Making Joiners in Lightroom

In my Mother’s Garden, Autumn 2011

I’ve recently had some unexpected time at home which has given me the opportunity to catch up on a few joiners that I had shot in the past but never found the time to finish off as completed images. Up until this summer I used Photoshop to build my joiners which has worked well enough, but does place rather heavy demands on the computer in terms of disk, RAM & processor performance. But increasingly, I’ve been experimenting with Lightroom, and now have a pretty reliable alternative way of building still movies. This newer method centres around the use of the Print module, which allows me to build and re-edit multi-cell images with very little in the way of computer resources. Lightroom is a parametric, metadata driven editing system unlike most others including Photoshop, which work on pixel by pixel editing. The upshot of this is that the final size of the completed joiner does not have to be considered until the very end of the project. Very high resolution, very large print size images can be prepared as easily as small web based output; they just take a little longer to be processed. 

Crucially, since the arrival of Lightroom 4 I can now save my print layouts and revisit them at any time, unlike in Lightroom 3. There are some weaknesses in the method; I would dearly love to be able to zoom into the display in the print module, and it would be great if I could use the Develop module functionality whilst still displaying the Print module view. But overall, using Lightroom is a much quicker and freer way of constructing joiners than using Photoshop.

Lightroom became my editor of choice about a year ago. Prior to that I was using Photoshop but rarely left Camera Raw when editing my pictures, so the transition to Lightroom was fairly easy and obvious.

The picture above is made up of photos taken a year ago on my LX3 compact. I wish I had found time to put it together sooner as I’m quite pleased with the result. The individual cells were taken with the lens set at a focal length equivalent to 60mm in 35mm film terms.  If I were to reshoot in the future I would probably use the G3/Olympus 45 combination which would give small cell sizes, but I think the picture holds together well with only four cells height. It reminds me that pictures can be made whatever the weather; blue skies and bright sunshine are not a pre-requisite for a a successful image.

In my Mother’s Garden, as Seen Through the Bathroom Window, Autumn 2011

Pictures at an Exhibition

Caught Feather, 2011

I will have a small selection of my photographs on display as part of the Arena Photographers exhibition held in the Gallery at Salisbury Library. The show runs from October 6^th through to 27^th, with a private view held on Friday 5^th 18:00 – 20:00. Please come along if you can.

Sunset Dandelion, 2010

We have enjoyed a good relationship with the library who have regularly give us the opportunity to display our work every couple of years. Hopefully we continue to deliver a good range of images that are of interest to the general public as well as other photographers.

Floating Leaf, 2009

This year I have put together a set of six images shown here on the theme of ‘ephemera’, using feathers and leaves as motifs for impermanence and fragility. I guess I have been thinking about these ideas a fair bit over the last couple of years.

Fallen from the Sky, 2010

As I’ve mentioned before, I think a picture does not really exist until it has been printed. All the pictures on display have been printed on Fujicolor Crystal Archive Digital Pearl paper. By using a metal oxide coating on microscopic pearl mica pigments, these prints really sparkle and look very nice indeed, giving the image a lovely depth. Well worth the extra expense I think. All but one of the prints were taken on my Panasonic LX3 compact. Yes, we all know that large sensor cameras give the best quality, but it is still impressive to see just how good a print you can get from the LX3 if you stick to ISO100 and shoot in RAW. Each print image is 292mm square, and at that size the resolution is just fine, with pretty good dynamic range.

Wet Leaf, 2012

One of the final things I had to decide upon was the pricing of the pictures. Pricing! How do you decide? The sales and marketing answer of course, is the maximum you can get away with, whatever the purchaser is prepared to pay. In this country, and in non-metropolitan areas in particular, that price might be very low indeed. Especially if you are not a well-known name. Especially if you are a digital worker and don’t use some arcane process to make your images. Especially if the viewing public have decent cameras themselves and would rather have one of their own creations put up on their wall. So I price my pictures to cover my costs, and I’m very gratified if someone should want to have picture of mine to place on their wall.

Winter Seed Heads, 2010

I have always believed that if you are making pictures that are of any value at all, then the work needs to shown publicly. That is why I still take part in exhibitions, as well as give talks, have a website and write this blog. Putting on exhibitions can be expensive and time consuming, but it is a good discipline. It forces you to produce top-quality work, to pay attention to the printing and finishing, and importantly, make sure that you have a body of work that works well together when hung on the wall. And you might just find that there is someone out there who likes what you have made.

