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Figured out how to record the menu screen on the D750 so I thought I'd mumble my way through the steps needed to get you shooting and once set up, looking at the world in Black and White through using the Live View option of your camera screen...enjoy?
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Getting there now, still working hard on the farmhouse and meadows but now getting a day a week in to get snapping and uploading again. Full strip down and rebuild of the Rotavator planned for this week, Briggs Stratton 3.5HP cadet for those that may feign an interest, I may take some snaps......... Now, I'm really just doing some pretty straight forward image library shoots at the mo, 50mm lens, not trying to do anything other than get my take on all this new material over here in France. I do have plans to produce commercial/retail images but those can wait for those winter months when I'll be spending lots of time in front of this machine. Big problem for me is the amount of dust I'm getting on the camera sensor, I'll be addressing that next year when i go for a complete overhaul of my gear but for the moment I'm hoping that Amazon can get a big box of swabs to me so I can ease off these monster chunks on the sensor. I'd rather be shooting than retouching blobs all over images...meh...come on Dominique...for he is the very local postie here...get those swabs into the post box. Most of the stuff I'm doing is a bit...ehhhh...how shall I say...good record shots!!! , so not much to fire up the creative juices this is a smattering from a pile that have headed off to Getty images this morning, all 50mm full frame in this rather wonderful quality of light that wafts about us in Brittany Centre Aquatic Morlaix, Architect Marc Mimram
 With mornings taken up with tidying up and uploading Stock library images I'm giving myself the afternoons to have a rummage around in all this brush based/digital painting ..like a voyage of discovery but with a broken compass..as ever I think I'm going to have to write down lots of notes as I'm doing my usual thing of blundering into it with a rough idea of what might happen but also by sticking a wet finger in the air to gauge which way the wind might be blowing, so a bit of chucking the kitchen sink at some things, although I'm doing it on a multi layered basis so I can just ditch a layer in the bin rather than try a stack of multi undoes or run up a mountain of snapshots in history...keen eyed ones amongst you will have probably noticed that that was close to being Photoshop bollock speak..for that, as always. I apologies. So at the moment I've got my head around the Mixing brush, defining patters and using the pattern clone stamp and using a novel technique with the art history brush and as you can see from the smorgasbord of painting techniques above, slapping different techniques together and seeing what happens.. still a long way off from what I can 'see' or, and for this I apologies once more...'pre-visualise'...sheesh... but loading up with a haversack of new techniques that all this new gear is letting me, if not master, well at least have a try at and in many ways that is how I've approached a lot of my image manipulation work..yep..that's just giving it a try, no barriers..sometimes it's the only way to discover the way you want to see things. Seem to have won some paper from Permajet...and I'm not sure why but as it's my paper of choice I'll keep an eye out for Postie. Thi image is now available as a card from Redbubble.  Into it now and using a combination of wacom and mouse to ease myself into this brave new world of tablet based work. So...the quickest way to learn was to go to the Wacom site and also Lynda.com and have a bit of Kelbyone thrown in for good measure...still waiting for all the button functions to stick so I have them all written out next to the Intuos Pad..a good old fashioned crib sheet. Well without further ado I have been back and getting stuck into painting in Photoshop CC, the image below was made up of 8 different layers using the mixer brush function and various brush sizes, now I'm not going to do any training videos just yet as I'm still at the bottom of the learning curve but can see how this could develop especially in the portrait field  So one more to do tonight and then I'll see what else I can get up to with this new system that I'm working with. I've got the double monitor thing just about set up but first back to the flowers for some more intricate paintwork...and here's one hot off the digitl canvas  Looks like it's Photoshop waffle time again and here's one that, if you have Photoshop loaded, you can play along with and create something new from your original file. As ever these are unscripted and if things veer off then all that's included. Things happen, catch the wrong key, click on something you shouldn't well...I think it's all part of learning Photoshop and sometimes those 'accidents' can lead on to a new way of presenting your images. Few notes before we start..shortcuts used are Ctl/J or Cmd/J for a new layer ,Ctl/T or Cmd/T for the transform option, shift and drag, mouse down shft/ctrl/alt/E for a stamped layer copy and probably a few others..okay pin them back it's video time Okay any questions fire them off and I'll sort it, time now for some coffee.
