With Spring rapidly springing all around there are a wealth of Photographic Opportunities. This little flower is a Grape Hyacinth from my garden, they're really cheery little flowers. I picked it, put it in a small glass, repositioned it to a shady spot out of the direct sun and made sure I had a nice uniform background. The background was a holly bush in the direct sun and the light glinting off the leaves has given the circular "bokeh" effect. To acheive a similar effect use a lens with a "long" focal length (say>50mm). Shoot in aperture priority mode with a wide aperture f/5.6 - f/2.8 or even f/1.8 if you have a lens that'll open that wide. Finally ensure that the camera - subject distance is << than subject to background distance. Having a background that has very bright specular highlights will give the best bokeh. The light in the shaded area was still sufficient to hand hold the shot without resorting to a tripod but if your shutter speed starts to drop below 1/focal lenth then think about using a tripod or resting your camera on a solid surface to avoid shake.



In terms of post processing. This was done entirely in Lightroom 2 as part of the raw conversion. I boosted the colours slightly with Vibrance and an increase in the blacks. Clarity was increased and then some further sharpening. I played with the tone curve to increase the highlights and lights and decrease the shadows and darks to give a further contrast boost. Exported to my flickr stream using Jeffry Friedl's excellent lightroom plug in (Jeffrey Friedl's Blog » Jeffrey’s Lightroom Goodies (Plugins and Tools)) and also using the LR2 Mogrify plug in from Timothy Armes to provide the borders and signature direct from ligthroom on export. Photographer's toolbox - Best Plugins and Web Engines for Adobe Lightroom

My flickr stream showed a bizzarre anomoly today.. views were trickling along nicely and it was looking like anothe rday with 200+ views and then BANG it shoots up to 900 in literally minutes. No single photo was the culprit but it looks like someone viewed pretty much very photo I have. A quick google showed that doing this in slideshow mode doesn't increment the counter so they must have looked at every single shot.... how bizzarre.... and no faves or comments in the process.

I'm also trying something else... embeding my most popular shots here as a slideshow.

Sycamore Bud

Sycamore Bud
Originally uploaded by Mark1970Vintage

This was a very bland, flat and boring shot so I gave it some textrue treatment in photoshop and heh presto... something far more interesting and visually appealing.

Thanks to skeletalmess for the following textures (bokah2, ageing effects5 and painted canvas) I applied a layer mask to delete the bokah2 texture from over the bud itself.

Epiphany....

I'm on a mission to reach Flickr's Explore. This is a portfolio of the top 500 shots uploaded to Flickr each day. There are something like 5000+ uploads a minute but only 500 make it into explore each day. It's an honour to have your shot chosen.

The exact algorythm they use to reflect "interestingness" is highly secret but it's common knowlege that it's based on number of views, faves, comments etc so having a lot of people looking at your shot and leaving comments and faving it is good, as is the speed with which it gernates those views/comments/faves.... but. You can't go pimping your shot to many many groups, spreading your next wide... as this goes against the interestingness rating. Keeping it to 5, certainly less than `0 groups is supposed to help.

Over the last week I've consistently been doing unto others as I would have them do unto me. I've been visiting more contacts home pages, commenting and faving their stuff.. but still only stuff that I truly like and I've been getting the same in return. more comments, more faves, more contact requests and a lot more views. My views have gone from an average of < 75/day to over 200 for the last 6 days with some simple yet seemingly effective behaviour changes on my part.

Next I need a stonking great photo at the top of my stream and then go faving, commenting a lot of other people's photos. I'll only post it to a few of my best groups that I know gives me a lot of views (probably strobist).. and we'll see how we go !!

Happy Easter.

Happy Easter.
Originally uploaded by Mark1970Vintage

From our Easter Egg hunt at Robin and Liz's today. 3 familes (4 if you count the dogs... mother, father daughter) and 10 kids so it was a bit manic but great fun. The kids loved hte Easter Egg hunt and despite the dad's thinking they were being devious it only took the little blighters about 10 mins to find them all.

I learned a new trick in lightroom today. You can add a title and caption to the metadata and when you upload it to Flickr or facebook it's there automatically in the right fields. This will save me a lot of time in the future.

Long Exposure

Bollard
Originally uploaded by Mark1970Vintage

A very long exposure in broad daylight using my ND110 (10 stop filter) to give a streaky effect to the clouds. This shot is of one of the ball bollards at the side of the access road at Guards Polo Club on Smiths Lawn in windsor great park. This is the first time i've had my ND110 out to play in a while and I'd forgotten how difficult it was to use. You need to take a meter reading with it off, focus, switch to manual focus, (autofocus doesn't work when you screw it back on as the viewfinder is virtually black) screw the filter on. Switch to maual mode, dial in +10 stops (e.g. 1/15 second becomes 2 minutes) hit the remote release, start the stop watch, keep the kids amused for 2 mins or so and then go and turn the bulb remote release off. As you cans ee it's quite involved.... but worth it I think for the efefcts you get.

Processed in lightroom with the Alice in Wonderland "Creative catalyst 19" preset.

see here for other ND110 shots from today

www.flickr.com/photos/marklandon/sets/72157623151244607/

April Fool..... unfortunately.

April Fool..... unfortunately.
Originally uploaded by Mark1970Vintage

So I got well and truly April fooled today. I usually visit Flickr in the morning to check out the Explore section (it's a great way of seeing some great photos and getting inspiration for my own shots) Every single shot on the first 5 pages was either rainbows or pandas !! What the .... ??

I thought nothing of it but when I checked back a few hours later it was still all pandas and rainbows. I left a few comments to that effect (there were still some great shots) and then based on another comment above mine I twigged !! It's an April fool. Flickr uses an algorythm (affectionaltely called the "magic donkey" to define interestingness and choose 500 photos it rates as the best (most interesting) to put on explore. Getting on Explore is a real honour as there are only 500 each day and flickr has something like 5000 uploads a second !!

The second part of the April fool was from "Big Huge Labs" and their flickrscout application. This is a tool whereby you can search for your own photos and find if they have been or are currently in "explore". Scout had been set up to show all of your photos... making it look like all of your stream had made it into explore.

I couldn't resist making a Poster of this. If only it were true though !!

In reality only 2 of my shots have made it into explore.. although obviously I thinkl I deserve more.