Perth close-ups: floral colour

The last in a short series of photos from a stroll around Perth.

These are all processed slightly differently from my usual workflow – instead of darktable, I used RawTherapee with a film emulation (allegedly Fuji Provia). As with the others in this series, all images were made on a Helios 58mm f/2 prime lens, pretty wide open.

Crail Harbour Rocks: then and now

Quite a few years ago, I had just acquired a large-format view-camera (a Shen-Hao); for a first excursion, I took it to Crail in Fife and made an interesting study of the boulders submerged at the water’s edge on the beach.

Fast-forward five years, and I returned to the same beach in Crail with a little Sony NEX-7 camera and retook the same image-brief:

  • Crail
  • closeup
  • water and rocks
  • multiple superimposed exposures

The differences a few yards, a few years, and a different day can make! Enough, perhaps, to justify titling the new image “Crail Harbour Rocks (2)”.

Around a Graveyard

A small set of photos made in Kinnoull Graveyard, Perth.

A friend from the photo-society had posted a handful of photos of this graveyard on facebook a few days previously, so I had a few ideas for scenes to shoot when we went there last November.

In particular, the obvious manipulated moody photo is an example of bokeh-panorama aka Brenzer technique – using a comparatively long focal length lens at wide aperture to narrow the depth of field and stitching a panorama to restore the field of view angle. In this case, it was a Zeiss 50mm f/2.8 lens, but the resultant shot would require a lens of 13mm f/0.85 to achieve in a single exposure.

It’s been a while…

It’s been a few months now since I called time on the fixation with black&white closeup as a style. So it’s time to remember how to do it… Herewith, mostly as a lens-test, cyclamen and cactus plants from the kitchen windowsill.

Since I last looked, RawTherapee has changed a lot – I’ve learned that the `Contrast by Details’ control was responsible for some undesirable noisy artefacts in previous profiles, it’s gained better control over black and white conversion and even support for X-Trans sensors (now there’s something to lust after).

fungi in the forest

Back in the middle of September, I spent a couple of hours exploring the Black Woods of Rannoch – a Caledonian Forest reserve on the south side of Loch Rannoch. One of the things that struck me – apart from a mosquito – was the sheer proliferation of toadstools, both fly-agaric and others, littering the path through the woods.