Postcard from Brittany

En Vacances, en Bretagne, 2012

Farmers and those in the tourist trade will see it differently, but August is a quiet time of the year as many of us take our summer vacations. For me, the run up to the annual break is always quite manic; covering for people missing from work, making arrangements for the family and a host of things that need to be sorted before the holiday. This year was no exception added to which we had the unique opportunity of visiting and following the Olympics first hand, and I have had very little time for Joined Up Pictures and photography in general. So I’m rather disappointed that I’ve not been able, or had anything worthwhile, to post over the last three weeks. I’m hoping that I will be able to get back to posting a couple of times each week now that September is almost here.

For our break this year we visited Brittany in north west France, and had a very nice holiday,  thank you. I’m afraid that I have little to share photographically; other than these few observations – 

1. Never take anything bigger than a compact camera when doing any activity like walking or cycling. Carrying a camera bag and lenses is a pain, apart from when specifically taking pictures.
2. I see the world with shallow depth of field, especially when I am really looking.
3. I much prefer to photograph the world with shallow depth of field.
4. I just love that articulated LCD on the back of the G3. It's rare that I want to take a picture at eye level.
5. Why can’t we have bigger monitors on our camera – as standard or as a plug in extra? Most smartphones are much better in this respect than any cameras.
6. I really can’t focus that well any more on the LCD of my camera when wearing contact lenses – I must get my eyes checked.
7. Why can’t we have standardised batteries and chargers? We brought four cameras with us, with four different, incompatible chargers.
8. The greater the tourist attraction, the less I want to photograph it.
9. Everyone is a photographer these days.
10. There are a lot of people out there using very big, very expensive cameras. Bigger than I want, more expensive than I can afford, and that's OK.

An Evening by the Water

Getting ready to sail, River Itchen, 2012

I must admit that I love to go out taking pictures by the water’s edge. The light always feels more luminous and there is plenty to photograph. Unusual objects, reflections, colours, textures, patinas; they are all there to be discovered.

Sail reflections, River Itchen, 2012

Last night we went down to the River Itchen in Southampton to take my son dinghy sailing. It was a beautiful, bright warm evening. While he was out doing some gentle racing in the light breeze we had time to go for a stroll, enjoy a beer, and take a few pictures.

Jetty detail, Ocean Village, Southampton, 2012

Unusually these days, my camera last night was my old Lumix LX3, which gets little use since I got the G3. While I love the flexibility of the wideangle zoom lens and the non-cropping multiple aspect ratios of this camera, I really missed the multi-angle viewfinder, speed of operation and the wide aperture lenses of the G3. If only I could find a suitable pouch for the G3 and a spare lens, rather than having to sling a camera bag over my shoulder. Does anyone have a recommendation?

Spring Trees, Farley Mount

We are blessed, in the city of Winchester, in living in a small and attractive city, which is surrounded by lovely countryside that is quick and easy to access. To the west of the city is an area of mixed woods and farmland known as Farley Mount. On previous springtime visits I had noticed the blossom on a line of trees edging a field and making a boundary with the road on the other side. Last year I was keen to revisit this area and make a joiner of this line of trees, and see what I could do with the field, which is always in productive use and often has appealing tractor tyre marks crossing it.



Spring Trees, Farley Mount, 2011

 
It was a glorious morning when I arrived to park up the car, having just helped with the school run. As mentioned earlier in an earlier post, I had been ill most of last winter but now I was feeling much better – revitalized in fact. The sun was warm on my neck and the air was so clear and fresh you could drink it. I felt euphoric; a couple of weeks earlier I had been barely able to walk, and now most of my strength and energy had returned.

One of the appealing aspects of working with joiners is that you can construct a picture that is part actual and part imagined landscape. I knew I wanted to present the trees in a line on the horizon. This meant walking alongside them and shooting in pairs, using a wide angle setting on the lens, before moving onto the next. I spent a good hour making this picture. I walked in several lines, first photographing the trees, then the field at increasingly steeper angles and increased focal length. The day was blessed with a sky brushed by feathery bands of high cirrus cloud. Rather than shoot these as straight lines I decided that I wanted to construct a sky built from triumphal arches of cloud, so I shot several bands of cloud incrementally rotating the camera between each shot to build the ‘arcs-en-ciel’. 

