Week One Portrait Class at CCE

Noirin by Annino O'Reilly

Serena by Annino O'Reilly

Kusum Singh by James Peppiatt

Tommy, pic by James Peppiatt

Tommy, by Kim Psalia

Niall, pic by Kim Psalia

Noirin by Kusum Singh

Hiromi by Phil Young

Noirin by Phil Young

Noirin by Niall Chang

Noirin by Niall Chang

Hiromi by Mary Flynn

Tommy by Mary Flynn

Dave by Leone Burridge

Hiromi by Leone Burridge

Hiromi by Stephanie Flack

Noirin by Stephanie Flack

Serena by Stephanie Flack

Bali Book and Videos

CCE had an eight-day Photo Tour to Bali in October 2012. As expected it was great fun because those that signed up for the tour not only shared a common interest in photography, but they were also game to try almost everything that we threw at them, including weird food, odd locations, a relentless itinerary, and a lot of tough photographic challenges.

Thanks to one of the tour members (thanks again Bev!), I spent some time thinking about the Apple iPad. She used it every day; in the hotel, on the bus - it just seemed a really neat, easy way to play with digital pictures while travelling away from home. So much so I borrowed one from Apple on my return and discovered an amazing world of very cool apps designed to create fabulous-looking, creative imagery. And what's more, it is easy - that's the iPad advantage - because it has to be virtually menu-free, operation is simple yet the results are impressive. Including a paint app called Auto Paint. This produces results that are far better than anything you can easily do using Photoshop Elements. Even more interesting is its parent application - Dynamic Auto Painter (DAP) which, at $100 for the 64-bit version, offers a heap more options and paint styles. Hence the inspiration for the book you see here.

Bali:Island of the Gods by Photo Art by Robin Nichols | Make Your Own Book

Infra-red Stop Motion Fun

Like others I hold on to my old, 'replaced' DSLRs simply through a sense of attachment. Unfortunately if you don't sell gear as soon as it is replaced, it becomes redundant, its second-hand value drops off the map. However, one cool way to revitalise your old camera, point-and-shoot or DSLR, is to have it converted to record infra-red images.

Infra-red photography was popular with landscape photographers back in the 80s when IR film, and processing, was readily available. The IR effect is to render all living plant material in incredible white tones, to make blue skies almost black, and to add a surreal, ethereal feel to any scene. To achieve this on film we had to use a near-black red filter over the lens, make the necessary exposure adjustment, re-focus the lens and then pay for specialist IR processing and printing to get the true glowing white effect. Because it was a bit of a pain only dedicated photographers pursued the process.

Unprocessed infra-red file

Processed black-and-white file

 Using a digital camera to shoot IR is far easier:

- No external filtration needed
- Fast exposures
- Instant results

- The same amount of post-processing that you'd add to a non-IR shot
- Spectacular results

There are several specialist companies that provide a conversion service (I had mine done in the US by www.lifepixel.com). The conversion entails the removal of the camera's existing protective filter (over the camera sensor). This is replaced with a specialist IR filter. These are available in different strengths, depending on your personal picture making requirements (see breakout box). All IR filters will produce radical visual results. The main difference between the 'depths' of each filter effect is most appreciated at the post-processing edit stage. Some of the deeper IR filters produce better tonal separation between blue and green tones which in turn make selecting skies, for example, faster. This in turn enables a photographer to produce a more dramatic visual effect. Again, sites such as www.lifepixel.com have tremendous comparison examples for each IR filter available.

Creating IR Stop Motion Video

Another fun and creative use for the infra-red images is to create stop motion IR stills. I suppose this is like a poor man's video in that you shoot individual video frames and then assemble the collective images into a video presentation using video editing software. Sometimes the visual effects created are stunning from something that's relatively simple to create.

IR Stop Motion: Tools needed

IR converted camera + suitably calibrated lens

Tripod

Remote shutter release cable (optional)

Photoshop or Photoshop Elements

Video editing application (Adobe Premiere Pro or Premiere Elements)

Step 01: Find a good location for your scene. Pick a subject that has both moving and static components in it to best profile the stop motion effect.

Step 02: Use a tripod. As you'll be shooting several hundred frames it's vital not to have any camera/tripod movement.

Step 03: Set the camera to shoot low resolution files. A standard 720p video frame is only be around 2Mb - there's no point in shooting 18Mp frames as this slows the camera and fills the card prematurely. JPEG is best.

Step 04: Set the focus to one specific point in the scene. You CAN change focus manually during a shootinge but care must be taken not to shift the tripod.

Step 05: Set the metering to Manual, make a test shot to get an accurate exposure before starting a sequence. Exposure consistency is important. The faster you shoot (i.e. the more frames) the smoother the stop motion effect.

Step 06: Attach the shutter release cable and start shooting. I usually try to shoot one fps, or faster, but this depends on the subject and the light. If the resolution is too high, or the drive too fast, change the settings. Having a 'fast' card (i.e. a SanDisk Ultra IV) helps, as does shooting in a low resolution mode. 

Step 07: Download the entire sequence. If you have shot several sequences it's good policy to separate each into folders. Next step is to crop each frame to fit the format being produced. If you don't the resulting video might come out with black lines top and bottom or left and right of the frame. Which doesn't look so good. This is normally the HD format (i.e. 16:9 ratio). If you have Photoshop it's easy enough to write an Action to crop and save each image. Processing several hundred frames takes little time. If you don't use PS then you might have to crop each image manually (tedious) or just forget it and go with the format that fits the camera frame proportions (i.e. 4:3).