Old dog, new tricks...it dosn't work apparently so as ever I set my jaw square against the twin imposters and threw myself into a dollop of new learning. Problem I have now is that I seem to be replacing my knowledge base with new stuff instead of adding to it.. doh..mind you if you let me loose on Photoshop 4.1 (from the dark ages) I'm sure something would stir and I could muddle through. That said, I quite like finding something new to titivate the visual tastebuds and this week this is what I've been up to. Oh changed from single app Photoshop CC to Pshop CC and LR5 for £8.98 saving 6 quid for more software....hmm.. have a look here So first up the Nik collection of software from Google, it's great, serious addition to LR5 and CC as a programme based filter, I've been delving but mostly I've gone through all the Nik software training and had a play, if you can't/don't like masks or masking then get it...... so new software learnt... and then there's all the analogue, color efx and if you are of that persuasion...Hdr. Click the image below to have a look  So if you are that regular reader of this stuff, thankyou btw., you'll have been up to speed with my computer graphics card death and the upgrading of the aforementioned...well I think I've come to a plateau in the upgrade front on this here old Dell and as I am a power crazed despot it's time for an upgrade. So I've gone for a data munching 1Tb 16gb of ram Dual 24" monitors monster..apparently it's called Hal and as I'm called Dave I can see no problems occuring at all.... coming this week...have filled 2 Hds with images from this old girl...who strangely is running like a rocket now all the junk has been deleted or shuffled off to a portable HD.... oh and a new Wacom Intuos Pro...hmmm nice and a couple of samsung 1TB Hds ..well..as I am getting a bit creaky I think this could the last big upgrade before befuddlement overwhelms me. meh... Now have some new filters...shiny new Hoya Infra red R72 and ND110...springtime..I have plans.... watch this space, I think this could look mad... Time spent watching all of Dave Blacks light painting tutorials on Kelbyone....again watch this space or go and see Dave Black's work here I have some ideas..oh yes some mad stuff in my head that will look like nothing else and probably be destined for my 'Marmite' folder. Found out I had this option in my 500px account..so played, actually quite a good way of pre-visaulising what your images look like as framed artworks..  There's other stuff but the sun is out and Daisy one of my Tortoises has emerged, yet again, from her winters slumber so before the Rugby comes on TTFN until the next time lensmiths... Why..??? well I,ve been looking for a site that would take the images that I think best sum up what I'm seeing at the moment and what I think will have some kind of life as a 'retail fine art photograph' Okay it's all in the eye of the beholder but I will be cherry picking what goes on and give it a push on here and through other outlets. Nice to have the option of somewhere that can handle print and downloads in a sensible and fair kind of way......which probably means I'll be spending less time uploading to flickr. Now I like flickr as it gives me access to Getty, who , god bless 'em have taken over 25% of the images i have on there but at the moment the way I'm seeing and presenting images dosn't fit that Getty style of stock image and as I've not had the nudge to upload any more to them for the last 5 weeks it looks like we concur... So 500 px will have the quirkiest of the quirk, it does contain an awful lot of oddly saturated landscapes and a lot are given probably too much polishing with the Photoshop rag but there are some gems in there. This is me on 500px  Well I think I need to go on an online training video but I seem to have got the hang of the basics of sharing. Okay I've had a 'presence' on there for a while but that was all to do with the Photowalk stuff from the last 2 years and as we are into a new year I thought I'd see what happens with this aspect of photo sharing social media. So I joined a lot of photography groups yesterday and made a beginners mistake by leaving the group notifications on, if you like a full inbox then do that, so quickly reversed the notification thing and have stumbled through the next phase of learning which is the 'sharing' thing...I know I'm on the cusp of old dufferdom but it really isn't intuitive, I'll go and look at some training videos with a strong cup of coffee and try to absorb some of the finer points...surely it must be simple...if not I'll just sit there until something sticks. On other news I updated to Windows 8.1...colours a bit brighter and snappier icons but I'm struggling to see what the difference is, probably due to my imminent dufferdom and lack of intrest in the whole thing. Sent off another file of book cover photos ( photos used in the loosest sense) and let the caffeine and creativity wander off into areas anew...have a look at this one...mildly barking I've got to admit but as ever, most of these are dotted along the learning curve so if they get rejected, well at least I've learnt something new in Photoshop.... Oh you'll find me here https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DavidJohnsonphotography/posts 
