Went down to Brighton Beach the other day, with a bunch of students who were in disarray…sounds like the beginning of a blues song!

Went down to Brighton Beach the other day,
with a bunch of students who were-in disarray.
Trying to teach them to use camera’s proper-lea…
As well as compose and inform them in every-way.

Sorry, that was pathetic and a blatant abuse of the entire history of the blues.

This trip was not-so-good, it was a mixed bag of students ranging from those who couldn’t be bothered, to those with literally no interest at all, to those who were quite up for giving it their best shot.  Now setting a bunch of students off along the seafront – a place they have grown up around – and getting them to take interesting shots is no mean feat.

I tried my best to encourage, instruct and inform…but it seemed to fall, largely speaking, on deaf ears.  Eventually I got bored and frustrated.

LEAD BY EXAMPLE

Then, I thought: “Lead by example”.

So, instead of instructing and informing…I picked up my camera and just joined in.

Not sure if that method worked either – but thought you might be interested in the results none the less!

To be fair, making images on the seafront is not as easy it may first appear.  Besides some troublesome light issues – it is hard to frame anything that hasn’t already been shot a million times before.  Still, I was quite pleased with the results and enjoyed myself if nobody else did!

What I also found interesting was my inability to shoot in Black & White.  Many of our students photograph in B&W and I thought I might do the same – but I couldn’t do it!  Much as I used to love working in grayscale, I just can’t seem to do it anymore.  Guess I just see the world in colour and have little interest in photographing it any other way.

Enough chat – here are some pictures…cue music.

(by the way, I have decided to add an exciting bit of chat at the end of this post, which I shall entitle Geek Chat read if you like chat and your a geek.)

BRIGHTON BEACH BLUES GALLERY – (CLICK IMAGE TO VIEW FULL SIZE IN LIGHTBOX)

GEEK CHAT

The geek chat will be kept to a minimum – but there is an interesting additional tale to this set of photographs.  As you wont know…I have recently been brushing up on my Photoshop.  Undertaking the rather daunting and quite dry task of working through and array of manuals and books to hone my skills a bit better.  I have always blagged Photoshop and most of my image adjustment skills stem from some basics learned during an afternoon tutorial from Mark Power!

So I have been hitting the books and trying to do things properly.  For those interested, for an all round insight into many of Photoshops main features – set out in a structured and hands on approach, I can certainly recommend the official Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book.  It is very good indeed.

Anyway, I have also been trying to see what I can do with RAW.  For those who don’t know – RAW is a brilliant image format that does not use any compression and maintains the original information captured by a camera’s digital sensor.  This means after taking the shot, you can use a RAW conversion software to save your photos in a non-destructive manner, but better still, you can make changes to the core settings of the image like white balance, exposure, sharpness etc etc without damaging the original data or loosing any quality.  Genius.

I have also used Adobe Lightroom for several years now, but primarily as a filing system.  I sync Lightroom with my images folder on the computer so I can use Lightroom to view folders of images, re-group them, create collections and all that jazz.  I also use it to export images in different formats, resize them and so on.

Christ this really is getting dull!  Anyway, combine all those three things and what do you get?  The photographs above – that’s what.  I wondered what would happen if I did all my image enhancements and adjustments in Lightroom – without taking them into Photoshop at all.  Meaning I could work straight from the RAW files and then export them in a format and size ready to upload.  I think it worked very well – the photographs look, as the students would have said “sick”.

Of course, I think normally the thing to do would be to make the adjustments to the RAW files in Lightroom, then take the images into Photoshop for final tweaking and adjustment before exporting and resizing them.  I am still trying to figure out this whole digital work-flow thing and how to work with RAW images as though they were negatives.  Not sure I have got anywhere near to a solution yet, but this experiment was useful.

Love some of Lightroom’s features.  The straighten function is great and I really love being able to use a dropper to set the white balance on the image itself.  Also the system they have where you can drag on the image itself to adjust the curves and colour balance is genius and for me a much more instinctive way to work.

Think I might have to investigate further…more books perhaps!

Welcome one and all – welcome back.  I would describe my postings as ‘scant’ in recent months.  Perhaps partially to my lazy, procrastinating nature, perhaps partly due to not having a lens for my D80 (regular viewers will remember the last image of the rest of my life incident) .  I have shot loads on film and all, but just haven’t had the time nor means to scan images and put them up (but I shall!).

So, after an absence for some time – what better way to start a come back post than giving it a riveting title like….

NIKON DX AF-S NIKKOR 18-135MM 1:3.5-5.6G ED

I am sure the photography geeks out there will be moderately interested in such a title, but normal everyday sensible browsers will not.  Its the kind of title that could divide a family.  So, for anyone interested in lenses and all that – here is my lens on the Nikon website with all the facts and figures you could desire.

Modeling shirt on Ebay!!!

THE FIRST TEST DRIVE

You may recall from the summer, I had a masterplan to raise cash for my lens.  However…a small amount of thinking made me determine it would take a long time from hair brained schemes alone, to raise the money I needed.  So, that side project should be reserved for getting money to pay for the rest of the stuff on my wish list!

Instead, I sold some stuff.  Lots of stuff.  Anything I could find in fact provided:

a) I no longer needed. it; or 
b) I hadn’t looked at it/used it in two years or more.

Its a good system and turned up a plethera of clothes, bags, photography stuff etc.  A couple of months later and I had enough cash.

As you can see to my left, I even had to turn my hand to modeling – rather successfully I think you will agree!

So, after a late night bidding war (which I won in fantastic bargain hunter style), my lens arrived last Saturday.

