Cold climates
When you are taking your camera into cold conditions, it will be wise to follow a few simple precautions to protect you and your gear. Feet One of the most important thing to protect! They are, after all, what is going to get you out of potential danger. You need to think about protecting them first and foremost. Cold climates can present several different dangers to feet. The first is cold. It is important to keep your feet warm and dry as possible. It is worth investing in strong hiking boots which have good waterproof qualities. If you can, finger a bit of waterproof wax around all the...
Read MoreNight Photography 2 – overcoming the darkness
So you have the night photography bug. You sit twiddling your thumbs in the daylight hours waiting for the light to fade so that you can go out and leave your camera perfectly still with its shutter open for many tens of minutes. You are not...
Read MoreNight Photography 1 – secrets uncovered
Night Photography – secrets uncovered It was my love and obsession of capturing the Aurora Borealis, which uncovered a new passion… night photography. Click A secret landscape is unveiled to the night photographer, the seas turned to milk, the street light adopt an eerie glow and the colours are amazing. In the days of film we had to battle with reciprocity failure were the film emulsion would stop being reliable over a certain time. Then the was Fuji Provia with no reciprocity failure up to 4 minutes and then there was digital with no reciprocity problems at all. But digital...
Read MoreLayers and Masks 2 – Adjustment Layers
Layers and Masks 2 – Adjustment Layers Adjustment layers do just that, they allow you to make adjustments to your images in a stack of layers. This has two benefits to the way you might normally adjust a picture; You can go back and change any part of you adjustment, i.e. the curves or levels You can use masks to affect only certain parts of the image. Let us start with an image and create an adjustment layer. This will create a new layer with the sole purpose of adjusting the light levels of the image. See Basic adjustments – levels and curves for more details of how to make...
Read MoreBasic adjustments – Curves
Like layers, curve adjustments is a way of adjusting the brightness/ darkness levels in an image. The emphasis is put more on contrast and adjusting curves is a very smooth and sophisticated way of adjusting contrast. Open an image in photoshop and go to Image – Adjustments – Curves This action will open the curves dialogue box. Click on the line at the intersection as shown Adjust the output to be 10 points lower than the input level. The output level should stay around the 65 mark. What happens to the straight line in the curves dialogue box? What happens to your image? The...
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