Load of Cock
Plans were for some woodland and landscape imagery to take up most of my time this January but as ever serendipity has swooshed into view and the in camera multi exposure stuff has taken over some what, keen eyed viewers will have noticed there is already a 2014 Galleries page up and running which of course will be added to as the year progresses. I'm also up to date with my processing, a first, so what I shoot will now almost...almost immeadiatley appear on here...yeh right.. so here are some wet pavement stalker images. Now you may think I've either been on the giggle juice or had a bout of macular degeneration with the next lot but these are the actual colours. The fountain has a light show built underneath it and if you time things right with the multi exposure shots you'll end up with shots like this Apologies also go out to the Photographer with the tripod who had to put up with me standing in the fountain whilst he went for his killer shot...sorry..you can always 'shop me out. Right lot to do, I'll crack on and I've not even sniffed a coffee yet
..well , dear reader, here we are 2014 and all that, don't know what you lot have planned but by early summer I'll be putting all my planning into practice..I'll be enigmatic and not mention it again...hmmmm life changing I think... Still there's lots of images to create and lots of boulders to scrape off my sensor..I've ordered a big bottle of fluid off amazon, plenty of swabs just need to get in there and do some dislodging... Photographically very busy towards the end of last year, lots of project based stuff and hoicking stuff up onto image library sites, check out my New Images page for all the latest, just letting Lightroom pull in a load of shots I did in Bath on monday, lets see what comes out and I may post later today, full day of footie action to listen to whilst I process and later on all the neighbours in for drinks and things and New Year cajoling. Off out again tomorrow as the BBC is saying 'sunshine' I hope they didn't have their fingers crossed behind their collective backs.... so one from Sunday to finish off with... fairly wide with the 105... 
So just fizzed past some from January of this year and now into a rump of files from June mainly to do with the Scottish Highlands...so many..and looks like i had a fluffy sensor at some points so a bit of uber-tickling with some content aware spotting. Here's some I did earlier  Europa Beach, Lewis  Luskentyre and Taransay, Harris , Outer Hebrides  McDonald Stone, South Harris.  Europa Beach, Isle of Lewis. So new Panoramas and a big pile of Daylight long exposures to get through, now they'll all fill up a gallery on their own soon but I'll post into these blog pages until I have them all done. Next trick is to send them hither and thither to earn themselves a crust... that can wait as I just havn't got it in me to do some mega keyword faff...back to those Bonny Scottish files.. aaayyyyyyeeee.... Wide angle panoramas chucky...from Camera Raw to Photoshop and let the software do all the work for you.....you'll end up with stuff like this....  This is how to do synchronised fettling of your files before flipping them over to Photoshop and then letting the software do all the hard work.... back home, well for the moment, lots of images in the can but at the moment not a lot of time to get them organised and sorted... I'd forgotten how much I love Brittany and it's varied coast and countryside. Lots of meetings and looks like next year is going to be a bit of an adventure over there in France, so I have a lot of planning to get through over the next few months which will mean reactivating a lot of dormant brain cells, may be too late for some of them. I'll start posting stuff later but went to a 'local' sculpture park..it was quite breathtakingly bonkers...the North and South coasts..lovely Huelgoat and Morlaix and bantered up and down the N164 turning left and right occasionally..loads of fun, met lots of nice folk and a a few brits as well... expect a bit of French to start creeping into the blogs as well , ha, my old french teacher would be looking up to the heavens and zoot aloring until la vache came home...yep...long way to go..... 
Peche
If I didn't have my little creative bursts then I wouldn't be able to cope with all the'mundane' images I churn out for Image Library consumption. At the moment I'm playing it safe with correct verticals, clean, well color balanced and nothing that might frighten the horses. My creative side though is probably something that would indeed scare the animals and give some folk the vapours, so I guess at the moment 85% of my time is spent cleaning , cataloguing and keywording whilst I give my self 15% of my working week over to some marmite based barmcakiness, heads full of it by the way so I won't be stopping soon so you've seen these I put up last week and here are a couple from yesterday...    So these are shot using a Daylight balanced light with a Nikon 105mm at f4, I like widish aperture portraits especially when they end up as barking as this. Got some book cover work to do this week so expect axes and billhooks and maybe some 1940@s based stuff and then it's off to France.......wooohooo.....
