Chronicle June'08 - Two Photographs Published

I have just learn't that I have had two images published by online art photography magazine Antidull issue 3. (www.antidull.com). This is an online magazine that features artists and art photographers from around the world. The magazine opens as an Adobe flash application - just click on Art Photography Issue # 3 for the photography edition. This is an interesting opportunity for me, given the magazine's international circulation.

These are the two images that were selected from my online portfolio.

Chronicle May'08 - Isle of Harris

Yeah - ok I know - I've done it again, I didn't manage to get even a single post on my blog during April - I just don't know where the time goes, but inevitably updates to the blog have to find their place alongside family time and time for my beekeeping. In particular, April is the start of the busy beekeeping season, so time was spent out in the apiary rather than in front of the the computer.


Moving to May - early May was a trip to Isle of Harris on a Light and Land tour lead by David Ward. Once again L & L delivered an excellent trip and it was a chance to catch up with several fellow Light and Landers that I had travelled with on other tours as well as make new acquaintances. Rather delightfully, once you have done a few trips with Light and Land, it starts to become much like an extended family.

The trip featured some great locations, well worth the travelling the distance. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to get to Harris. Flying isn't that convenient (London to Glasgow etc and then on to Stornaway) The timings aren't that conducive to a single day of travelling, once getting from Stornaway to Tarbert (our base for the week) is also factored in. Driving is a bit of a marathon exercise, again best if the journey is split halfway, with a ferry journey then over to Harris. Once again timings really dictate an overnight stop on Skye before catching the ferry. This leaves the train and more especially the sleeper service to Glasgow or Inverness. I chose this option as the use of time seemed to be better at face value, however the cost of the sleeper is greater than the cost of flying (if you don't wish to share a cabin with a stranger - not my kind of thing I'm afraid) and the term sleeper should be used loosely for anyone even close to being a light sleeper as the train sways and bounces around alarmingly.

I have only just started reviewing the images taken on the trip - it may take some time, given the amount of free time that I don't have at the moment. Nonetheless, scattered amongst this entry are a few from the first day of the trip.

Chronicle March'08 - Greetings Card Surprise...

Yes I know March has just passed... but sometimes you just run out of time - I will try to keep April's Chronicle actually in April! In fact the blog is easier to edit, so I am intending to make posts between the ongoing monthly Chronicles.

It is always with some excitement and trepidation that I receive commercially printed images back from the printers. Colour management ought to be straightforward and in fact most photographers nowadays have a pretty good grasp of the theory AND the practice.

Regrettably, in my experience, the same isn't true of every commercial printer. To properly proof images before sending to a commercial printer, you really need a copy of the profile from the commercial printer that they are going to use to print your work. This often isn't an easy ask! In fact, quite often it just gets lost in translation. My best advice is that if they don't talk the right colour management language and they won't let you have a copy of the necessary colour profile, then find another printer.Anyway, despite believing that all would be well, there is always a moment of suspense opening a package with either proofs or the first production images inside.
This time round all went to plan - sigh of relief!

These images are a selection of what will be available as greetings cards from my website in the next week or so.
Footnote: All of these images were taken in early November'07 during a visit to Montana and Wyoming. Ghost towns and the wide sweeping panoramas of the Grand Tetons were particular highlights.

Chronicle February'08

Focus on Imaging at the NEC has become something of an annual pilgrimage to see what the photographic industry has to offer.

This year felt better than last – maybe due to the return of Canon. Always good to look over their new lenses, but they remain weak in comparison to Nikon with their wide angle zooms (yes the new 16-35 Mk II included) still too soft on a full frame digital SLR when compared to similar Nikon lenses. Come on Canon, you need to step up a gear as with the introduction of full-frame sensors to the Nikon range, Nikon are back in the game. This competition is good and should drive the market forward to the benefit of both Nikon and Canon users. Sony will wade in later in the year with a full frame 25MP sensor SLR that is likely to shake things up further, particularly when Nikon use this sensor in their own body. Canon is making a mess of fixing its 1D MkIII focus problems and this can’t be doing its reputation any good at all – is really been caught napping.

New inkjet paper was in evidence. I have been using the new Harmon Baryta gloss (identical to air-dried fibre based silver halide darkroom paper) and matt paper for about 5 months now and I am really hooked on its wide colour gamut and deep detailed blacks. Harman were promoting their newly released Warmtone gloss baryta (to give it its full proper name – Gloss FB AL Warmtone) a gloss baryta paper with nil or minimal optical brighteners giving a warm gloss paper intended primarily for black and white printing, whereas its close cousin - Gloss FB AL – with optical brighteners works well with both colour and black and white. Free A4 sample packs were being given out which I eagerly accepted and can’t now wait to try out. Similarly Hahnemuehle had two new papers to show, namely their Baryta and Bamboo papers. For my taste I found the Hahnemuehle Baryta surface to be a bit too textured, although no doubt it will appeal to many. Unless I missed it, it was a pity that Epson didn’t manage to have samples available of their new Exhibition Fibre paper that started to ship in the States at the beginning of the month. This paper is intended to compete with the other Barytas and is reported to be the brightest and sharpest of the bunch – which is good and bad in almost equal measure. Being blindingly white the level of optical brighteners is worrying and likely to have an adverse effect on its longevity. But as it wasn’t at Focus, I can’t say that I have seen it to be able to personally pass comment – a pity because a few sample sheets would have made for an interesting comparison.

As usual there were some photographic prints displayed around the exhibition hall, many illustrating the work of college students. It wasn’t always clear how far through their courses these students had progressed and whilst there were some interesting images many of them were not properly sharpened and showed that a better grasp of print sharpening was needed. Print sharpening really must comprise of three core elements – capture sharpening, creative sharpening and finally output sharpening. Single stage sharpening will always be inferior and largely inadequate. Many of the prints that I saw didn’t appear to have enough sharpening applied whether single or multiple stage. This is an easy mistake to make, if the relationship between the image displayed on the monitor and the printed image is not clearly understood. Custom and practice has it that for sharpening, images should be viewed on the monitor at 100% magnification. Unfortunately this is now one rule of thumb that should be killed off forever. With modern monitor resolutions and image output resolutions this advice is totally wrong and will inevitable lead to inaccurate sharpening. If your display resolution is close to 100 ppi and you are printing at 240 ppi then viewing at 50% gives a truer impression of the final sharpening – certainly a lot closer than viewing actual pixels (100%). Similarly a display at 75 ppi with print output at 300 ppi ought to be view at 25%. It should also be remembered that Photoshop isn’t good at odd zoom levels as it applies strong antialiasing at these odd levels – which has an untrue softening effect. Better to stick to viewing images at 50%, 25%, 12.5% etc rather than 66.6%, 33.3% etc. Soft-proofing applied sharpening is far from perfect, however by at least understanding the relationship between monitor and print, it can at least be made to behave predictably.

Expressive Landscape Blog Launches ...!!!!

Welcome to the new blog for the Expressive Landscape website (www.expressive-landscape.com) . This site, launched today, provides a forum for discussion and comment on all things photographic - so long as its landscape!
The expressive-landscape.com features photographic reviews and articles together with galleries of my landscape photography. A selection of my work is available for sale on the site as Limited Edition and Open Edition prints. In addition, some of my artwork is available as greetings cards.