Luckily – that weekend happened to co-incide with a general plan to attend various events around Brighton so I had the perfect chance to test the lens out and see how it felt.

Barulho Prepare To March (2009)

BARULHO & THE PROTEST

My brother plays in a Samba Band based in Brighton called Barulho and they were playing at a protest on Saturday morning.

Can’t remember exactly what the protest was for – how bad is that!  But it was for something rather specific… Equality of rights for LGBT Mental Health patients I believe.  So went down to watch the band and got caught up in the protest while I was at it.

Check out the link to Barulho above, they are in Brighton and beyond a lot and hold open sessions regularly for any budding drummers out there.

Arch & Rust (2009)

CHRIST I MISSED MY CAMERA

So, I never thought I would utter the words – but I missed my Digital SLR.  A lot!

For years I held out from getting one.  For years I battered on about how it was as good as cheating and film (Medium Format specifically) was the best way to take images.  For years I spent thousands of pounds I didn’t have on processing and photographic paper.

Then – after my degree, I caved in.  I could no longer afford to regularly shoot film as the costs practically tripled without my student discount or darkroom access.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love film and for serious project work, would generally opt to use Medium Format.  But, for regular image making and the ability to take a camera everywhere and make images constantly – I love my Nikon.

Interestingly, when I first smashed the lens for it, I didn’t take any photos for about a month – I was too gutted.  Then, gradually, I started taking shots on my old Nikon FM-2 35mm.  Partially out of desperation and partially as it seemed appropriate to go from a fairly modern piece of technology to a fairly old and outdated one.

If anything I would say being forced back to 35mm and the constraints of a basic camera really helped me.  It made me more motivated to take lots of shots, made me think about my images in a different way again and I suppose I kind of fell back in love with taking photos just for the love of it and not always having to have a pre-defined goal to aim for.

Dawali Celebrations - Brighton Old Court House (2009)

DAWALI CELEBRATIONS AT BRIGHTON MUSEUM

Also headed down to Brighton Museum for the Dawali Celebrations.

Living in Brighton, it never fails to shock me what a white middle class kind of city it is.  Compared to towns I have lived in before, the ethnic population is very small.  So it was refreshing to find an event like this that celebrated another culture and one of it’s important days.

Much of it was aimed at kids, but it was an interesting event none the less with some interesting things to see.

I must admit to being very ignorant of the Hindu culture but learnt a bit more about Dawali and what it actually means.

Courthouse Portrait (2009)

MUSIC IN THE OLD COURT HOUSE

The best part of the Dawali celebrations, for me, was the music on the old court house – over the way from Brighton Museum.

My brother (pictured) is a musician and was keen to check out the sounds and record some for use in his own creations as The Reverse Engineer.

Whilst I wont pretend to know anything about the music they were playing or the instruments it was played on…needless to say it was very enjoyable!

Do you know…I have just realised that this post has basically turned into one of those stories you had to write at primary school after the summer holidays…

“This summer I did lots of fun things.  I went to the zoo and saw an elephant which was good because elephants are big.  I also went to the park with my friend and we ran around a lot.  I like the summer because its hot”

Apologies if anyone else picked up on the rather bland formulaic approach I took when writing it, but there you have it – I am out of practice at Blogging!

I guess the point of this post, in summary, would be:

I got a new lens.  I tried my new lens out.  I was pleased with my new lens and pleased to have access to my digital camera again. as it will make keeping the blog up to date much easier. I also got to see a Samba band, a protest and some interesting music at the Dawali celebrations.  All in all, I am happy.

Which is better – the waffling story or the concise summary…you decide!

Digital Pinhole 1 (2009)

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A BROKEN DIGITAL CAMERA?

Just a quick post to update you on the digital camera disaster (see previous post).

So…the lens was ruined, but I had no real way to tell if the camera body was also damaged. I had managed to download the latest images off the camera – which was a good sign. But without a lens, I had no way to check the camera’s functions and sensor had not also taken a battering.

Sitting in my small technician’s room one lunch time – I wondered if you could create a digital pinhole camera. This train of though mostly came about through my frustration at having an expensive camera body but absolutely no way of affording a new lens to make the thing usable in any sense!

That line of thought lead me onto the most basic form of photographic image – the pinhole camera technique.

So, thinking that there was no reason it shouldn’t work, I set about turning the Nikon Digital SLR body into the most expensive and technologically advanced pinhole camera the world has ever seen!

So far – I have only done a basic test to prove the theory correct and the process would work. To do so, I just got a bit of black mounting card, poked a very small hole (a pin hole no less!!!) into the middle of it and cut the card to be slightly bigger than the lens housing on the camera body.

Digital Pinhole 2 (2009)

I then firmly held the card over the camera body where the lens would normally fit, and took a photo as normal (this has to be done in fully manual mode; otherwise the camera goes mental trying to find a lens). I also had to experiment with exposure times for a while to try and get that right.

However – I was quite pleased with the results – three of which are displayed here. I didn’t Photoshop them other than a very small tweak on the levels. So what you see is what I got.

I am quite excited by them truth be told! Think there could be some mileage in this ironic form of digital image making!

So – my next project will be trying to make a slightly more permanent lens attachment so I can use the Nikon as a digital pinhole camera until I get the funds together to buy a real lens!

Or perhaps it will change the way I take photographs for ever?!?!

I will post more results on the blog as I get them.

Digital Pinhole 3 (2009)

In the mean time – try it yourself! It will fill you with a smug satisfaction to use such expensive and advanced equipment for such a basic task!