In a (New) World of My Own

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

The Abbey

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.

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 a few attempts I finally got a decent portrait of my sister.

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…

The old hut

Serenity

The trees of Merlin Park

Yeah

Big leaf

Grey day in Galway

As always, I have more up on my Flickr site

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

Panning 2

Panning 3

Panning 4

#’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.

I’m back using OS X. Once again I gave up on wireless networking under Linux and I’m back to an OS X/Windows dualboot, decorated by Caira :]

December desktop

Umm, running Firefox, Adium, iTerm and Photoshop CS2.

I was up at 6am on Saturday morning to go out to Menlo Castle with Mike to capture the dawn. I was fairly trashed at work afterwards, but the result was great:

Dawn over Galway

This is a panorama of five photos, although I cropped down the sides as there wasn’t much interesting happening. The photos comprising it used the following settings:

1/4 second at f/9.5, ISO 800. White balance was set to shade to warm the colours and focus was manual. The only processing beyond stithcing was cloning out two city lights that ruined the photo.

Menlo at dawn

A few people have asked me to remove the power lines from this photo, but the gradient is too sharp to do it without a lot of trouble on my part. So feh to that.

I’m mad that I cut the arse off the car, this is one of my best tries at panning yet:

I’m mad

I’ve tried a few panning shots around Eyre Square and the top of Williamsgate Street as the lights from the shops provide great background to the car/bus/whatever.

That I found Killer mauling Caira’s presents or that the first thing I did was to grab the camera, lie on the ground and start snapping manically? -_-

Smoosh

Rwar

Grrrr

/stalk

So much for Caira’s presents…

Or: Woo!

“The repair will be another…4-6 weeks. Could you please ask the customer if he minds waiting for it?”
“…”

That is what we were told today when we called our repair centre to check on my camera. Under our own rules I’m entitled to an exchange if a repair goes outside of 28 days, which is on Tuesday coming, but we changed over the camera today as I’m about as likely to find religion as I am to have my 350D back by then. I was going to take another 350D as an exchange, but every camera we’ve left in stock was either ex-display or faulty, so I took a 400D instead. I’m happy with it so far, I took a few shots around town. The first thing I’ve noticed is that the 400D does a much better job than the 350D did on white balance. Even set to tungsten the 350D tended to put an orange tinge on photos, bleh.

This photo involved falling over

St Nick’s

They replaced my camera!