Blooming wildlife.

People are easy(ish) they can generally do as their told, if they're trying to run away out of the photo you should probably stop chasing them with a camera.

Pets are generally confined to a certain area, so just shoot a few thousand pictures and sooner or later you'll get lucky.

Wildlife on the other hand is an absolute pain, it does what it likes and typically it likes to go away and hide.

What you'll need/want:

• A very fast camera (focus + fps [shots per second])
• Animals don't stick around for long, so that's why you want a speedy camera.
• Bait
• It's best if you can set up the picture by expecting where the animal is going. I don't mean bear baiting, but placing some bird feed is pretty handy.
• Patience
•  If you're hiding in plain site you may need to stay still for a while before the bears come back.
• Luck
• A massive zoom
•  If you can't make out the detail of the animal it's a crap shot, either fill the frame or make sure it's an interesting picture with the surroundings.

Saying that, I haven't had a good week of trying...

About an inch too far right, it's also got a building in the background making it cluttered. But the timing and focus was spot on, hurrah.

 I do like the motion blur on the wings even at 1/1600

Spot the Difference

OK, this shouldn't be too hard for you.

So you really don't want to be the guy who takes a crap picture and fixes it afterwards, it's always better to try and frame your picture without clutter in the background. Sometimes it just happens, or it's unavoidable... then you can see about removing things.

It's honestly not that hard, as long as you have a small patch of the area you want you can clone it all better. Just try to keep in mind don't copy whole sections, do little bits and try to mix up the pattern.

For bits like the red tractor, cut that shape out and place it on top of the layer you're cloning.

If you do it well your eye shouldn't be drawn to it, so sometimes the less work the better... sometimes it feels like a scene from Father Ted. If that happens start with a new car, re-open the file or jump back in the history.

Cheap Photography

Well it's cheap because I used what was to hand, it's more cheap in terms of amount of effort.

You'll need a Macro lens, remote flash, SLR and item to photograph.

I picked a crocheted rabbit which B made for me, the fluff on the edges hi-lights the flash.

Peak District Climbing

So in my last post about waterfalls I mentioned the reason for being up north was climbing, well here are some pictures from that too.

Gear: 7D with 15-85mm and 90-300mm. The 90-300 is a little slow at 4.5-5.6, but this isn't going to be a problem outside on sunny days. For any sports photography you're going to want a high FPS, like the 7D while the 100% view finder makes framing easy.

Everything was shot in RAW to help with editing.

We had some great clouds to make the skies look a little more exciting (always good to add to your stock library too). It's very easy to get bum shots while photographing climbing, they don't make great pictures... so I tried to stay at least at or above eye level.

The exception to the rule, shot from below.

The 90-300mm on a cropped body allows for easy candid shots.

That's me on the wall, I didn't quite make it as a 10second challenge this was taken with the help of a tripod and release timer.

Another candid shot.

15mm action.

On really windy days you may consider tying down camera on remote shutters, this poor 600D was well secured before being left on timer (It helps being on a climbing trip when working out how to tie down cameras).

The ropes make it look a little girly, I had considered removing it - but it would be a lot of work to remove the shadow along the arm.

Ahhh framing.

Little bit of HDR

Stitch job

Yorkshire Waterfalls!

So on Friday some of us were heading to the Peak District for climbing, but I decided to leave earlier and nip past the Yorkshire Dales to hunt down some waterfalls... Having set off at 9am I wasn't at Richmond till 1530, but that wasn't a huge problem as the light was still too bright for slow shutter speeds.

I built a Google map list of waterfalls I wanted to track down and I did my best to manage as many as possible in a short time.

Richmond Falls was a bit of a wash out, very impressive to look at but darn near impossible to photograph at 1530/1600 on a summer's day. Only when zoomed in could I reduce the shutter speed enough.Ooooh this would be a good time for an expensive dark filter!

F36 1/3s 63mm

But while I like this picture, it doesn't help show the mighty nature of the waterfall! Which is impressively wide, although short.

F22 1/3 15mm

It goes out to that wall too, but the only rocks to stand on in front were too far away for a good photo. I also made it out to that wall on the right of the picture, but it's impossible to see the main fall there.

Anyway, so mindful of time i raced back up the hill and jumped back in the car and headed on to Orgate Force (that's not my picture). But honestly, I couldn't find it - well more to the point I couldn't find anywhere of parking the car within a few miles so after a while of trying to walk up stream... So I cut my losses and went on to a place with no name. Where I found these:

 After this I went for a walk down stream in search of the next, and while I could hear one I couldn't find a way down to it... which bummed me out a little. But I found myself in a field full of rabbits, which was good too.

I'll most definitely be going back, I only managed a fraction of my list as they take a surprisingly long time to track down, frame up and then photograph. It clearly needs to be at least a week, but I'm not sure Bex could be dragged around Yorkshire for a whole week of my hobby.

Waterfalls coming soon!

Currently pitched up in the peak district for a climbing weekend... but stopped off in the Yorkshire Dales for some waterfall hunting! Pictures coming soon.

Wedding Invites, a how to.

Right, for anyone who doesn't know me and B are engaged and we're planning to do most of the work ourselves, starting with the invites... which transpired to be incredibly easy!

We looked at few we've had in the past, pinched the bits we liked... we knew we wanted them simple/clear to read with not too much manual work.

I started by buying the card, I bought these they come in a box of 100 and with envelopes, making a nice square shape of 135*135mm. Once you know what shape card you have you can do the design, if you do the design before the card you might need to shop around for something more expensive.

I then went to 1001FreeFonts and picked a font to use, we're trying to have a simple theme so an old fashioned typewriter font suited: Here it is (be sure to check the licence, most are free to use for non-commercial use).

 

 As I mentioned, the card was 135*135 Square meaning designs are 270*135. I find the best way to do this is to create a layer ½ the size and place it on the left, this allows you to picture it as two halfs... front and back.

Throw the text on that you want, line it up so it looks nice.

Do the back, here we've done all the boring details like accommodation and the wedding list.

Mirror this for the inside too, here we've left the left side clear so we can stick in an A4 map to unfold nicely.

Don't make more work for yourself, for the evening invitation I've use the first as a template and only made slight changes to the text content.

It doesn't have to stop there, in Photoshop it's very easy to do a mail-merge like function. It's called variables, it's designed for much higher processing like mass production of web banners based on changing information in excel sheets. But it works just as well to produce invite with individual printed names... you need is a .csv file with a list of names in (as pictured above).

The finished product:

Run through the printer twice (once each side, with a long wait for the ink to dry).

The envelopes had a standard mail merge used, it was a bit of a faff to set the paper size correctly in word, but it did work in the end. For people with a whole address that got printed, most people are getting theirs hand delivered so it's just a name. We also used a rubber stamp to put a return address on the back, but that was mostly because I could.

I've skipped over any of the details, assuming you know how to do these. there are plenty of good lessons for Photoshop on you-tube, just search for what you're after. Good phrases are "Photoshop Text Wrap" and "Photoshop Variables".

While Photoshop is wonderful to use, you could basically achieve the same results in publisher, paint, power-point or gimp. For simple text layout work there are other applications which do the job just as well... meaning you can really do it yourself and save a few hundred pounds.

Honestly, there are companies out there charging a fortune for what's basically GCSE level DT work which can be done on equipment most people have at home already. End of rant.