The Abbey
I braved the inclement horribly shitty weather to take some photos of the Abbey church on Eglinton Street.
As I have a terminal lack of anything to do tonight, I’m going to fill in some of my workflow on the photo. The first step is to actually get the photos from my memory card, for which I use a shell script. It does nothing exciting and I don’t accept any responsibility if it accidently dumps ten thousand photos into one folder (which happened to me). There’s not much to say for the script, it takes all the .cr2 files from the memory card and places them under ~/Pictures/Imports in a subfolder, going by today’s date - 2006-12-31.
After that, I import the photos to Lightroom:
Workflow 1
Normally I’d use the raw editor to screw with whatever aspect of the photo needed screwing with, but in this case I wanted to compose a HDR shot in Photoshop, so I just exported the three photos I wanted to tiff format and used the HDR function in Photoshop to create the final photo. I used Photomatix before, but in 90% of shots people go utterly overboard with tone mapping, which leads to a horribly fake and cartoony image, which was never to my tastes when it came to HDR. Going through the HDR group on Flickr I find this and this.
Workflow 2
Creating a HDR photo in Photoshop is insanely easy if you have good shots taken, so I’ll skip on the detailed instructions. Suffice to say, to pick File-> Automate-> Merge to HDR, click a few buttons and go get a coffee if that’s your thing. At this point I’ve composed the HDR, converted it to 16-bit for ease of work and straightened it:
Workflow 3
I’ve started working in layers where I can, I did a lot of tweaking of colours and lighting, with a little clone work for a few annoying cables and wires that were in the church:
Workflow 4
Squinting at the above picture, I had layers for the shadow/highlight tool, levels, hue/saturation, curves, colours and the channel mixer. And behold, the final shot:
Workflow 5
More humbuggery
I’ve been asked by mum to get photos of everyone over the holidays for printing, specifically she wants some kind of nice, posed group shot, which is akin to organising a battle-ready regiment of geese at short order. It’s just not gonna happen. Our one try at a group shot was pathetic and anemic - no one wanted to give me the time to set up, get a tripod or any of that like, so I wound up having to give the camera to Sonya and hope for the best. On the other hand I’ve pissed off everyone no end by getting in their faces and just snapping away, which has given me a small but great set of photos of everyone in natural poses and situations. But no one wants me to use those.
I think in the end I’m just going to sidestep the whole issue by just printing and framing the bloody photos myself.
To bedlam!
Christmas came to the Grealish household. There isn’t much to say, we all opened our presents. I didn’t get much, some dollars from Frank, some gift vouchers and (really) abhorrent pants from Jennifer and some really nice pants and more vouchers from Mum. The high point of the day was a trip to the graveyard to visit nan and dad’s graves, where after one or two attempts I finally got a decent portrait of Jennifer:
…and the final result
And some photos of mum and Jenn together:
I don’t care what they say…
We also had a visitor by way of a stray cat that turned up begging for food:
A christmas traveller
I’m back to work tomorrow (woo). I’ve some more photos up here. Happy holidays to one and all.
Fie
I’m sick and everyone at home is yelling at me because I had the gall to decide myself what I want to do with my life, but I still managed to escape the house for an hour today for a short tip to Merlin Park forest, which is sadly being enroached on from all sides by new housing estates:
If you go down to the woods today…
As always, I have more up on my Flickr site
Panning photos
I’ve been wanting to give panning another good try, so I went down to Eyre Square after work tonight. The problem is that while there’s a few good spots to capture cars, the position of them means that drives can easily see you with the result that they think I’m with the Gardai or something and slow down. Fah!
Panning 1
#’s 3 and 4 were taken right at the top of the square opposite the bus rank, #2 was taken a little further down by Holland’s and #1 was from the top of Shop Steet, as car’s going into that corner make for great captures. Outside of Lightroom adjustments on the raw files, no processing work was done on these.
Me, elsewhere
