Total Lunar Eclipse Coincides With Winter Solstice

This is a coincidence that hasn't happened for almost 400 years, and it won't happen again until almost 100 years from now.

I'm afraid my photo skills were stretched to their limit in the dark at around minus 10. Using a remote, a torch, eyes streaming, glasses on and off, tripod wobbling, hands freezing, steaming up the view finder etc. etc.

Notice what I think must be an aeroplane top left?

Link to the Spinny Thing

Click on this for the link to the spinny thing, then spin it with your mouse.

I did this project as a test run for products photography for Paul's web site company.
It involves taking 18 images under identical circumstances with the item rotated 20 degrees per shot. The item has to be placed on a perfectly central axis on a calibrated turntable. I batch processed the images and kept the crop identical too. Manual focus f32, Tamron 90ml Macro f2.8, manual exposure using 2 lights with umbrellas.

Spinny Thing

Research and Development Group Inaugural Meeting Sat 11th Dec

Minutes of the Meeting:

Present:
Philippidees Wheatcroft
Paul Simpson
James Woodings
Steven Bright
Susan Billings
Robert Billings
Saffy Sue Simpson
Michael the Chauffeur (special thanks)
Ruthless Hill
Susan Lazy
Ecca

Apologies:
Blueboy Simpson (just doesn't like photos)

Minutes of the Previous Meeting were agreed easily as there weren't any.

Matters Arising:
We all gave ourselves a big pat on the back for the extraordinary quality of the collected images.
After consumption of large amounts of muscle relaxaning, inhibition lifting diuretics the meeting concluded at 1.00am the next day.

Action Points:
Maybe we should eat first next time?

Events 2011:
Maybe a Bird of Prey trip? Rosliston? I'll do some research.
Calke Revisted?
Any other suggestions?

Spotted this Morning

Not sure what he is. Maybe Goshawk?
Apparently a female sparrowhawk.

Robin Competition the Gauntlet Is Laid Down

Celebration for the Christmas Lights in Measham

A Measham Robin

I've tamed this one so any time you want a lesson, Jim, pop round.

How to Make 5 Holes in a Perfectly Good Picture

This involves quite a few steps and if I tell you I'll have to kill you.


So fasten your seat belts, or preferably buy yourself the highly recommended Scott Kelby Adobe CS4 Book which it comes from. 

You have to have a picture in mind that you're going to use, that'll work as a 'banner crop' or letterbox shape.
Make a new, blank document. I made this one 9cm x 6cm at 300dpi.
Add a new layer.
Drag a small square with the Rectangle tool, I made mine 1.4cm square. Holding Shift as you drag keeps the square square, if you see what I mean.

Press D to set foreground to black.
Alt -Backspace fills the square black.
Press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace brings up Free Transform, then drag the square copy over to the right. Holding Shift keeps it in line.

If you do Window>Info you can see the size of the square you are making.

Press Enter to  confirm.
Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T for another copy. Repeat until you have 5 squares.
Centre the two layers by selecting both by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking both.
Then use V (Move) and select Align Horizontal Centres.

To add the picture, select the background layer. Then go to File>Place and select your picture as a Smart Object. Move it so its a bit larger than the boxes. Press Enter to lock.
Drag your photo to the top of the pile of layers.

Then go to Layers>Create Clipping Mask.

You can still move around your photo to get the best position if required.
Then I put the text in.

This took me ages before I'd cracked it and the Scott Kelby book describes it in much better detail.
Happy Clipping Masks.

Making Your Own Custom Blog Background

Here's one way to make your own background for your blog.

Select a suitable image, this one came from our trip to Birmingham, the wall by the canal that Steve made us photograph because he liked the texture.

Open it in Photoshop and select the crop tool.

Set the crop size to 1800px  X  1600px (pixels) this is the max size for the background image.

Make your crop selection and confirm.

Save As (in a place you can find it) your picture at a quality setting that makes it below 300K in the Image Options box.

Sign in to your blog and go to the dashboard.

Go into Design>Template Designer>Background

Click on the side arrow alongside the Background Image box.

You can then upload the image by browsing for it. 

Taking the tick out of the 'scroll with page' box means the background picture stays where it is as your blog text scrolls up and down.

