Category: Photography

Started with a photo of a car I took a couple of weeks ago. I used Mixer to put another image on top, did some masking and brought in another image over that with the Blend and used a blend preset. Finished off with a little bit of Glow and some more masking.

Old Car, Tree Bark and an Aeroplane Engine

Goodbye Aperture – Hello Apple Photos

The best thing for me about Aperture, is the facility to use the plug-ins from various other third-party applications. Third-party plug-ins from HDR application Photomatix, Intensify Pro, Tonality, Topaz Impression and Noiseless, to mention just a few. It is useful to have all your photos in one place. When you process photos in a different application via a plug-in, the image goes away and comes back to the same place as a copy. It does the round-trip automatically and you don’t have to worry about bringing in the changed photo you had to first of all export out in the first place. We don’t have that functionality yet in the new Apple Photos application, but I expect it will come at some point in time. It’s going to be necessary to make the jump from Aperture one of these days as it is no longer being updated or improved. We just need to be patient for the functionality of Photos App to catch up with what was available in either Aperture or iPhoto previously. In the meantime, we can look at a couple of applications to help us get better use out of the Apple Photos application. There are two such additions we can look at from Fat Cat Software – PowerPhotos and iPhoto Library Manager. I’ve already used a third-party application, PhotoSweeper, for finding duplicate photos which worked extremely well. Finding duplicates is also offered by PowerPhotos.

Analyse your libraries in Power Photos

Create and manage

With this application create and manage multiple libraries. This is extremely handy if you have a limit on the amount of space available on the iCloud photo storage. It also means you can archive off photos you don’t need to look at very often. It’s also makes it easy for you to organise your photos into categories or projects.

Find your photos

You don’t even have to have the Apple Photos application open in order to do a quick browse and search. Either search through a single library or find what you need from multiple libraries. You get a detailed list of your photos which includes a good presentation of the photo meta data. You have lists of photos showing the dates, keywords, descriptions and faces as well as one or two other things besides. From there you can reveal the photo you’re looking for either in Photos or directly in the Finder. Once you’ve found the photo you’re looking for, do the right click and send it off to Affinity Photoand do what you need to do with it.

Bringing it all together

You could have a number photo libraries either in Aperture or in iPhoto you need to bring into Apple Photos. With PowerPhotos you can automate your migration of these photo libraries into the new application.

PowerPhotos A Worthy Addition to Apple Photos

We have so many photos to take care of these days, due to us using our iPhones and even iPads to take photos as well as with our larger digital cameras. It’s necessary for us to have the best software to store and categorise our photos to make them easy to find and to work with. Apple Photos is not yet up to full strength, but it will be, given time. In the meantime we can make things better by using applications such as PowerPhotos. The application itself is not terribly expensive at $20 and seems a worthwhile addition to your photo management tools. It’s still going to be necessary to do a manual export out of Photos App and an import of the photo when you’ve dealt with it in applications such as Affinity Photo. It’s not going to be too difficult to use some automation on your Mac using applications such as Hazel, Keyboard Maestro and maybe even Automator or AppleScript to keep on top of the organisational process. With some work arounds it will be good to make use of the Apple Photos App to manage our photo libraries.

Buy the Book

Layers

I’ve been looking at what can be done with the Instagram photographic social network and I’ve been trying out a couple of new photo applications on my iPhone. One application I’ve been looking at will let you make a collage of three or four photographs together to present your images. The application is called Layout and is free with some in-app purchases available.

Mextures

I made another image using the application Mextures and I like this application because I can choose a number of effects and apply them in layers to the image. On this one, I used the light leak which adds a flare to the image. This worked out rather well as there was already a certain amount of light flaring from outside which was the morning sun.

Geeky Photography Book

The first of the Good and Geeky books is online and available to buy. I am delighted to get it out there and it felt like I would never get finished a few times. I have read through it so many times now it is making my head spin. Each time I find something to give a little tweak to or I find another spelling mistake or a typo. I used the Hemingway application on my Mac to help me make the sentences were as readable as possible. There is still one chapter I would like to add to it later and I will be adding a chapter when the Photos app comes out from Apple. It feels really exciting to have a book in the store now. I can finally say I’m an author although getting a few sales will help me confirm that to myself. I have added the book to KDP Select which means that it can be borrowed by the Amazon customer that use the Kindle Lending Library.

