Today, (well, yesterday now, technically) 27th February, we took a trip to Whitstable to take some photos however the rain soon came down and messed up those plans.  I will have to look at travelling there on one of my days off during the week so hopefully I can spend more time on it.  I hate being rushed and this is always the case when I have other people with me.  On the way home, we did come across a fishing lake with some nice reflections so I jumped out and took a few shots.  The sky was more overcast than cloudy but even so, they did not come out too bad.  I got a shot of Ellie on Tankerton beach.  I would have liked to have gotten more but again, it was cold and people were in a hurry.  I enjoyed my night shots in London and will have to try to take some more night-time shots.  I'm working lates for the next three days so I will have to recon the area where I work to look for some interesting shots that I can take on my days off.

On Saturday 19th February, we went to London and visited the Natural History Museum. For starters, there was a huge queue to get in and a light rain but I managed to take a few shots of the external architecture and this statue in the garden. I've been shooting in raw mode with my Fujifilm S200EXR and whilst having the ability to tweak things like exposure at a grass-roots level is good, I find the software bundled with the camera poor and strips the EXIF data from the file. Maybe I'm just being fussy but I like to know what aperture and shutter speed a shot was taken with so that I can learn and recreate the shot if I want. I get to see what worked well and what did not work so well. Shooting in jpeg has the problem that the camera takes the data from the chip and sets things like exposure levels and colour balance and then saves that data whilst discarding all the surplus data. Raw on the other hand records exactly what the chip saw and allows you to do the processing very much like the old darkroom techniques of my youth. Whilst, with digital photography, I am denied doing the developing, the processing side is now available to me. But, as I said, I was not completely happy with the Finepix Studio raw Software.

So, looking at opensource alternatives, I found UFRaw which handles the raw files from the S200EXR very well. It is quite complex but I'm getting the hang of it. It's not as polished as Adobe Lightroom, but doesn't come with the inflated price-tag either. And here's the important bit for me, it allows for the embedding of the EXIF data. It allows me to look at exposure levels, white balance and curves and saves out in several formats from lossless TIFF to Jpegs with variable compression levels. I must say that the developer has really done a great job and I would recommend this to anyone like me who wants to shoot raw but does not want to shell out £200 on conversion software.

Paintshop Pro or one of the multitude of similar software like GIMP are a must for giving your photos that polished edge. I'm still learning the basics but I'm getting there. I feel that my last photos taken from Margate Cemetery have been given a little extra punch which I could not have achieved from just my camera on the severely overcast and misty day. I'm hoping to get out more and take plenty more photos and people have started to give me requests for shots that they want taken.

I've been playing with my camera some more. I've been trying out shooting in raw mode. To be honest, my camera does such a good job with Jpegs, there really is not too much difference between the two. I often use curves to pull in the light and dark and tighten up the contrast but this can be done either with the raw file or in paintshop pro with the Jpeg file. If anything, raw takes that bit longer to save to the card and to convert to Jpeg for uploading so I'm seeing very little point. I'll persevere with it as it makes little difference to me at this time but I imagine that if I had lots of photos to process from a photo shoot this would become an issue. Likewise, if I'm out and about and I find that I fill up my memory cards with raw files when I could fit a lot more high quality jpegs on them, then it would also be an issue.


Still trying out my strobes. This one was done in our dining room. Background light was about 1m from the wall and set to 50% power. A second strobe was set at 45 degrees above and to the left of Jo, about 70cm away with a bounced white umbrella and set to 50% power. The original came out fine but I used a screen layer in paintshop pro just to brighten the image some more. Jo was getting all funny about having her photo taken and she says that she does not like this one. I like it because it was one of the only ones I could get where she looked halfway near relaxed.



I thought I would show a bit about my new lighting pack. Above is a picture of the remote trigger for the flash units. The square bit sits in the hotshoe on the camera. I have to turn on "External Flash" in the camera settings so that it knows to use the hotshoe instead of the internal flash. When the shot is taken, it sends a signal to the receiver (The bit with the wire) which is plugged into one of the flash units. The other flash units are set up as slaves which means that they use a little sensor on the tops which, when they "see" a flash, they quickly fire themselves. This way, I don't have complicated wires conecting all of the flash units together. I don't know if there is any disadvantages of using a wireless trigger over a wired one but to date I have not had any problems. One thing I did do is put larger labels on the On/Off switch on the receiver because the writing is tiny and did not stand out. So rather than getting a magnefying glass each time I wanted to check that the receiver was on or off, I just stuck a couple of labels on it.




These are the flash units themselves. Each one is rated at 250w but has an analogue dial tha allows adjustment of the power. I was playing yesterday with the distance of the flash and the power settings. My biggest obstacle now is space. Space is at a premium in our home. Another problem is lack of willing models for me to practice on. Ellie is quite often at school on my days off and Jo is just uncooperative all the time. I'm looking to get some more backdrops so I've been offering to do photos for people in hope of making enough money to get the extra bits I need. I could really do with a light meter but I'm amazed at just how expensive they are.

On a side note, I'm down to 13st 3lbs. I'm pretty much still on target to reach my ideal weight by the end of the month. I'm down a notch on my belt which I'm pleased about. I haven't been less than 13st 8lbs in about 15 years so I'm really excited about reaching my ideal weight.

I've currently got painful cracked chapped lips which are so sore I've had to resort to putting lip balm on. I'm very texture orientated, so having this stuff on my lips is like nails down a chalk board. I hate it but it has taken the pain away so I'll try to persevere with it.

I have not been so strict with my diet as I should have been and thus today I am at 13st 5lbs. I'm back onto night shifts tonight and I should find it easier to cut down on what I eat over the next few days. 12st 7lbs by the end of the month is, I feel, achievable.

I've been playing some more with my new strobes and I'm really happy with the results. My biggest hurdle at this time is space. Both our lounge and dining room are very small so it is very difficult to set up the lights and background in such confined areas. I've seen some tips on how to get a high-key photo just using flash and no background which I need to have a play at. It will be interesting to see if I can get pure colour backgrounds using this method and gels but I very much doubt that it is possible. It seems that low-key photos similar to the one above are just as possible by making sure that the flash is not directed at the background. It will be interesting to see if I can do that.