Due to restrictions on posting videos here in Edublogs, I have moved this blog to a new home. Please go over to http://electricimages.wordpress.com to stay connected with this blog!
The Last Post, CC-BY: http://flickr.com/photos/walkadog
I took this landscape shot in Yarralumla, on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin, near Yarralumla Nursery. Handheld using 3 bracketed exposures, 2 stops apart, and combined in Photomatix to create a single High Dynamic Range file with 11 stops of latitude, which was then post-processed in Lightroom 2.
Yarralumla: Autumn Twilight
This technique of creating an HDR file which I process photographically using Lightroom is a technique I’ve been developing myself. Rather than tone-mapping in Photomatix – which almost always results in awful, overly saturated images – my technique brings out detail in all areas of the image without making them look like technicolour monstrosities.
Nicole was one of my actors in my short film I did a couple of months back for the Lights! Canberra! Action! film festival. Because she would like to do more acting work, she wanted a casting portrait done to attach to her casting bios and applications. I shot this on the spot (on location) in the terrible, dim tungsten lights at the Pancake Parlour in Civic, using a ring flash adaptor to provide even, diffuse lighting, and using a black foamcore “reflector” to provide a backdrop.
Portrait of Nicole
I changed the white balance to a balance out the yellow lighting, and the result was a blue tint to the shadows that looks quite theatrical, almost like it’s lit with stage lights.
I did it! A few posts back I was considering entering a short film in Lights! Canberra! Action!, and here’s the film I submitted, shot on my Canon 5D Mark II. It was my very first attempt at shooting a short film, and I learned a lot from making it. 
Head over Heels. from Leonard Low on Vimeo.
While it didn’t make the Final 12, I learned a LOT from the process of planning and shooting the film… and I’ve since learned quite a bit about editing too. Here’s my feedback from the judges (which I think is fair!):
Opera by Candlelight is an annual event in Canberra at which some of the most talented and promising young musicians in the local region and interstate showcase many of the best-loved arias and classical solo pieces in a beautiful outdoor setting, made even more enchanting by the romance of candlelight. It was lovely to go as a spectator, but I also brought along the camera to practice some stage photography skills and managed to get a few nice shots (despite consciously staying well back so as not to annoy other audience members or distract the cast!)
Don Escamillo (performed by Philip Barton) brags of his exploits in the bullring.
Because of my love of the Arts, I made the images freely available to Opera by Candlelight, and I’ve received some very nice feedback from some of the people involved which was very kind of them. One of the favourite images is this panorama of the stage, created by hand-stitching two images together. The time between captures was a couple of minutes, which means there was time for a couple of people to move on stage, creating sets of identical twins!
Kate Rafferty performs her sensitive and moving rendition of 'Caro nome'
Technical details: images were shot at 21.1 megapixels in RAW on a Canon 5DmkII, mostly with a professional 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM lens. My 580EXmkII Speedlite was attached, but not used for most shots (as the stage lights provided adequate, and more atmospheric, lighting). Exposures metered in Spot Metering mode and exposed at -1EV to compensate for the harshness of the stage lights, which can so easily burn out important highlights on the performers’ faces and costumes; and as an added bonus, -1EV in Aperture Priority makes the shutter speed twice as fast so there’s less chance of motion blurring and shots come out crisper.
I’ve taken part in a local film festival called “Lights, Canberra, Action” a number of times – as an actor, voice actor, and supporting crew member (with varying levels of success!). It is run as an activity in conjunction with our local Canberra Festival, commemorating and celebrating Canberra’s foundation as the Australian national capital, and involves creating a short film that features a list of secret locations and/or items around Canberra – all within a 10-day production timeframe, from go to whoa.
But this year will be different. This is the first year of the Festival that I’ve been in possession of one of the best HD cameras in the world, the Canon 5DmkII – together with a steadily growing video production capability, including a pro-quality RODE VideoMic and a top-of-the-line, lightning fast video workstation, a Dell T7500 with Ultrasharp 24-inch monitors, running both Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere. So – this is the first year I’ve had the capability to shoot and produce my very own short film for the Festival!
It’s going to run from 26 February to 8th March. Whether I join someone’s team, or form my own, I’m really hoping I get to be part of something really great this year.
So it’s been half a year since I last updated this blog, but in that time I’ve been doing a LOT of photography and continuing to learn from books, magazines, exhibitions, other photographers, and above all, experience. I’ve become much better at wielding my mighty 5DmkII – when I first got it, it was slightly overwhelming with all the functions and doodads, but now I can set it up and run it like it’s second nature. I also got a new lens for it, the 24-105mm f/4 L. The 50mm f/1.4 is still an incredibly good lens, but I’ve had countless occasions when I’ve wished I had a wide-angle or a bit of zoom, and the new lens means I can get some experience in a few different genres of photography – particularly landscape photography, for which I’ve also just purchased a top-of-the range Circular Polarising filter.
