My idea is that I’d like to go somewhere very neutral and get a stack of silhouettes traced from real people. That might be fun. It could also prove difficult (not the illustration part) as I need a space and someone to stand still in various poses like a gumby.

I was messing around with two at the same time, the top one’s up on redbubble. The other is not finished but I know what I think the concept is.

Something you don’t get to see where I live – Orion (Iron Pot) is just above the tree, Crux (Southern Cross) isn’t in the frame. Taken at ISO 1600 you can see the beginnings of star trails if you zoom in.

We made a trip up to Strahan and stopped in Tarraleah to get some lunch – which was awfully expensive. I guess it has to be when they wouldn’t get much business. Below is the penstocks leading to the Tarraleah power station, it generates about 90MW.

The 4 photos below are from Queenstown. It’s getting better now because they’ve stopped the pollution, but the place used to look like a moonscape. They used to burn the trees in the smelters as well as the fumes from them killed everything off. The Queen river used to run silver because of the tailings they dumped in there. It’s kind of a brown colour now but some of the rocks are still silver. That open cut mine is a disused one now – I believe it was one of the early ones, I think it’s called the Iron Blow. Exploring the bush around the area has some unique challenges, namely vertical shafts covered by the scrub.

We ended up at Strahan and Ocean Beach. I didn’t get any nice photos of either. Ocean beach is 33Km long and has some of the highest persistent waves in the world. They can reach 18m – no one swims there because of the rips. There is no land between it and South America.

The next few are sunsets taken on the way back – these were near the button grass plains, the reason the rivers run the colour of tea, the grass puts tannin in the water. The top photo is Frenchman’s cap.

My parents brought a new puppy named Sadie, she’s a Stumpy Tailed Cattle Dog.

We also did the Wine Glass bay, Hazards Beach track which took about 6 hours. The other side of Wine Glass is Great Oyster Bay. Fantastic views and things to see during the walk. It was a pretty warm day and I think a quick swim on Hazards Beach did wonders for me, the water on either side is unbelievably blue. The lagoon is half way between Wine Glass and Hazards beach.

Seeing as Mt Field isn’t that far from where I live I usually end up at National Park. Below are Russell Falls, Horseshoe Falls and Lady Barron Falls.

There was water running over Waterfall Bay this time, I didn’t have the right lens to be able to get it properly. I’d like to walk around to it one day. Most photos I took that day were way over exposed for some reason.

Below are just a couple of random shots. Was good to be home but glad to be back in Melbourne, the first meal I had was pho.

The first is Hobart from Bellerive, the second is an old hop pickers hut in Molesworth, the fields behind it used to be hopfields. The last photo is an army of ducks that attacked while eating McDonalds.

I’m not a photographer by any means, it’s just something I enjoy. However; I thought I’d write a post on taking black & white photos and what I feel is the best way to approach this using a DSLR.

I know a lot of people who shoot in JPEG and use the on-board processing to covert the image to black & white however personally I have found post processing to black & white to be more effective. Some people will debate that the on-board processing takes in to account white balance, exposure, and and so on but it’s all about personal preference isn’t it?

If I’m shooting in JPEG – I  always shoot in colour and convert it to black & white using Photoshop or something similar. Using the on-board processing means all the colour data is lost when the image is written to the card; if you want to change the photo or wish you’d taken it in colour you won’t be able to go back.

If I’m shooting in RAW, it saves the colour data as well as some information it uses for the black & white (from what I can gather) regardless of whether you’re previewing it in black & white or colour. This can be handy if you want to see what it might look like in black and white.

One thing that I like about about black & white photography is that low contrast photos often look good – so some cloudy / overcast days when you think you won’t go take photos because of the lighting, you could still go and attempt some black & shots.

The photo I’m using as a demonstration was taken recently on the Yarra in Melbourne, the same evening as Dusk Reflections I’m not sure who actually took the photo.

I’m using Photoshop CS4 using the latest RAW codec, the photo was taken on a EOS D550, f/10 ISO-100 1/100 sec. with a sigma 10-20mm

I’m going to touch on 4 methods. 2 methods that give you control over the results and 2 that do not – the blog distorts the images – click through for the full versions

There is the the original:

Gradient Map

This method applies a black & white gradient to the brightness of your photo. This is the method I’ve played with most.

