Experiment to use over-sharpening for a palette-knife / oil-paint effect. I guess whether or not you parse it as painterly or oafish use of Topaz depends on your photographic experience…!
Palette Knife Effect
Tree 23
Ivy Dancers | Gallery
Resonance | Gallery
More ICM practice. This time with a whisk and bi-colour processing.
Brown Rubber | Gallery
These all click bigger, but I am still liking the grid business. I’m thinking of a panel for these…. All ICM images of the same dried rubber-plant leaf.
Green Rubber | Gallery
After Bert Stern
For competition themed “Constructed Beauty” in 2024.
Suilven | Gallery
…and four others.
Wirework II | Gallery
Another go at ICM with wires, this time - SCART!
Christmas Tree
From two ideas - count ‘em: TWO - from Penny Reeves.
Inevitably
Freedive | Undersea Panel | Gallery
Here’s an irritating discovery. If you denoise your raw image in Topaz to start with, then push the texture, clarity, exposure - basically anything - afterwards, it gives you a big ugly grid of artefacts. So denoise afterwards. And hopefully I’ll get DxO for Christmas….
Thanos
Experimenting with extreme close-up of my eye. Learning that the real challenge is blocking reflection while also sufficiently illuminating things. And attaining sufficient depth of field at the same time. And sitting really still.
This is a lesson that should be learned. If I take a bunch of raw images, process one significantly to the point I like it, but still have adjustments I want to make at the point of taking the shot (because the first shot was step one in learning something), I struggle to work objectively on subsequent shots because I want to edge them towards what I achieved in shot one, rather than develop them to whatever they naturally want to be. In shot two (on the right) for example, I controlled the light as far is humanly possible, and lined up the reflection of the camera lens perfectly with my pupil. But…… I still prefer shot one despite everything I sought to correct subsequently…
Curiously my eye is much less moist in shot 2. Probably because I had a megawatt lamp inches from my face frying off the moisture…
Strike 3. Clear your mind and start afresh. The frustration with this one is that (although the lens flare is added in post) the lens in the pupil is genuine, but looks pasted in there! Grr.
Wirework | Gallery
Strike one at some ICM with wires a la David Day. Clicking that link will put this effort into some stark perspective - but I’m learning through doing…. I’m going to build a little dark tent in the studio to properly give this sort of thing the space it needs to develop.
This was Cat 5 ethernet cable (de-sheathed). It would be easier to make the images more abstract if they weren’t striped, but I’m interested in that as an option. It makes it more circusey than it would otherwise.
16/12/23 Strike 2
Insomnia
1:20am
and I’m wide awake again.
Have you stopped breathing?
In Bed After Camera Club
Mill Road Winter Fair | Gallery
Went out with a 50mm to make myself interact with folk more (!). Had a lot of fun. A great atmosphere on a freezing day.
Long Exposure Workshop | Gallery
Sunday I attended a (2:1!) long-exposure workshop with Antony Zacharias. These are my shots. I did not do an awful lot of long-exposure stuff, not least because Antony showed me some of his images (see the link to his website) and I was distracted by how wonderful and inspirational they were. Nevertheless, here they are. I quite like some of them and, regardless of the quality of these efforts, the workshop was excellent.
Click to view full-size.
Arcminute Microkelvin Interferometer
There’s probably a way to get the moon not blown out, and still benefit from the moonlight, but I’m buggered if I can work it out.