Topics

For those wondering (if anybody at all) here is the current list of topics.

Current one :-
Bokeh

Still to do :-
F5.6 1/1000 what can you do with it?
Texture
Pattern
Water
Light
Fire
Buildings
Car (Singular)
Eye
Hand
Time
Animal(s)
Three
Movement
One
Writing
Up the creek
Standing still - theme to shoot your feet in interesting locations.
Paradise by the dashboard light
Self portrait
Forbidden
Shooting from the hip.
Camera Phone
Slow Down
Buildings
Beverages
Minature / small world
Toys at work
Things that go bump in the night
Burj Al Arab

Done :-
From a child's perspective
Lines
The Over 50s Club
Symmetry
Looking up at the world
Reflections
A Formal portrait of Wife / Girlfreind / Mistress
Sand

Cheers,
Richard B.

Stary Stary Shots - Shutterbug desert challenge

High on the excitment of the forming of the Dubai Shutterbugs, the inaugral meeting next week and the creation of this wonderful blog a group of us decided to get together and have our first club outing. We headed out into the desert to take advantage of the new moon and relatively clear sky and take shots of the night sky.......and here are my offerings

YBOD by fire light
I like the soft warm light on this, and I still maintain it is WAY more pleasing on the eye than all those harsh and complicated flashes.

Overlaid Stars
this is 110 photos overlaid in exposure blending software. Believe it or not this is actually my favourite star shot so far from a technical point of view as I am now happy that I have finally got the exposure/aperture right to actually catch the stars and get good quality trails. Lots of scribbles in note books have been needed to get to that point.

Sadly, as it was already dark when we got there I didn’t have any dusk lit foreground to make this a good image and the tree and stars are lost in a sea of dark. But mission accomplished as I can now concentrate on composition knowing the settings are right.

Maybe a bit of time on photoshop at the weekend and I’ll be able to reduce the hallowing, but not sure its worth the effort as the image itself may not be worth it. The majik numbers for these shots are:

f5.6, ISO 200, Time = 30seconds per shot.

All noise reductions turned off (otherwise you get dashed lines instead of streaks as the stars move while the camera does its noise reduction).

Light leak tree & Tree black and white

This was taken on Imogen’s camera more as a comparison of a 1 hour single exposure vs the overlay technique. Sadly my eye piece cap didn’t quite fit Imogens camera therefore I’ve ended up with light leak still.

Still, by converting it to Black and White its not so bad. Maybe not a wall hanger but certainly a screen saver/electronic photoframe effort.

Thanks all for now folks

Steven

June 2009 - Bokeh

The homework subject for June 2009 was simply "Bokeh".

Not wanting this to turn in to a techy-geek knee rubbing session a quick explanation of what Bokeh is can be found on that font of all knowledge - wikipedia

Basically it is a technique that takes advantage of the blur caused by shallow depth of field to add something to the photo. This could be as simple as bluring a background to the more creative use of intentional blur to add elements to the shot.

So here is my homework offering:

Cookie Monster Love Cookies

And here is how I did it. Based on details given on DIY Photography I produced a homemade lense hood with a shaped appature approximtly equal to focal length/appature (in my case 50mm/1.8 = 25mm nearr as damn it):

I then set cookie monster up with a wall of lights behind him but with the distance between the camera and CM half that between CM and the lights to get a good amount of blur.

And just to demonstrate the effectivness of the bokeh hood here is are two shots with and without the hood - see how the left has near circular light blobs (the shape of the appature inside the lense) and the right is heart shaped.

Without hood With hood

The Dubai Shutterbuggers

For a while now a few keen photographers of varieing degrees of amateurness have been exchanging emails on a biweekly stretching to monthly basis to share photo's, critique and abuse on a range of homework topics.

In order to ease teh burden on peoples inboxes, and to provide a place to store photos, comments and idea I thought it a good idea to set up a blog where we can psot our homeworks before getting together once a month to hurle abuse at each others pictures.

So here it is. Feel free to leave comments, upload picture or jsut trawl through our ideas and reasure yourself that you don't have to be able to be keen.