I take a lot of photographs and you could classify 90% of them as ermmm........ a bit boring. What !! !!! I can see you rubbing your eyes as I type, well yes, well maybe not boring(oh yes they are) but probably a better way of describing them is sensible, correct verticals, realistic colour balance, nothing to frighten the horses or even make anyone get the vapours but they are part and parcel of how I try and scratch something of a living out of this world of photography. We are talking about Image Library shots, records of what is around us and which I post to Libraries for them to seek out buyers and hoover up the dosh for them Now things dribble along, I do a shoot, bring back the keepers, fiffle faffle Lightroom to Photoshop to FTP and there you are online and glistening in their glossy lovliness...but sometimes, sometimes stuff happens and that's where Mr 100% steps up and has a tweak of your sidies. 100%...that's the screen resolution you must do all your final dust/ chromatics/ balance retouching at. If you work in Lightroom or Camera Raw to fix your colour noise problems you'll get a warning message...'Work in 100%....' 100% and now I also do a double take on my files, touched up and corrected and then I'll come back to them the following day for another look over. Now I can see you lolling back into your wingback armchair scoffing at this overt pampering of my image files......well, i just had a large batch rejected, failed..cast aside because one file had a blob of dust on it, so QC failed the lot and I had to wait a month before uploading any more. Okay when I looked the piece of dust was like the scene in Armageddon when they first catch sight of it hurtling towards Bruce Willis...at 25% it really wasn't noticeable..100% and it was 'Yippy cayee, we're going to need a bigger drill' So , if you have aspirations to sell to online libraries fill that screen with 100% of lovliness and flick away with your content aware spotter. 
ZZZZzzzzzzzzzz....Flint Castle...move along...move along...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
..well for a short while and then it's off to France for a long week, get through Christmas and then off into the hills of Spain.. there is a purpose to all this which hopefully will become clear to me and then you by March next year, it's all very exciting, well for me anyway but first trip out of the way so time to check in and report about some snaps I was taking. Light was great whilst I was there, stayed in Gibraltar but wandered across the border into Spain and the edible delights that La Linea had to offer..got stopped at the border, I know, my dodgy looks gave me away but all they found were lumps of well abused camera gear..er did Almeihda gardens, walked the Med steps which really did almost kill me but had great views from the top of Morroco and the vast tonnage of boats waiting for some business...er Wide angle panoramas, some more famous animal pictures, and lots of odd bits of 'The Rock'..could I live there..no, so claustrophobic and even worse when the Med cruise liners dumped their contents into town. So lots of lens swapping so I'm making a guess that I've got dollops of dust on the later images but that's what your PP software really is there for. So for me a few day's of smacking these images into shape with the bonus of some images being accepted for book cover publication whilst I was off on my jolly, now to find where I filed the original layered fles... well gives me something to do. here is a selection of things that hopefully will be appearing in a Waterstones near you soon (truth be told all my book cover stuff is for overseas publication so I've yet to walk in to a Waterstones and go all misty eyed at the sight of my images being mashed together with some text)... so here are a few new ones to look at. Well where did that week go..ah ..processing and uploading...the office chair needs a rest I think .....and I have some ideas for something completely different..... I've got 600mm of Nikkor to put through it's paces...yes 600mm...it looks as battered as I do but the glass, besides a few dust flecks is clear and shiny... I will be out and about with it... also some barking Portrait/studio/person stuff that I have lodged away in my head needs to be brought to life especially as my tortoises are looking at hibernating...(yes tortoises).... besides that I have a lot of macro stuff to do and if I can make this work..telephoto panoramas.......I'll run out of ideas one day...ideas are good, putting them into practice is always the tricky part.... Judgement day beckons on the Worldwide Photowalk images..some good ones on there already and I'm looking forward to the rest appearing soon..yes that would be very, very soon guys...the 14th is looming, you can't win a prize unless you buy a ticket!! Right I have some book cover images to smack into shape, oh some of my images that are appearing on Audio books appear to have that bit liceneced already so even though I've found them in geographical areas that they shouldn't appear in...well they have...hmmmmm , can't say I'm convinced totally but Mr Amazon in all your .com, .co.uk, .it.de.fr variations...I am watching you..oh yes...    Some stuff off to the publishers for a Yay or nay.