I like my wooden planks and I like my flaking paint, but which one is better? There's only one way to find out.Fi i i i i i i i ight!

'Escape Exhibition' at Burton Hospital

I delivered the 8 mounted prints and frames to Queen's Hosp Burton. They were delighted. The poster above goes into a matching 30x40cm frame with the others.

Their fire regs don't allow glass, as we'd suspected, but they are going to change them over to plastic.

They'll be back in touch to arrange a press release when they're in position.

They looked great as a set, so a big pat on the back for us. 

Bacchus, Roman God of Intoxication.

After a surreal evening at the Burton Photographic Society, I'm thinking of starting a new religion.

This is Bacchus, Roman god of intoxication and a lovely chap, who I'm sure did not know what he'd got himself into.

Thanks very much Bacchus and Jim (a demi god) for the lights.

It was over all too quickly and with a 3, 2, 1 we were back in the room.  But I did have the pleasure of helping him take his toga off after elbowing everyone else out of the way.

Shirazians or Chardonians?

Burton Photographic Society annual Exhibition

Burton Photographic Society Annual Exhibition at the Priory Centre, Church Road, Stretton. Sat 13 and Sun 14 Nov.


This exhibition is open for viewing by the general public over the whole of the weekend from 10am to 4pm with the official opening on Saturday at 2pm by the Deputy Mayor of Burton on Trent.

http://www.burtonps.co.uk/annual%20exhibition.html

Resizing Images for Printing and Mounting

This may well be wrong, because I worked it out myself......all comments and ideas welcome.

For the BPS competitions and for the Burton Hospital Exhibition we are using a maximum mount size of 50cm x 40cm.  Obviously images can be any size within that mount and any orientation, but this is just one way of resizing to optimize framing.

Say we have a portrait orientation image and we want our mount borders to be 7cm wide at the top and left and right sides and then 8cm at the bottom border, which justs lifts the image and works better optically.

In Photoshop select the crop tool and set the width to 27cm and the height to 36cm, this makes the image 1cm bigger than the cut out of the mount allowing 0.5cm overlap on each side. Set the Resolution to 300DPI 

To return to free cropping afterwards just select Clear.

Then I go to Image, Canvas Size and select inches as my units.

I select 12inches by 16inches as the Canvas size with an extension colour of white.
(16x12in is the same price as A3 at DS Colour Labs)

I'm then ready to Edit, Convert to colour profile which I've downloaded from their web site, this is DS Colour Frontier DP2 Lustre, for the matt finish. And obviously Save As ready to send by email.

For 6cm borders top, left, right and 7cm bottom,
Landscape crop 39cm wide by 28cm height
Portrait crop 29cm wide by 38cm height.

For 7cm borders top, left, right and 8cm bottom.
Landscape crop 37cm wide by 26cm height
Portrait crop 27cm wide by 36cm height

Calke Revisited

Seems a long time ago that we went with Bill doesn't it?  Remember they were shedding their antlers then and we saw the white one that had literally just lost one, unbelievable that they grow a new set from scratch every year.

 

I'm visiting Burton Hospital tomorrow to have a chat with them about our exhibition.

Sorry its taken so long, I'll let you know how I get on.

Cathi Poole's Rheas

 It's a strange feeling when a bird, standing a metre in front of you, looks you straight in the eye. Just waying you up for any sign of fear or that attractive bit of fringe on your scarf.

We'd been looking forward to seeing Cathi's birds and weren't disappointed. These large (huge) flightless birds have been hand reared and are incredibly tame. They have the most amazing spherical eyes and must have 340 degree vision, seemingly missing the 20 degrees directly in front of their line of sight.











There are other rare breeds knocking around from West Indian whistling ducks to Soay sheep.  I think I could have got a better sheep picture but he had that 'Come on, step over the fence, make my day,' look in his eye.

 

From Wiki:
Rheas are large, flightless birds with gray-brown plumage, long legs and long necks, similar to an ostrich. Males of R. americana can reach 1.50 metres (4.9 ft), and weigh up to 40 kilograms (88 lb). Their wings are large for a flightless bird and are spread while running, to act like sails Unlike most birds, rheas have only three toes. Their tarsus has horizontal plates on the front of it. They also store urine separately in an expansion of the cloaca.

