Taken yesterday a 5.30 A. This dawn shot is important in two ways. My mother died while I was working on the painting above. I have called it Joans Dawn.  Joan Pforr nee Caldwell. 29 August 1921. Married 29 August 1942. Called home on 20th Feb. 2011.

17th Feb

Some variations on an image I took last evening at 5:10 PM. I was doing some tests for the plan of tonight's shoot.  I'll use a tripod and some on camera filter.  Plus be a little later.

Annie Grices' shot of "Sunset Flying Home" Feb 10 2011

Annie Grice took this great shot on the way home after the my recent  Summer School. No blocked up shadows, highlights ,plus neutral mid-tones. Well done, composition and cropping right on the money.
PEAK protocol used well.

Photo by numbers

Peter Eastway the well known Australian photographer now advocates numbers as a way of controlling contrast in images. He shows how Phase One , the European Raw converter can do this.
I have been preaching this system for at least the last 15 years.  The image above was totally painted by numbers. The PEAK protocol allows you to do this with almost any photo application.

SLOW Photography movement

Take your time and take one picture for bigger rewards.

lane terry
THERE we were, out in the forest taking photos of the waterfall, when the conversation naturally turned to the great Ansel Adams. Just as every composer has the misfortune to work in the shadow of Beethoven , so every photographer is overawed by the American master of landscape photography.

One thing we agreed on was that he would not be using our ‘‘ take 27 photos and one is bound to be OK’ ’ technique. He would have been there before dawn, lugging his heavy plate camera into the best position, checking his composition, waiting for the light to be just so, and then firing the shutter. Then, one perfect image in the bag, he would pack and up go home. His work flow was then to develop the negative and make a print. And then next year another print. And the year after ... and so on.

One of Adams’s famous photos , Aspens, Northern New Mexico, was shot and first printed in 1958. In 1976 he was still making new prints from the negative, searching for that extra je ne sais quoi in the image. And when you see the prints side by side you see that he found it.

In a recent issue of the online magazine Slate, Tim Wu (slate.com/id/2279659) writes about what he sees as a reaction to the mindless profligacy of digital snapping. He applauds the arrival of the ‘‘ slow photography movement’’ .

‘‘ Slow photography is the effort to flip the usual relationship between process and results,’’ he says. ‘‘ Usually, you use a camera because you want the results (the photos). In slow photography the basic idea is that photos themselves — the results — are secondary. The goal is the experience of studying some object carefully and exercising creative choice. That’s it.’’

We know what he means. We came away with some — well, lots of — photos of the waterfall but, if we are honest with ourselves , we would have to say that we didn’t actually see the object. Mind you, it was raining at the time so we were in a hurry but that probably wouldn’t have made Mr Adams speed up and miss the view.

New York Times photographer Fred Conrad’s essay, Slow Photography in an Instantaneous Age

(tinyurl.com/rc5yn4) takes up the theme. Conrad writes: ‘‘ One advantage of using larger formats is that the process is slower. It takes time to set up the camera. It takes time to visualise what you want.

‘‘ When doing portraits, it enables the photographer to talk and listen to subjects, to observe their behaviour. A camera can trap a photographer sometimes. You can look so intently through a viewfinder that you are unaware of the picture in front of you. When I use an 8x10 camera for portraits, I will compose the picture and step back. Using a long cable release, I will look at the subject and wait for the moment. It’s very liberating.’’

From now on, we promise, we spend hours looking at the waterfall and 1/250th of a second taking a single photo.


Copyright © 2010 Fairfax Media

I basically support the idea. The digital generation has reduced imaging success to the " law of Averages" .  I see that large format is great . The full frame sony 850 produces  a 20 x 13 inch image at 300 dpi. That is 4 times larger than an 10x8 contact print. The quality is as good if not better in many way than film. It also can shoot at 3 frames/ second.

MYSTIC RIVERS. This is just another PEAK image.  Creativity is essential part of the PEAK protocol. Learn how to "SEE" .

23 Rd Jan. 2011

This is another PEAK shot. Planned over a couple of days. Just hours before we were checking radar for storms and cloud. Arriving just on time I already had my 35mm f 2 lens on the camera, the aperture set and the 4 filters in place on the camera. Colour temp was set to 5300K. I bit low  as I found out within a frame of two. The image were taken with the SONY DRC bracket.  This produced 2 great files. This was put first in DXO and then Adobe RAW as was the jpeg file. Adjustment were made in just a few minutes in a  menus. Hay .Look good.

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