capture with the kit lens. For a start, it wouldn't have been able to focus fast enough. I think the range is a good combination for what I want to shoot. There are some suggestions about a bit of barrel distortion at wide angle, but I've bought a Photoshop plugin called
PTLens, which is reckoned to successfully iron out any image distortions introduced by particular lenses.
Posted by conor at 2:48 PM
August 29, 2007
Woo hoo! One second of fame!
My eclipse photo from my last post featured for a smidgen under a second in a photo montage at the end of One News on TV1 tonight! Here's a
link to the video clip on the TVNZ website.
Posted by conor at 8:27 PM
Lunar Eclipse, 28th August 2007
Well, it was worth the wait. Not having seen an eclipse before (that I can remember anyway), I only really started getting interested in today's eclipse late last week, and then the weather yesterday afternoon turned threatening. I ended up driving about 25kms each way up over the Port Hills towards Godley Head to even see the moon, and then it clouded over and started raining before the eclipse even started! However, by the time I was as good as back home, the clouds rolled back to ultimately reveal this:
Posted by conor at 11:16 AM
June 19, 2007
Camera and kit
My mate
Macartan from Queens Mountaineering Club days asked what camera kit I'm currently using, so here's a quick synopsis:
- Canon EOS 350D with the somewhat ordinary 18-55mm kit lens.
- Velbon CX540 tripod; a nice present from my folks a couple of years ago, reasonably lightweight, fine for current landscape shots on calm mornings/evenings, etc.
- Circular polarizing filter for most of the outdoor photos; hence the need for the tripod at times, since I like shooting at low ISO (100 or 200), and the circular polarizer cuts out another stop or two of light. Circular polarizer really adds pop to vivid blue skies and outdoor shots in general.
- Canon RC-1 remote controller for tripping the shutter while the camera is on the tripod. This comes with a handy little clip which means it clips nicely onto the camera strap.
I only got this DSLR at Christmas (from my lovely wife), and only really feel now that I'm getting to grips with it. I'm starting to notice the lack of sharpness in the kit lens, and would like to replace it with something like this
Sigma. Unfortunately, it's about NZ$600, so I might have to wait until next Christmas!
I shoot RAW format images on the camera (as opposed to JPEG), and am currently using Adobe Photoshop CS2 including Adobe Camera Raw for post processing the RAWs. I don't think I've got my home monitor particularly well calibrated, and I suspect I'm processing my photos to end up a little on the dark side. I'm also not currently going to a lot of trouble to resize my images specifically for our website, so the resolution/quality of the ones on the website is probably not brilliant.
There's so much I feel I still have to learn on the post processing front, but I'm learning quite a lot from the DPReview
forums.
For panoramas, I now shoot candidate shots for a panorama in portrait (i.e. camera on it's side), so it requires an extra shot or two to cover the breadth of the panorama. I do a little tweaking in Adobe Camera Raw before loading up
Hugin to build the panorama as a TIF file. A bit of sharpening etc in Photoshop and then I export it as a smaller JPEG.
I've acquired a couple of
digital photography and
Photoshop books by Scott Kelby, and I'm waiting for another one on
RAW processing from Amazon which should be here this week.
Thanks for the feedback and the compliments, Macartan!
Posted by conor at 11:28 PM
Back up to Castle Hill for our 3rd weekend away in a row
Off after work again on Friday up to
Castle Hill village, on our own this time.
It was another cold weekend, with a dusting of snow falling to about 900m on Saturday night, and a cold fog filling Castle Hill basin, with hard frosts of about -6 degrees again.
We headed up to Arthurs Pass on Saturday, and walked with the kids up to Punchbowl Falls.
DOC have put in a fairly substantial walkway all the way to a new viewing platform below the falls themselves, although it was a gloomy and overcast day up there for viewing.
On Sunday, I got up at 6.15am and felt my way in the fog up first the Mt. Cheeseman ski field road and then the Broken River ski field road until I popped out above the murk to watch the sun rise. Took the rest of the family back to the same spot later on in the morning to explore on a lovely, crisp, windless morning. We headed back to Kura Tawhiti (Castle Hill rocks) on the way back home to do some scrambling.
Posted by conor at 2:30 PM
June 15, 2007
Enjoyable weekend at Castle Hill with Trevor, Della, Cara & Little/Big Conor
We borrowed Bernadette & Shane's bach at Castle Hill village, and invited the Keohane family to come and join us.
Winter has definitely arrived temperature-wise down here, although very dry, so no snow about. Hard frosts in the mornings (-7 or -8 degrees), indeed the air temperature on Saturday up there didn't get much above freezing. All the kids had a good time playing/scrambling about among the Castle Hill boulders on Sunday afternoon as well. I took a few photos which I've enjoyed experimenting with in Photoshop to make a bit more dramatic.
I also tried taking a few more star trail photos with limited success this week. In fact on one abortive attempt I left the camera out for an hour, and when I came back, both the front of the lens and the camera were covered with a hard frost!
Posted by conor at 12:26 PM
June 12, 2007
Good photography quote
...via one of the guys on the
DPReview forums, which I'm now starting to appreciate (requires a slight understanding of astronomical terminology)!
Photography is a money-sucking blackhole... and I've just crossed the event horizon.
Posted by conor at 3:04 PM
June 8, 2007
Superb weekend away
First weekend in June in New Zealand is a public holiday to "celebrate" our illustrious Queen's Birthday. We headed up to a cottage on Lake Heron Station, a high-country farm 2 hours drive directly west of Christchurch.
Cold, crisp, mostly calm, early winter days in some stunning scenery. We all had a great time. Here's a selection of images from the album.
Posted by conor at 2:41 PM
May 21, 2007
Cecil the Surf's new wheel cover
Ildica got one of my photos printed onto a wheel cover for the spare tyre on the back of our new (to us) car as a present for my birthday.
Fatal error: Call to undefined function buildthumbnaillink() in
/home/conorboyd/ildica.com/archives/photography/index.php on line
631
