The Photography Thread

[Ginger Tosser]

It should be the correct speed, i'll blame the wind and tide coming in as my documentation could have been slighty out!

[bangaio]

OK, i admit i'm having a clear out, here's one of my little bro' on the doing what he does..

[Ginger Tosser]

so i'd need a scanner! mmmmmm scanner......

Thats what i was searching for, then after a couple of years I found this cheap (well ?500, but cheap compared to the retail of ?2,500)



A little slow compared to the current model but its been worth it.
scans medium format upto 6 X 9 aswell as 35mm slide and negs.

/edit

Bangaio, i do like the light shots, i plan to do a few of them when i get the DSLR (as it'll be easier to see if they're ****!).

[Magnakai]

Canon have just announced the replacement to the D20 - the D30 (not to be confused with the old-skool 30D)

They've also just announced loads of compact digicams.
Check it out on dpreview.com.

[bangaio]

30d - the d30 was the old one...see confusing. Of more interest i reckon is the new 17-55 f2.8 is lens. I'm gonna gave to get one of those if it's any good. The only thing I wanted that Canon didn't do was a fast general zoom for their cropped dslrs, they had the 17-40 f4 (bit short and slow) the 16-35 f2.8 (fast but too short at the long end) the 17-85 f4.5-5.6 (perfect range and IS but slow.) Nikon has an amazing 17-55 f2.8 and that was always so tempting for me, almost enough to get me to buy into their bodies once and for all but this ..if it any good will be fab and it has IS on it too! Lovely!

[Ginger Tosser]

Also Canon are giving a ?200 Rebate on new purchases of the 5D (between now and June). I'm off to Focus on Imaging at the nec on sunday. Hopefully they might be cheaper there.

I was seriously looking at the 20D as it will be cheaper now, however the full frame and apparant lack of shutter lag has convinced me to get the 5D.

My advice is you want a 20D don't try the 5D, it'll only make you cry.

[DaiSuki]

Kanji Man

Because there was a crowd behind the guy, and because one of the crowd was growing out of his shoulder, I decided I'd like to blur the background of this one. However: my camera is too small to get any kind of depth-of-field-blurring going on, so I had to photoshop it. The only way I could think of doing it was to cut around the guy, and across a certain amount of background, then apply a generic blur filter and then go around the sharp edges this created with the blur tool.

Is there an easier way to do this kind of thing, or a way to get a better finish than I did (the top half of the guy's jacket, and his hat, look decidedly 'misty' to me in a way that they probably shouldn't). I mean, obviously I've got a legit copy of photoshop. It's just that I've... ummm... lost the manual

Apparently some plug-ins can judge depth in a picture and do this kind of thing automatically? Does that kind of plug-in really work?

[DaiSuki]

In fact, I've just noticed a lack of blur under his chin. Best sort that out now

[Magnakai]

I think it's a really, really nice photo as it is! It doesn't really need anything doing to it.

But, if you did want to go hardcore, you could use the Lens Blur filter, like I did on this photo:

Trace around the guy & save the selection as a channel. Then create a new channel with a vertical white to black gradient sort of matching the depth of the ground. I'd start it about half way up, although you could do a very shallow gradient that gets progressively steeper as it goes further up for extra realism.
Load the first channel you created as a selection, then fill it on the gradient channel.
So you should end up with some dark at the bottom, going up to light along the sort of depth of the ground, and with a black outline of the man.

Then go back to your regular picture layer and load up the Lens Blur filter.
Under source, click in the combined channel. I think I've told you to do it the wrong way around, but that's ok as you can just click on invert.

Then move the Blur Focal Distance to 255. That'll make the guy (the black part of the channel) completely in focus. Play with the Radius slider to adjust the amount of blur, and the Noise to make it look good.

Hopefully you should have a really nice looking blur at the end of that!

[DaiSuki]

Cheers for the assistance...

...I was sort of with you until "Load the first channel you created as a selection, then fill it on the gradient channel".

Any chance of a step-by-step for this bit? I've got three channels - the original image, the cut out of the bloke and the gradient background. I see "fill" on the edit menu, but I can't make it do anything useful. Photoshop help recommends that I merge the bloke/gradient channels, but I can't - the option to merge is ghosted.

It looks like it gets easier afterwards

[Ginger Tosser]

I finally got it! Jacobs are selling the 5D at the Focus on Imaging show (NEC) for ?1750.

just need to use it now.

5D

Baby!

[MartyG]

Nice one - that's a lot of pennies - I hope you get your use out of it.

Pretty poor w/e again for taking photos, although I did get a break in the weather today, and managed to get a few shots off. Only really liked a couple of them. This was about the best of them.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=104613577&size=l

[Ginger Tosser]

Hope i do as well, also hoping its easy to hide in the company figures as well.

I'll try to get some shots in the week (work permitting of course). I did some snow shots on my film camera on friday, so might get them back from the devs as well.

Marty, it would be interesting to see a night shot of that alley.

[Distant Cousin]

Some snaps of my trip to Rome:

Colosseum
Obelisk at the President's Palace, I like this cause of the sun around the top.
Constantine's Arch outside the Colosseum.
My family looking very confused at a map ^_^
Inside the Colosseum... Part 1
Inside the Colosseum... Part 2
Crazy Italian guy pretending to walk into the wind...
The Obelisk at St. Peter's Square
St. Peter's Basilica.
John Paul II's tomb.
Library on the way to The Sistine Chapel.

^_^

[MartyG]

I like the Obelisk and the Sistine Chapel shots both are nicely done. The others are a bit snap shotty. It's difficult to get clear shots around such touristy spots as there are always so many people around getting in the way.

I'll see if I can get a shot of that alley way at night, it's close to where I live. I'm not sure there'll be enough light down there to make it work though.