Step 08: Once the cropping is finished, import into your video software. I prefer to use Adobe Premiere Pro. When importing stills it automatically stretches one image over 25 frames. So one second of video. This is too slow. In the program preferences you can easily reset this so that a still image takes only two frames, thus giving you effectively 12fps. This produces acceptable stop motion.

Step 09: To make editing multiple sequences easier Premiere Pro also enables users to select all the frames in one sequence and Nest them - effectively grouping them as if the sequence was one file. This makes it easier to shift an entire sequence (which might consist of several hundred frames) on the Timeline.

Step 10: To finish, Nest or Group the entire production than add any post-production tone enhancements to the sequence you think necessary. I like adding a Tilt/Shift effect that moves the focus plane to create a miniature 'look' to the production.

Render the entire production and export to your favourite format. Typically this might be 1080p or 720p. Have fun!
TIP: Shoot a blank frame at the end of each sequence to make it easier to identify start and stop points once on the hard drive.

Making a 'Jigsaw' Panorama

One of the most useful tools in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements is a feature called Photomerge.  As the name suggests, this has been designed for stitching panorama sections together. And it’s done this job well ever since it was first introduced in PSE (then it was upscaled to appear in Photoshop CS). In its original version, the finished Photomerge panoramas were unpredictable and required a lot of fine-tuning to get them perfectly lined up and tone matched.

This is the massive caldera of Mt Batur in Bali by Wendy Travers. Many people will be familiar with this (although rarely do you get such a clear view as this!) but few can claim to have captured the entirety of the scene. Wendy shot 30+ images on a point and shoot camera then stitched the lot together using PSE's Photomerge Panorama utility. The resulting file not only encompasses most of this massive scene (including the window ledge at extreme right), it also produces a very large file!

Once the jigsaw has finished stitching, check the layer masks (the black-and-white thumbnails to the right-hand side of the layer thumbnails) to see if there are any redundant layers (ones with no apparent content). Delete them to free up computer resources.

However, ever since the release of PSE 6.0 and a revamped version of Photomerge, it's almost easy to create eye-popping panoramas using this clever piece of computer code. So much so that the same code has been adapted in Photoshop Elements to work with face montaging (called Photomerge Faces), people montaging (called Photomerge People) and there's even a Photomerge 'scene cleaner'. This montages people, and things, OUT of a scene. To make the latter work you have to remember to shoot multiple images of the same subject preferably shot using a tripod, ensuring that the moving parts in the image, usually the people, are recorded in different parts of each section. The software then replaces the ‘busy’ parts of the frame (i.e. those sections that have people moving through them) with ‘less busy’ parts of the frame (i.e. those same sections that have no people moving through them).

One of the refreshing features of a jigsaw panorama is that they move away from the rectilinear format of most photos. The edges can be unpredictable and therefore introduce a sense of chance into the image making process. Mt Batur view jigsaw panorama by Carolyn Pettigrew.

When it comes to shooting a panorama most photographers only record a few frames before stopping the shooting process. This produces quite acceptable panoramic results. But, it’s possible to shoot multiple frames, with different focal lengths, and even at radically different angles to each other and still produce a completely stitcheable result. To a certain extent this technique relies on your computer being able to handle the massive number of calculations this entails but, if you set your camera to medium or low resolution before you start, you'll find that you can shoot up to, and including, 50 frames which are then flawlessly stitched together using Photomerge Panorama.

Hindu ceremony, Tirta Gangga, Bali by Robin Nichols

I call this process a jigsaw panorama. To me it has several advantages over the standard rectilinear frame. Every straight panorama is rectilinear. That's the nature of photography. Everything comes in a rectangular frame. However, if you shoot multiple frames of a set scene, at slightly different angles, randomly if you prefer, the stitched image that’s subsequently produced will have irregular edges. In fact it might even have large parts missing. It just depends on how careful you are when shooting each section.

Aside from a delightful randomness in the resulting shape, you'll soon find that by stitching multiple frames together (and I mean more than six) results in a truly massive picture file. The largest jigsaw panorama I have ever created came to more than 1.5 GB, although I had one student who, memorably, produced a massive 4Gb panorama! He claimed that it took his computer more than three hours to complete.

If you don't want to spend all day waiting for the computer to complete the operation I suggest you lower the resolution, either before you shoot the picture sections, or after using Photoshop Element's batch conversion utility (called Process Multiple Files). Reduce your images to 50 or 70% and then import them back into Photomerge.

Jigsaw Shooting Tips:

Remember to overlap the frames by at least 20%
Do not overlap the frames to much because this just makes the computer have to work harder
Set the lens to manual focus (so the camera does not accidentally re-focus on a near object)
Set the metering to Manual (so the exposures are all the same)
Reduce the file size by 50% to make the processing easier and faster - you will still end up with a large file.

Here was my attempt at the Mt Batur scene - I managed to cover a wider area but missed several sections in the lower slopes of the caldera! This needs another 10 or 15 sections along the base to make up the lost details!

This illustration demonstrates how the frames above overlap, or didn't in this example. I'll just have to go back and reshoot...