Try something different today.

Treasa — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 21:33:15 +0000

I haven’t been taking too many photographs lately for a variety of reasons. One of those is the purchase of a new computer and also, The Book. This means I have actually been looking at some of the older photographs. These ones I was reminded I had last year and having looked at them again, I set them aside for some further work later.

There were, actually, 13 photographs in the series when I shot them, more than 3 years ago now, but I must have moved shooting the last two because it looks like I was a bit closer for them. The horizons are out of kilter with the other 11 shots. I left them out because I wasn’t really in the mood for building sand for 11 photographs. The skies are okay but the sand, meh.

So, this, when it was finished was nearly half a gigabyte. I had vague notions of re-contrasting it and then desaturating it. I’d done some work on one of the frames on another computer which I haven’t moved data from yet and it looked, if I could apply it evenly across all the frames, as though it would be really nice. Unfortunately I couldn’t reproduce it and anyway, I spent some time painting out a car from several of the frames so messing around with noise levels suddenly became less attractive.

If I had the time over again, I’d have shot the images in RAW, something which I didn’t tend to do systematically at the time; but then the PSD would probably have been way bigger than half a gig. But then that’s why I have a shiny new processor and some more RAM and a reasonably decent graphics card.

Anyway, I’m completely out of touch with new photographs for various reasons so there won’t be a list of “you gotta see this” on this occasion.

A few more of the older photographs will start turning up here because a lot of them were on Dancing Shades of Light before I closed that site a year or so ago. And I’ve forgotten about a lot of them.

This is why we do what we do

Treasa — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:15:49 +0000

This was up on Dancing Shades of Light before that site died last year. I was idly looking at stats on flickr and I discover it’s still the most viewed photograph I have there, now 1500 views plus. I remember when it hit about 800 and I thought, fantastic, nothing is going to beat that ever.

Looking at it now I can see various technical issues – I hadn’t done that many of these, and actually, this is still the biggest one I’ve done. Depending on how many frames you’ve got and and far off the end of the zoom you are they take a greater or lesser amount of time to complete. I think this took about 4-6 hours. It’s still the biggest I’ve done.

It was shot with a 50-500mm zoom lens and stitched together painstakingly in Photoshop. At the time I didn’t use layermasks much (although I use them ubiquitously in the photomanipulations now turning up on the DigitalFX site) and I didn’t have a graphics tablet. The big challenge with this too was the sheer number of frames. I think I had 23 separate frames to glue together. The ones I did before typically maxed out at 12 and because the time lapse between frames was twice as long, there tended to be more space between the kitesurfer in each frame, so less painstaking painting to be done across bits of body, lines, bar, board.

It got a huge reaction at the time. Typically, when Eamon saw it, he pointed out the imperfections on the kitesurfing front. Kite not low enough.

The second most viewed shot on the flickr stream is this one:

which was done sometime later for Francois. While it’s probably technically a better stitch, I had no room to straighten the horizon and so for me, it’s always the one that could have been the greatest of them all.

And I lost a frame out of this one some how.

When you do something like this for someone who doesn’t see it coming, their reaction tends to be great. That reaction is what makes you do it again, and again, huddled over a computer, lining up horizons, trying not to swear about where a wayward hand lands versus a brightly coloured board.

Living for Light » stitches

Try something different today.

This is why we do what we do