..40 years ago...yes 40 years ago that I dropped out of that Lorry on the M6 at Wednesbury, staggered up the road under the weight of all my worldy possesions gathered together in a US Navy drawstring kit bag and turned up at West Bromwich College of Art to begin my education in all things Photographic.. There was a studio of all manner of folk wiffling about with these strange wood and brass contraptions with what looked like the inner parts to an accordian swaying about in the middle..... and so it all began. Really I suppose it's only these last 5 years that I started taking it all seriously again(intervening years had galleries, picture framing and a crazy spell photographing anything traffic and pedestrian related around Greater Manchester) and it was all started off by entering the 'Britain in Pictures' competition run by the BBC .. you had to enter things through their flickr group...what the chuff is a flickr group I remember thinking so I joined and blow me out of the 100's of thousands of entries I actually got 10 in the top 100 and 2 in the top 10...blimey I thought this is great!! So I ended up, still wet behind my digital ears, being exhibited at the National Media Museum in Bradford...okay they were tucked away in the cafe but..heck... it was all new, shiny and a bit bewildering and I suppose I was hooked from there on. So here we are, on the verge of another Worldwide photowalk here in Manchester. We are at the Victoria Baths and all its crazy detailed and hopefully photogenic fixtures and fittings..there will be a model, there will be some death defying 'live' demonstrations by me...yep, it'll be alright on the night.....and hopefully 50 photographers will have a good time, meet new people, maybe learn something and possibly in 40 years time look back and remember the moment that photography was worth immersing themselves in. Hey TFI Friday looks like a day uploading to redbubble once I've stuck down a pile of textures and cut up some bits of material...oops giving it away here's one from my new Glasgow gallery 
Early morning Autmnal sunlight at Glasgow Botanical Gardens
...and a big thanks to Diane Seddon at Oaktree as we now have a great model to photograph https://www.facebook.com/mrslauranorrey?fref=ts had a nice chat with her last night and we look set for a great day at the venue...inside as well so this cacky autumnal weather will be held at bay.. I've just had a cancellation so one place has opened up on the walk just go to the worldwide photowalk page and register....servers are down as I speak but be patient. should be a good day for one and all. Great mix of folk coming and levels of experience. So I have yet another busy day getting the final prep together for the walk, last Photographic club talk of the season at Frodsham where I will be looking at the Urban landscape and from my point of view it's many iterations, so lots of camera technique and the thought behind some recent projects...should be a good night.... I'm all set for a play with the sparkly 105 F2.8 Micro that has been in customs for the past 2 weeks but now released back into captivity..I really have got my eye on some 300mm F2,8's that are on ebay...even with the carriage and customs charges it does work out cheaper than a Europen sourced one...seriously If you are thinking of buying something non EU then here is the checker I used to work out import duty... http://www.dutycalculator.com/ Right back to all those 'sleepers' that are dozing on one of my old (old means about 2009) Freecom hardrives that is stuffed with shots yet to be seen by the public at large..... 2009 and I'm on the Welsh coast in the sunshine.... but oh my the D700 was pretty new then but all those oil specks on the sensor..praise be to content aware spotting.....  Oil and Gas industry on the North Wales coast.  ..one of the image libraries that sells my images to keep an eye out on sites such as amazon and it's various iterations .de .it .fr and so on to see if publishers are using images licenced for one territory in an area where they havn't coughed up for the fee... so as I was meandering around the web last night and for want of something better to do I started searching..and well I found one of my images in places that, have yet to be officially authorised...or have I? Could be that my agents have ...er...not been quick in informing me that they have been actively selling or it could be something in the licence I'm not aware of...either way missive sent off to my agent for a bit of 'clarification' could be nothing but fingers crossed it's fee paying, trips to Spain, France and Gibralatar coming up over the next couple of months and I've run out of children to sell... Here's a link to one of my book cover images... amazon Busy working through lots of 'hard drive sleepers'...those images that have been filed (okay I'm using filed in it's loosest sense) so 2009 and 2010 being given a work over by Adobe's finest and slowly but surely uploaded. I'm really keeping the PP to a very basic minimum, clean, straighten and lens corrections is about the sum total as I nudge things past the QC bots that live on image library sites...for me it's the greatest restraint I've shown in image post processing ever.....ever... lordy they could almost be film..... until the next time....  On the coast at Point of Ayre and it's leaning lighthouse. |
What's all this then????An unyeilding torrent of Photo babbel full of unconfirmed facts and manufactured photo drivel.. take from it what you like, it won't change the world but may leave you feeling nauseous... Categories
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