Reset your colours to black (foreground) white (background) – they are usually set like this by default

Add a gradient map adjustment layer

You will see the gradient apear in the “adjustments panel” as below and your image will now be black & white:

You can now make adjustments to your image using the gradient editor

Click on the gradient you see in the adjustments panel as pictures above and the following window will popup:

This controls the gradient, you can adjust it simply by clicking either of the colour stops. You will see a little diamond apear under the gradient bar in the centre. You can adjust the darkness by moving the black colour box on the left, adjust the brightness by using the white on the right, you can adjust the midtones by moving the marker in the center. Finally you can add additional colour stops as you’ll see below  (I’ve exaggerated the effect in the photo to use as an example):

 Grayscale

To convert an image to grayscale simply click on the image menu, go to -> mode and click discard, this will ditch all the colour information – don’t forget to make copies of your images before you work on them! You’ll get the following results:

Desaturation

The next easy method is desaturation. To achieve this simply click image -> adjustmensts -> Hue/Saturation and move the saturation slider to -100. Again you have no real control over the results but you will end up with the following:

Black & White Adjustment Layer

This method gives you presice control as you can manually adjust all the tones.

Click on Layer -> new adjustment layer -> black and white – then click okay. You should see the following toolbox

Move each slider left or right to lighten or darken the respective tone, you can also click the little hand slider icon and hold on the selected image and the tone that’s selected will be adjusted, here are some examples:

The following settings:

Produced a darkened sky

The following settings:

Produced a lighter image:

There are many more ways to convert a photo to black & white I believe, It’s probably important to experiment and see what you like. As I said it’s not about being professional for me – it’s about the satisfaction of taking a photo and being proud of it, being able to have full control over the results is something I like to play with.

I’m trying to grow a mo… To raise funds and awareness for prostate cancer and depression… Anyone who knows me will be aware that it’s a difficult task… So I’ve decided it’s going to be named… The Mo of Destiny…. Partially because I have no control over it, it’s just going to be a hairy caterpillar on my top lip (hopefully)

I’m posting a mo-foto a day, to my mospace – http://au.movember.com/mospace/622604/

If you feel like donating to a good cause there is a link on the page…

As we’re getting further in to spring I’m hoping that it comes back, and perhaps a drive to the tulip festival will be a good starting point. I’m not overly concerned though, this dry spell seems to be a yearly thing for me which is a shame because I’m sure there are many great opportunities in the winter.

I’m wanting to save for a 5D and a Canon 100mm Macro, saving isn’t one of my strong points. I considered a  50 or a 60 but I may as well just spend the extra cash, the bokeh on the 100 is amazing.

Hopefully I’ll be posting a couple of pics from the US soon, I’ve spent this evening updating my linkedin profile.

I’m also considering redoing this site – or at least adding a section for my professional services, we will see.

Here are a few of the images taken that won’t make it up as single image posts. I plan to play around with single image HDR on some but I’ll see how I go. I purchased a little tripod for a trip thats coming up soon – next week, it’s a little flimsy for an SLR but only when fully extended, i’ll put it on the bonnet of a car if I need to, it also gets as low as 5cm which will be very handy for macro.

This is Bliss, one of the dogs. There is something wrong with her, she poses. Every time I took a photo she’d change position.

This is an albino trout from our breakfast visit to the Salmon ponds out side of New Norfolk. Some of them are huge.

We went for a visit to Russell Falls after the Salmon ponds.

We visited Lake Meadowbank which was unbelievably still!

We spent a bit of time in Hobart, I didn’t really get any interesting photos though unfortunately.

Now back to work, and normal life for a while.

Aside from work commitments I’ve been working on my friends site: http://www.ramonatienda.com/

Ramona owns a store in North Melbourne – if you are anywhere in the area sometime you should drop in and have a look.

Some good news too – work will be using some of my images to decorate the offices. I’ll post which ones where chosen when they are printed.

The group is called khancoban; they discribe themselves as “Half noise, half folk – khancoban’s songs deploy in low-gravity and with a dash of grit.”

I really enjoyed their music on a sunny relaxing Saturday afternoon. Naturally I took some photos. Here they are:

from left to right: Jim (keys), Jemima (drums), Andre (vox), Lucas (bass), Andrew (guitar)

I actually really like this image, not because it’s a fantastic photo – because it’s far from it; I just find it very calming. It was very overcast on this particular day. Taken near Bushy Park, Tasmania (images are cropped in the post, you can click though to the original picture)

Tone-mapped:

The sky is pretty grey in this one, I was happy with the fields though.

This image below is from Mount Field National Park, Tasmania. Again this isn’t the most fantastic subject for HDR but I was very keen to give it a try.

Tone-mapped:

Very noticable difference in the shadows, and I don’t think this is too over done.

Taken during a bike ride recently. Very warm day.

The next photo is one I took of Melbourne city, turned black and white using a gradient map and a little bit of colour bleed.

Thanks to: http://www.beyondmegapixels.com and http://www.pixelens.com/blog/ for my inspiration and interest in single image HDR.

Made a few changes to the sites layout this week: 3 row recent entries on the home page, recent blog entries on the home page and a couple of changes to categories.

Now I have a photoblog I just have to get to Venezuela and capture that shot I was thinking about. Well, that and get some equipment.

I think I should wait for the next version of the 5D Mark III though. As much as I want the high frame rate on the 7D for macro and HD; Full frame will be better for landscapes.