Buy The Book – UK Store

In the book I cover my move to the Sony NEX 6. I have chapter about Mac applications I use with my photos on my Mac. There are links to 12 photography based Mac app tutorials. I look at ways you can get your photography mojo back again if you have lost the creativity you once had. Suggestions to beat the photographers equivalent of writers block.

Buy The Book – US Store

Good and Geeky Writers WorkFlow

This book is in the final stages too. I am giving it another read through before I submit it to the Kindle store too. The next book I work on will be covering the topic of email encryption. It will be a very hands on how to guide style of book and a few explanations to go with it all. I get a lot of interest in my GPG tutorials I have on the Wizardgold YouTube Channel.

This book is a collection of articles about  photography with the geek in mind. It started off as a number of articles that were published on the Spondicious photography website and has been added to with more unpublished new articles. The premise of the book is how to be a more creative photographer using technology and the geekiness.  There is a Mac  and Apple bias and there are a number of videos that are connected to this book showing how to the use whatever is at hand to make better photos.

Getting the best from your camera flash

One of the first things that you have to learn when you are getting into photography is that using the flash on camera is generally not a good thing to do. This doesn’t necessarily mean that using a flash is bad, but you do have to know how to use strobe lighting properly. Quite often when you take a photo using the on camera flash you will find that the subject is completely blown out and will have horrible highlights and shadows that generally make your photos look terrible. You can do some things to improve the situation by using tricks to soften the light from the flash on your camera. You can use little tools which will deflect the light off walls and ceilings in the room which will also soften it. A better route to take would be to use off-camera flashes that are controlled by wireless. The way to do this is to get the wireless sender that you put onto the hot shoe on your camera (My Sony NEX 6 has a hot shoe)and then have receivers which you connect to the flashes which you place in better positions for lighting your subject. To a certain extent this is much like the way that you go for three point lighting when you are shooting video. You will have a key light which is the main light to light your subject on one side and then on the other side you will have a fill light. You can do it with just the two lights but you could also put a light behind your subject which helps your subject to stand out from the background. There you have your three-point lighting.

Following the advice of the Strobist

There is a photographer called David Hobby who has a website called Strobist and here he has loads of information about how to use these off camera flashes or strobe lights. There is a Strobist 101 lighting course which will give you all of the basics that you need to learn how to use your flash lighting. I bought two of the Nikon SB25 flash units and I also got receivers plus a wireless controller. You can get some really interesting effects using even these small battery-powered devices. You do need to spend some time learning how to use these devices and getting the settings just right for your photos.

Shooting in the direction of the sun

One general piece of advice when you are taking photographs is to have the sun behind you when you are taking the shot this is so that you have a better lighting for your subject who is facing into the sun. Although sometimes all you get is a person who is squinting which doesn’t necessarily look so good and you won’t fix that in post processing. What you can do with off-camera strobe lights is to have the sun behind your subject and then use the flashes to light the subject. I have found that these sorts of photos will give some stunning effects in terms of how the subject looks in relation to the lighting of the background.

There will be more about this subject in the Geeky Photographer book when it is published.

HDR photography tutorial – weirdo HDR image

We have all seen them! That strange looking HDR image with the over saturated wild looking colours. Or there are those HDR images which are so sharp that they might cut you, with all the details enhanced and emphasised. There is a well-known photographer on the Internet by the name of Trey Ratcliff who goes by the name of Stuck in Customs. Trey has made a name for himself with the HDR image, producing some stunning looking photographs from all around the world. Some of these images from Iceland are particularly amazing. Even if we can’t all have the opportunity to travel around the world in order to make amazing photography HDR style, we can still learn how to make the HDR images ourselves. If you check out the website for Stuck in Customs you will be able to find a HDR photography tutorial. This will answer all of your questions about what is HDR photography.

What is HDR photography?

With the HDR photography you are extending the visual range of your photograph. Usually the way to do this is to take 3 to 5 shots of the image with the exposures bracketed. So you will have one photograph where the image is overexposed, another photo where the image is underexposed and one where the image is correct in terms of exposure. Then you will use software such as the Hdrsoft’s Photomatix Pro to merge these photos together. You will then have a photograph which is your HDR image, giving you more visual information in the shadows and the highlights. The overexposed photograph gives us the information back in the places where it would be otherwise blown out. The underexposed photo uses the information in the shadows that would be too dark in the standard image. Mixing these two photos together with the standard exposure photo gives us a much wider range of tonal information for our final HDR photo.