We were too near the sea to resist a trip and set off for Hornsea. The East coast never ceases to amaze me. Low, brown waves and pebbley shores. Amusement arcades and the best fish and chips fried in lard. Returning over the Humber Bridge. A very memorable day. Thanks, Cathi and Harry, Sausage and Frilly.

Holly

Day trip to York

Paul was going to York on business and I tagged along to take photos.

I found it strangely intimidating to photograph by yourself rather than being with a group, I was quite apprehensive for no good reason.  I wanted to do some portraits and some for the BPS 'documentary' theme (if we ever find out what that means.) Of course the odd spiraling cauliflower caught my eye.

I'm not going to be able to continue with the C and G L3 course so I'm grateful for any feedback.

Tues 21 Sept an Evening with Colin Prior at the Lichfield Garrick

I'm going to this in Lichfield. Still some tickets available.

http://www.lichfieldgarrick.com/Shows/Colin-Prior/index.asp

Lichfield Camera Club are pleased to welcome renowned Landscape photographer Colin Prior as he talks about his work in the Scottish Highlands and what it takes to capture his superb images at dusk and dawn. He will also explore his fascination of the relationships between elements of the natural world and how he goes about capturing them, describing his ambition to raise awareness to younger generations.
Recognised internationally, he has spent the past 25 years documenting the world's wildest places, chasing his fascination with the natural world. His award-winning images, often created at the furthest extremes of the Earth, have taken on iconic status.
He has produced award winning work for TSB, Visit Scotland, Hilton, William Grant & Sons, Belhaven and Bowmore. His work regularly features in galleries, bookshops and outdoor retailers throughout the UK.

Garden Visitor

Giving myself a 'must do better' for these.
I'm going to wrap double sided carpet tape round all the trees and wait till it sticks.

Red Arrows

Hi Guys
With the use of my fantastic Nikon kit I was able to capture a few Red Arrows picture at Shackerstone, even though I was in Lincolnshire.
It would have been sharper, but I think the curvature of the earth affected it.

Hope you got some nice close ups of the hair in the nose of the pilots.

Course Fees Hike Level 3 Photography Burton College

Just picked up the part time brochure, starring Rebecca on page 29.
Course fees for Level 3 C and G are £275 tuition £30 exam fee £67.60 Awarding body.

So £372.60

Last year was £242.60

This is a 53% rise.
Can anyone confirm or explain this?

Leics and Rutland Gardens Trust Trip

Coach trip to Lincolnshire - Doddington Hall gardens including walled garden and the walled garden Normanby Hall. Anyone wanting to come can come as my guest, price is £39, including morning coffee, lunch (ham or cheese ploughmans's) and tours of both gardens

Sunday Sept 5th 2010

Coach departs Glebe road Oadby 8.15am. I have space for 2 in my car to get to Oadby.

The main attraction of our Autumn coach trip this year is to see two walled gardens in Lincolnshire.
Doddington Hall, a great house built in 1595 and still owned by the same family, has 5 acres of beautiful gardens with parterres, mixed borders and a wild garden. Although we have a tour of the whole garden our main interest today is the newly restored walled kitchen garden which contains a very wide variety of produce including many rare and heritage varieties. They use organic techniques, biological control methods and rotate crops for maximum production and pest control.

There will not be time to visit the house but, hopefully there will be time to visit the splendid farm shop where produce from the garden is sold.

Link to the web site

Catie at Holme Pierpoint Aug 2010

Layers with thanks to Steve

This follows on from the BPS Sunday morning Photoshop lesson on layers led by Steve. Very helpful, thanks very much.
I'd got a nice pic of my brother with his little lad Harry

and another which was great for Jack as well but had John's eyes closed.

I wondered if I could transplant the eyes without the help of Photoshop rather than Christian Barnard.

So I managed to open both and put them each into a layer, I then used the free transform tool to align the heads with the top layer on 80% transparency.

Then I made a mask on the top layer and painted in black to reveal the open eyes underneath.

I did a little cloning to reduce reflections in the glasses.

Obviously its much better to get it right in camera to start with, but this was just a moment when Jack touched his little brother and John. All the different hand sizes are special to me.