August 2019

Misty sunrise in McLaren vale colour

The above banner is from the back lit competition, an image by one of our newer members, Suzie Smith.  This is an excellent and moody landscape.  Below I have banners from the club set that went to Edwardstown.  Heather Connolly, “Water Line” and Duart McLean, “Tobermory”.  I don’t need to mention that we came second yet again in this annual challenge.  Go to the club page to see the excellent summary of the competition by Helen Whitford.

Water Line Banner

Tobermory Banner

I had a long conversation with Howard Seaman at one of our meetings this month.  Howard had an idea for a workshop.  He proposed that two people process the same image and then we compare the results to illustrate differences in style and execution.  Howard has been using some different software to the usual Adobe Photoshop / Lightroom.  He has been using Skylum Luminar and Aurora HDR.  I was keen to explore this idea and suggested we could do a test run in Camera clips.  He and I swapped several photographs (RAW files) and both processed them as we felt inclined.  Have a look at the following examples.

Don't Jump comparison

This is one of my images, a bracketed 3 image HDR taken on the Great Ocean Road.  Howard’s version on the left has greater detail, has cropped in a little tighter and removed the “fatal footprint” in the sand.  I showed these two versions to Frances and she preferred Howard’s processing.

Convention centre Comparison

This is Howard’s image of the Convention Centre.   His version on top emphasizes the green red contrast in the image.  My image below I removed the green colour to create a more yellow- red – mauve image.

Benches Comparison

This is Howard’s image.  he  bracketed 3 images to create an HDR of these benches.  He managed to pack in a lot of detail into this geometric composition and gave it a square crop.   I chose just one of the three images and proceeded to darken and blur the background to emphasize the effects of light and the detail of the umbrellas.

None of these are the right or wrong way to process the image.  They reflect our stylistic preferences.  I have included two articles in this edition where Howard and I explain how we have approached each others images.  Dead End Street – Howard Seaman and Fire in the sky – James Allan. It is a chance to discover why we made the processing choices available to us.  This has proven to be a very interesting exercise.  I look forward to the workshop.   

I also had the opportunity to speak to Chris Schultz our former president on the topic of accidental renaissance.  This is a style of street photography.  Have a read about Chris’s thoughts on this topic.

Spot Colour Banner 2

Lastly I include all the information presented at our recent workshop on spot colour.  I have a brief summary of the concepts, followed by the instructions provided by Mark for Photoshop, Di for Lightroom, Judy for Snap Seed and an alternative Lightroom approach and lastly myself and Gimp.  It has been a pleasure compiling this edition of Camera Clips.  I hope that you enjoy it as much as i have.

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