Project 365 is now complete – what’s next

Written by admin on January 25th, 2010

When I started out on this project, my goals and reasons were quite simple, get out with my camera and try to expand my creative horizons. I felt I was repeating myself and I needed to try and get out of this pattern. I don’t want to call it a rut as such but it is safe to say I needed to work on my creativity. With a new baby, work being busy and a host of other things happening, I knew if I didn’t have a project like this one my photography wouldn’t grow and I might even lose some of the growth I had made.

The goals for the project were simply this:

- Get out with my camera every day
– Go to the same places and force myself to find new and creative ways to see things
– Find out new subject areas that I would enjoy and could expand into
– Practice practice practice, like a runner, its not what we do once a month that makes the difference

I can happily say that I followed through on the goals above and they have lead me to some interesting places. First of all the practice practice practice part has been eye opening in regards to the way I react to oportunities, not only on the concious levels, but also subconciously. The new subject areas I have found that I am interested in should provide me with a lot of new interesting material to work with.

Lessons I have learn’t along the way

What goes in comes out, if nothing is coming out put more in, what I mean by that is inspiration cames from seeing / hearing / feeling /…. If you feel like your lacking ideas, find some new inputs. The more creative you want to be the more you will find yourself needing to find new sources of inspiration for your mind and spirit to feed on.

There is a fantastic community of photographers around the world who freely give their time, energy and experience. If you are feeling a little flat on the pushing the boundaries, find a new technique or tutorial and try it out.

The final phase

The project has produced lots of interesting images that have and will continue to be used for further projects. Indeed some of the images have already been sold as prints, used on websites and sold in calendars.

The final phase of the project is to release the photobook that I have been working on since Christmas. The photobook features the best of the images I have taken over the last year. The image on the front cover has almost every photo a day taken throughout the year. Alongside the photos are various quotes and snippets of wisdom that have helped me through the project. To view the electroninc version of the book click here. If you are interested in getting an A5 or A4 copy of the book let me know, and I will let you know the details.

What next….

Well that has been a question quite a few people have asked and one I have been asking myself. The photoblog has had over 2400 visitors (unique visits per day) and over 18000 page views. More than one client has told me how much they have enjoyed the photos I post. So I have decided to keep posting images onto the photoblog, I won’t promise it will be every day but it will be most days.

My next project however is based on project 365 but with aim of upping the quality and reducing the focus on quantity. The new project will be called Project 52. The goal of the project is to produce 52 images (1 a week) that I would hang on my wall. Once again I will aim to produce a photobook with the all the images from the project inside. I also want to focus on creating images and exploring themes, rather than just capturing images of things as I see them.

By keeping the photoblog running and working through Project 52 (if anyone can think of better name, let me know) I think I will keep the momentum going from Project 365 and continue the growth in my photography.

To all those people who have made comments on the blog, facebook and face to face, thanks it helped me a lot to keep focused and keep going. I have heard more than one person who is thinking about doing a similar project.

Mike

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Exposure and Dynamic Range

Written by admin on January 11th, 2010

Just aquick post about dynamic range and how to find out about your cameras sensor’s abilities.  Ever wondered what the dynamic range of your camera is, wonder no more.  The DxOMark website (www.dxomark.com) will show you the vital statistics of your camera (even how close the ISO on your camera matches the actual ISO standards).

If you are still wondering what dynamic range is, take a look at the following article from Martin Bailey or a great Dynamic Range article from Cambridge in colour.

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Joe Mcnally’s Youtube Channel

Written by admin on January 5th, 2010

Youtube is a great way to find free video tutorials on all things photography.  Today on my wanderings through the web I happened onto Joe Mcnally’s Youtube channel.  He has currently got 18 videos uploaded.  His latest offering is a funny look at the “sins of the modern photographer”…

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Inspired by Helmut Hirler

Written by admin on January 2nd, 2010

In my last post I discussed a photographer that I had seen at a new gallery.  I was interested in how he produced these contrasty looking images and guessed that it was was using an Infra-red sensitive film. I decided to try and recreate the high contrast look in Helmut’s images.

The first stage was to take a few images with an Infra-red filter attached to my Canon 20D.  The photo was taken out my back door and is a fairly average scene to say the least. Fortunately for me the sky had an interesting range of clouds scooting by. The image was a 30 second

capture at F16 at ISO 200 in manual mode with a RAW file format.  F16 was chosen to ensure the image had sufficient depth of field for both the foreground and the clouds behind.

I then brought the image into Photoshop CS3 using Adobe Bridge and Camera RAW.  In Camera RAW I increased the contrast to +100 and set the clarity slider to +100.  In Photoshop to further bring out the contrast in the image, I raised the black point, added contrast layers using curves and applied sharpening to the image using the high pass technique. The finished image can be seen above.

What did I learn from this test.  First of all, don’t try to get the histogram on the camera’s display all the way to the right, I found the best results came when I gave about 1.5 stops of space between the histograms white point and the start of the curve on the display.  I found if I tried to get closer than this I would get clipped highlights and a hotspot in the centre of the image, which is impossible to remove.  I can only guess that the histogram on the 20D display is not sensitive enough to the infra-red image.

Secondly, the high pass sharpening technique feels right when used on images like this.

I look forward to trying this technique out when capturing images of subjects which have suffered what I call “natures revenge”, rust, rot and other forms of destruction.

 

 

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Being An Avid Collector Of Ideas

Written by admin on December 29th, 2009

As part of my Christmas presents I received a collection of e-books from David duChemin.  I am currently reading the first of these books which is called “THE INSPIRED EYE”.  One of the paths to creativity that David mentions in his book is to become an avid collector of ideas and concepts or as he calls it “building blocks”.  These can then be used by the brain (both consciously and sub-consciously) in future creative adventures.  One of the places David mentions where these building blocks can be found, is in Art galleries.

As part of our Christmas holiday travels, I knew we would be passing by a gallery that had opened just recently in Woodville.  From a previous journey past before the gallery had opened I knew that the art work inside had some unique ideas. The gallery has rather cleverly been named Artmosphere.  Following David’s advice we decided to take a break from the summer heat and go collecting.

What we discovered inside included a number of paintings of roadside scenes painted on car bonnets, an interesting idea where the substrate used adds to the story being told. We also saw some examples (some over a metre in width) of the work of photographer Helmut Hirler who seems to specialise in large format infra-red photography.

The most interesting aspect I found about Helmut’s work was the way he used Infra-red photography to bring out the texture and contrast in a scene.  The image of Helmut’s to the right is a good example of this. I look forward to the building blocks gathered on this summer afternoon eventually appearing in some of the images I capture, thanks Helmut for the inspiration.

I tried infra-red photography a few years ago but had a few issues with the image containing a bright hotspot in the middle of the image which I couldn’t explain and other photographers I had asked and no extra advice to add. After seeing Helmut’s work I decided to see if there was a good resource to help me with the issues I had, and maybe some advice how to avoid them. I found this rather aptly named article, A gentle introduction to infra-red photography which discusses among other things the hotspot issues I had.

Thanks David for the advice, it was an interesting half hour that has sparked new ideas.

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