I’ve also been putting together an excellent digital studio. It all started when I put together a collection of portraits, doing my editing and proofing on a 6-bit Cold Cathode monitor… with disastrous results! Because of the limited colour gamut of the monitor and the cold temperature cast of the cold cathode backlights, the whole set came out with a yellow cast when viewed on my excellent graphics workstation at work!
Portrait with yellow cast... 
I realised that if I was going to get decent results I’d need to be sure that the images I was creating would look good and display and print properly. What’s the point of taking great photos if they all have funny colours when they go out to print? So – I now have a wide-gamut 8-bit, 28-inch monitor, and I’ve been so happy with it I’m now looking at buying an Eizo 16-bit monitor. Here’s a photo from my most recently post-produced set showing much better colour control:
Portrait with correct colour cast
On the software side of things, I’ve been very conscious of developing good workflows to ensure I have backups of my work and consistency of production. I’ve now set up a digital workflow using Lightroom and Photoshop, with various plugins and managers along the way to refine the process for particular kinds of work (portraits, landscapes, etc). One big discovery was that a lot of the work I’ve done in the past has been exported or saved using non-optimal colour spaces. As a result, some of the colours have looked a bit funny on screen (e.g. shadow tones on skin and hair) and I’ve pulled my hair our wondering why they looked so bad! Turns out I’ve needed to manage my colour spaces a bit better, and/or use the correct export features in Photoshop to ensure the exported shots look as good as what I’ve created in Lightroom/Photoshop.
So… 2009 was a big year of learning. The goal in 2010 is to start putting all these skills to the test and start creating commercial-quality and competition-worthy images and products. Look out for my new digital design & photography website, coming soon…
As part of our assessment, we’re required to do a presentation of our images that may include a slideshow or multimedia presentation. I decided to use Animoto to compile my visuals for my presentation, to be followed by high-quality copies of my images. Animoto won the Webby Award this year, as well as the People’s Voice award for Best Service & Application website, so I thought this would be an appropriate best-of-breed way to put together my presentation. So… without further ado… here it is!
That was the “low quality” version of the video, which can be produced in any length for free if you’re an educator or student under Animoto’s “free for education” program. I paid US$5 to download a high-quality version of the video for the actual presentation, as well as an ISO which can be burned to DVD.
Last night I completed the penultimate (second-last!) image in my “Earth Hour” set. This background is rather more serene and less dramatic than the previous images, but I decided on a gentle, pink-toned backdrop to complement the subject’s pretty pink outfit.
The big breakthrough with this image was that I’ve finally mastered hair masking after having serious issues with hair masking in the first images of this series (which I may go back and redo now that I have the technique mastered 
). If you zoom in on the hair in this image, you’ll see that every strand has been flawlessly masked onto the new background using the tutorial I previously linked to.
Exposure Data
Exposure: 1/125 sec.
Aperture: f/2.8
Focal Length: 50 mm (Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens)
ISO Speed: 400
Lighting: Flat light/beauty portrait setup. Tungsten studio light on left diffused through large diffusion panel for full-length diffuse light. Tungsten studio light through tall, rectangular softbox high on right for full-length light from right, but mostly illuminating face.
Over the weekend I was kept busy competing in the NSW Ceroc & Modern Jive Championships, but yesterday afternoon/last night (in spite of being totally knackered by aforementioned dance comp) I managed to finish one more image. The model’s choice of clothing, the background, and the candle combine to create a painterly and almost-fantasy feel to this image.
I think having a foreground element – like the rock on the left of this image, or the park bench behind the subject in “I Forgot…” – makes a big difference in reducing the appearance that the models have been Photoshopped onto a background. I’m thinking of adding a railing behind the image with a view over the Blue Mountains; and some other forground element behind the forest image, to see if these (compositionally) tie the last two images together more.
Exposure Data
Exposure: 1/40 sec.
Aperture: f/2.8
Focal Length: 50 mm (Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens)
ISO Speed: 800
Lighting: Subject was lit by candle; a tall, diffuse soft box was used on the right for fill so that the light from the candle wouldn’t seem to harsh on the subject’s face. The original capture colours were tweaked a little during post-processing to reduce the difference in light temperatures between the candle flame and the tungsten fill light.