In all, it took me about an hour to shoot all the material for the joiner. I drove home feeling very satisfied that at long last, I was getting back to doing the things I love. 

One Year Ago Today

Feather, Spring 2011

One year ago today I was off work with an illness that was both undiagnosed and untreated. I had by then been off work for more than two months in some considerable pain. But the weather was beautiful and spring-like, so I dragged myself out of the house up to Cheesefoot Head to take advantage of the sunshine and the warmth. It was good, the sunshine and warmth were what I needed.  I was not going to be walking far that day, so my focus was on small details, especially those that hinted at the arrival of spring. 

Until the arrival of the G3, my small LX3 compact was always my camera of choice. The most remarkable aspect of this jewel of a machine is its wonderful lens that focuses right down to almost nothing. Because it does this at the wide end of the zoom range, it can create powerful images of very small details set in context against a background environment. It was the main reason why I bought the camera in the first place, and is why I won’t buy a macro lens for the G3. I’m not interested in isolating details as one does in conventional macro photography; I want to show the subject in context. 

When you start photographing very small details like the feather, it forces you to look long and hard at almost everything, and pictures can be plucked from seemingly unlikely places. Feathers act as useful metaphors for me. They suggest delicacy, fragility and impermanence. Easily blown away by forces that they cannot resist, they can intimate vulnerability and insecurity. Which is how I was feeling at the time, and why I felt drawn to make a picture of this tiny feather.

Time to think

This afternoon I went on bracing walk with the family, with cliff top views to the see on our left and folded fields on our right. With low grey clouds, spits of rain and a fairly strong wind picture taken was always going to be difficult. But low light, difficult footings and difficult weather are nothing in comparison with the reluctance of family and companions to pause for just a minute to allow you a minute or two to make a picture. Usually it’s a cry of ‘come on, hurry up’ or ‘don’t hold everyone up!’ And if you do manage to persevere with taking the picture, there’s that famous challenge ‘what on earth are you taking a picture of?’ and ‘that will be a rubbish picture’. 

Yes, usually it is. Because you need time to think, time to really look, time to compose, time to set the zone of focus, time to include and exclude all the elements that add or detract from the final image. You need time to explore, take a frame, take a better one, take a chance, try something different, time to get ‘in the zone’ as they say.

 The picture below was taken last spring when out for a short walk, one by myself. Although I knew I had to get home fairly soon, I allowed myself a little time to stop and look at a relatively new gatepost. The sun was just grazing across the surface of the grain of the wood on the sloping surface at the top of the post. It reminded me of the ploughed fields that I had seen earlier in the walk. By moving in very close I could make this illusion work; the distant trees appearing as though they were at the top of this imagined field. All that was really needed was just a little time to look, and some time to think.

Imagined Field 2011

Fallen from the Sky

Here’s an image I’m fond of, and is typical of one of my approaches to picture making.

Fallen from the Sky 2010

I love to be outdoors and that is where the vast majority of my pictures are taken. I'm not interested in picture-postcards, 'chocolate-box' style of landscape photography that seems to pervade all the newsagent magazines. But I am interested in the way small details can represent a larger whole, especially if the picture can be constructed so that there is narrative between the subject and the background.

This shot was taken on a changeable day in the autumn of 2010, with lots of broken cloud scudding by. It was a time of some frustration and disappointment for me – I won’t bore you with the details. I noticed a water trough close to the path that I was walking along. I’ll admit that I ‘m a sucker for reflections. There are usually opportunities to build an interesting layered picture. Drifting gently across the surface was a rather water-logged feather, and on close inspection it seemed to be floating on a fully submerged red leaf.

I was out photographing with my remarkable Panasonic LX3. The lens on this wonderful little camera has the ability to focus right down to almost zero distance from the front element. It does this at the wideangle position of the zoom, which means that close-ups show a large amount of background. Close-up subjects are given great prescence. It’s ability to show details-in-context was one of my main reasons for buying the camera. 

For this image I moved the camera in close, just above the water, until I had got good detail in the feather and leaf, set off against the reflected sky. I pressed the shutter and made a little prayer for fallen leaves and fallen angels.