Easy does it with HDR

Judging by the many examples of the HDR image around the Internet you’ll understand that it is quite easy to overdo it. While the HDR image is often going to be a little bit strange to the eye and more a piece of photographic art than a faithful rendition of your natural scene, there is no need for it to be completely stupid looking. Fortunately with the HDR software that many people use called Photomatix Pro, there are settings which allow you to achieve a wide range of effects. You can still go for something that might look silly, but you can also do something that will just make a great looking HDR image.

The first stage of the process is to choose whether you want to go for enhanced details or a fusion style of HDR image. Once you have made that decision you will be presented with a variety of choices in the form of sliders and switches that will affect your final image. Even without using a HDR photography tutorial you will soon find some favourites within the style of photograph that you can create. When you start using Photomatix Pro you will more than likely use all of the different presets available before finding some combinations that suits your photography best. Practice using the Photomatix Pro application and you will soon be able to make your own stunning HDR photographs. You can get something that looks like HDR in Intensify Pro.

I’m sure that it is true to say that once you get into photography proper, then you are automatically a geek photographer. You won’t be able to help yourself, there will be lots of gadgets and equipment to buy for your photography and then on top of that you will need to have a wide array of software for the postprocessing of your amazing pics. It is also quite possible that you will be inducted into one camp or the other and that is usually either Canon or Nikon although you could be a rebel like myself and go for something like the Sony mirror-less cameras. Even though there are settings on these cameras that will be totally automatic and can give you a really good picture most of the time, you will want to use the semiautomatic or fully manual settings to really do the job properly. You will not be happy just allowing the camera to choose for you the settings that are going to influence your photograph. Then of course, there is so much reading that has to be done to learn as much as possible about photography and photographers, that it is almost a full-time job. You might think that I am saying all of this in that it is a bad thing, but not at all, it is quite fun to be a geek photographer.

Where to get started

Seeing as just about all of us now carry around a camera in our pocket in the form of a smart phone, then that is obviously the best place to get started with your photography. When you are using your iPhone or your Android smart phone or even your Windows phone if that’s the way that you roll, you can get some great photos. The equipment doesn’t really matter, what is most important is that you develop the photographer’s eye. This is the way that you look at the world and decide on finding things in it that will translate perfectly to an interesting and artistic image. Even when you are snapping shots at the birthday party you will also want to be looking for the best angle and good lighting. It is what us geek photographers do.

Once you have become hooked on taking photos and recording the world in two dimensions, then it is only natural that you will want to get more geeky and get better technology. The truth is, is that there are benefits to having some of the latest photographic technology that widens the range of what you can do with your images. There will be cameras like the NEX-6 that has better software within, that allows you to capture a wide range of light. This handy little camera also has in camera applications that you can add, so that you can put more artistic interpretations on the pictures that you take. Just as an example, there is the partial colour setting which allows you to take a picture that is in black and white all apart from one specified colour such as blue, or you might choose to highlight any reds in the image. I have even been known to experiment with the Sony application on the NEX-6 which turns the photo into an illustration. It is quite a cool effect to play with! Get more Spondicious Photography News.

Postprocessing to turn your photos into art

I have all of my photos in Aperture on my Mac and from this application I can send photos to plug-ins which will turn these photos into something special. Intensify Pro for the Mac is an excellent application. I am one of those photographers that is not interested in merely capturing a version of reality as seen by myself and the camera as the photograph was being taken. What I want to do is to turn a photograph into a work of art and for me that often means to have bright, richly coloured extravagant images that grab the eye. To this end for some time now, one of my favourite types of photography has been HDR photography. For this I set the camera to take three images at the same time. The first one is at the correct exposure and then I do one that is two stops overexposed and another that is two stops underexposed. I then use the Photomatix Pro software to merge these photographs together so that it brings out the information that is in the shadows and also has the information that would be burnt out in the highlights.

Spondicious Geek Photography Book coming soon

On account of the fact that I have written an awful lot of articles about using Mac postprocessing applications for photographs and photography in general, I have gathered these together into a book. Not only is the book full of excellent information about how to work with your photos that you have taken, but there is also hours of video tutorials included. I have added some articles to this that have never been published anywhere else. Before I have finished and published I will also add a couple more videos that will be only for the readers of the Spondicious Geek Photography Book.