A slideshow of my favourite sport

I had the backing music in my head for about 1 month. Played it over & over & over so that I could piece together a slideshow of images to put to it. The problem was that I didn't have the images. As it turned out this was the best approach because I knew what to look for. The following is a slideshow of thew Wexford Kettlebell Clubs participation in the second Irish Kettlebell Sport Biathalon Championships as hosted by Kilkenny Kettlebell Club.

Again congrats to the folks of Wexford Kettlebell Club. Hope you enjoy it!

Time for a change...

You may have expected to see my Pixelpost site when coming through this link but I've decided (perhaps only temporarily) to abandon this. I don't take as many photographs and feel that my work displayed was becoming slow and without enthusiasm. What I'll be doing for the near future is putting any new work on this blogspot site and see how it goes. Apologies to anyone who appreciated my other site but times are a changing.

Interesting techniques from Guy Gowan

I came across a method of processing recently as exercised and flaunted by Guy Gowan...I had heard of him before and got the usual "he changed the way I process images" comments. Now I can see why. I had seen excerpts of what he had done so I could work out his methodology.

Below are 2 images - your typical before and after. Nothing special just a club outing to Leenane, Co. Galway during 2010. It was taken handheld using the Panasonic Lumix LX3 in low light. The image was about 2 stops underexposed and had a green cast (as you can see).

Before:

 

After:

In Lightroom I raised the Exposure about 1+2/3rds of a stop. I didn't worry about the bright sections to the right side as the Histogram said nothing was blown - I could have balanced it but that wasn't the intention of this exercise.

So exporting to Photoshop I got to work on the colour cast. I saw by the Histogram (expanded version) that the greens were excessive so I added a photo filter magenta to bring the colour back...about 25% with Luminosity preserved. I tried to boost the blues a little but this served no real purpose so I left it as it was. A bit of noise reduction then with an interesting method of contrast boost.

The contrast boost utilises firstly a Levels layer where Auto is selected with "Enhance Monochromatic Contrast" checked in Options and 0% clipping. Then an alpha channel from the RGB Channel placed on a Curves adjustment as a mask for highlights was run. This was on a 50%/50% point and dragged down by 10%. Then I ran a levels adjustment on the Alpha Channel generated mask (Alt-L) and moved the sliders in to just past the edge of the histogram edges.This layer was duplicated, the mask was inverted and the Shadows were increased by 5% by using the same method but not placing a Levels adjustment on the mask as this had already been done on the prior layer. Then this was flattened and sharpened by using a LAB Mode Sharpening technique and only running a 25% opacity on this new layer.

I was quite happy with the technique, all of which is lossless and can be constantly re-adjusted once saved as a .psd file.

So what is street photography?

This is a peculiar question to ask anyone who isn't into "Street Photography"...but what is it...I mean, street photography? To me it's a answer that I initially thought was an easy one until I tried to answer it.

 Is it people in an environment where the image produced holds the viewers attention longer than a passing glance?

Or even more detailed - where a person sees an image where they exhale a short burst of air through their nose...not a laugh or a snort, just a recognition of a situation in a period of time?

 It can be when a sequence of events leads to an image where you think "You couldn't make it up" - almost like spotting a rare bird or witnessing an unusual sporting event...you can say you were there.

But on the other hand the juxtaposition of people with their environment suits well. Just in a position that holds the attention but nothing startling stands out...it's just a situation. But then you just take a photograph just because it's an interesting composition and the people just add to the randomness and create a pleasing effect.

To try to answer the initial question - it's probably a lot of things to a lot of people but the interesting fact is that it is just that - varying and diverse. Rather like the people that feature in the images.

Whale Watching?

3 mental sons, stuck in front of a TV fighting over who was on the PS3 next. An idea - go see the whales that have been reported off Hook Head. So 3 kids, wife, 2 cameras and off we went. As soon as we got there we could see the shine of car roofs through the haze - not the only ones out for a Sunday afternoon of amusement. 

Driving down the peninsula we saw snow drifts...we got closer and they were mounds of foam from the surf...of course - the storm from yesterday was still wild at sea.

So we saw no whales. We didn't look. We were bemused with the people standing around the perimeter of the inlet under the Tower (Hook Lighthouse) watching the waves converging and shooting into the sky. Everyone seemed to have a camera or a dog...why no one had both is one of those unnecessary but curious thoughts. So I tried to get something that showed the people and the tower and the waves. This was probably the better of the day but with the wind and the cold we didn't stay long. Last time I did this I got soaked but it was worth it.

 

Of course I said 2 cameras - my wife had the other. I think she pipped me at the post today with this one. Competition is tough in the Rossiter Household!