How I did this winning image, Tuesday 23rd April 2019

Hi Folks,

Last night club members talked about how they created their winning or best image for the season.

However the evening started on a high note with Kathy saying how delighted she was to hear the Imagez club had won the RoseBowl whilst she was down in Somerset and she was jumping up and down on hearing the news.

Kathy thanked Chenxi on the marvellous job he had done in selecting the right images throughout and for the final.  Kathy also thanked Jan Dell for attending the Rosebowl and receiving the cup on behalf of the Imagez camera club and said she would have loved to have been there herself.

 

So the first to give a talk was Chenxi about the Rosebowl and what happened to lead us to the final and win.

The Rosebowl allows any club in the Chilterns to enter the competition which at present has around 40 clubs. The Chiltern Association of camera clubs are part of  the organisation along with others that  have over a thousand camera clubs in the UK.

 

So here is a breakdown of numbers of clubs in the UK up and to 2018

The Rosebowl competition puts the entered clubs in groups of four and over three rounds

the winning club receives 5 points,

second 3 points,

3rd 2 points

and fourth 1 point.

Over the three rounds of  competition usually 11 points are sufficient to qualify for the twelve place final.

 

Chenxi said in the early three rounds, fifteen images are used (but not more than two from any one club member)  and this year he was struggling to get images that were of a high standard and had to draw from images from this and last season.

Imagez  CC in the first round came second getting 3 points.

In the second round we did much better and finished first and getting 5 needed points.

However, in the third round we were struggling and finished last of three, fortunately our group only having three clubs in that round we managed to get 2 points.

So in total only 10 points.

 

So we scrapped into the final in eleventh place.

I don’t think many people gave us a chance of winning from that position but Chenxi sat with our judges and they decided on six images along with two that Chenxi was confident with and using one of Julia Cleaver’s that had not been previously used but thought it was class.

 

So in the final Chenxi made these eight selections as the fifteen had now to be reduced to eight for the final.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the result was a win for the Imagez camera club

 

 

So the next speaker was Nick Bennett

On his image titled The Stag Roar.

Nick said, sometimes one needs luck and a lot of help from club members like Brian Worley on his lighting techniques, our club judges and all the other club members sharing their ideas. On one such occasion, Aussie Alan was going to Richmond Park and asked if Nick and Brian would like to come along. Alan knew the best spots and where to park and all three were there just as the park gates were opening.

Nick said he normally takes sports photographs and took along his 300m, f2.8 lens, as he did not want to be on the end of some antlers in the middle of a ruck.

Alan said, stand in this position and Nick got this shot. Nick said, there were other photographers around and some in the picture but he managed to fade them out ok.

 

Next to give a talk was Steve

On his image

 

Steve said, he was in an outside group doing regular competitions and this particular week there was a requirement to do a self portrait.

However, he was working in Liverpool and staying in a small hotel. Although Steve had his photography equipment with him the room was too small for boxed lighting and even the bay window in his room pointed inwards lol.

So Steve set up a flash unit and added a device that acted like a gauze to soften the light.

 

Steve used a  remote hidden under his hand and took many shots, often his eye would blink knowing just when the flash was going off. He spent quite a time in the mirror trying to adjust his squint before getting the correct shot.

The shot had a blue tone to it. He then went into Lightroom to use a familiar filter that he likes to get the right tones. He used a split tone of 300, put the shadows up 60% and lessened the brightness a bit and added a vingette around it

 

His second picture was taken at an Oxford studio where they run a portfolio evening. Taking a picture of this guy he did ask somebody to hold a reflector up to brighten the eyes but it was held too lower but nicely brightened up his pocket area

So Steve then worked on the eyes to lighten them and bring out the white of his eyes. Steve used the same split tone that was used in his self portrait.

 

Next to talk was Chris on his 24 hour London Shoot.

Chris has been on several of these shoots around London and at least one for the full 24 hours. It is very tiring on the feet but worthwhile to see London changing under the different lighting. Chris said he was not sure whether there is one for this year .

So on to this picture from last year.

This is the shot one would be looking to achieve but the camera is not clever enough to do it.

 

If you give it the right exposure the windows will be too bright and blown out

 

If you compensate the exposure to get the windows right the rest of the station becomes too dark.

So as I understand it Chris has taken three HDR shots,

one correct for the windows

one correct for the station

and one with the exposure in between.

This allows these three images to be blended together with software picking the best parts of each exposure.

I understand this to be shooting using bracketing system on one’s camera.

In the image below the software is clever enough to notice any movement made between shots. It may be a person moving in the three pictures and the software gives one an opportunity to either remove it or blend it as one.

now do I clone out Chris’s  head lol

 

Next to talk was Kathy on how she made her winning swans

Swan Dance by Kathy Chantler

Kathy started with her pair of swans taken in a swannery in Dorset.

The swans were quite amiable.

The picture had to be cleaned up of all unwanted distractions before any processing and Kathy cloned out a swan in the background. Kathy said, her cloning was not that good in this picture but it did not matter, as the detail will disappear in this process.

The process in Photoshop would be in three stages of using different filters,

the first was the pixelation filter.

 

Then the next filter used was blur created on a copy image and blur was used 6 times.

Next the filter distort was used to create the swirl effect.

 

Then another copy is made with the distort filter used to swirl the picture in the other direction.

 

All are then layered together and using the brush the heads of the swans are carefully revealed  into the picture

to produce this.

There are various combinations of filters to use one has to try them, said Kathy  and if they don’t work one can always delete them.

There are different Youtube versions to follow on the internet.

 

Next to speak was John Timbrell on some of his pictures. John said this picture was taken under hospital lighting.

 

John then cropped it ‘close in’ for the theme of love and changed it to black and white.

 

John’s second picture was taken in the Montreal Art museum exhibition and this was a dark room demonstrating the use of flashing light.

John said he is always looking for different things other people don’t usually  notice. Once the display had finished John noticed the crack between the curtains and thought it would make a good ‘mystery’ theme image.

He cropped the bottom corner to give the diagonal and changed the image to black and white.

 

John’s third picture was taken on a Greek ferry and he liked the interaction of the people with the priest pointing his finger and the man with the dog looking on. There was a archway running down the image but John managed to successfully clone it out.

 

This picture John’s said, was taken in the Tate Modern members cafe and he liked the steamy effect of the  window but it did not have a top frame around it so he cropped it and added his own frame using a border. Which gave John a second 20 points in the Mystery theme round

 

After the change

 

 

John’s final picture was taken at Waterloo Station and he waited for various moments when people appeared into the scene.

John liked the central figure and the grid on the floor.

 

It took several photos to get right with shutters speeds of a 1/4 of a second after which he then did the crop.

 

Peter Carter then did a talk on how he produced this winning Genie image

 

First of all it was all taken in a darkened room with a camera, tripod, some incense sticks, a led light, three triggers and a kettle.

Various spots and noise had to be cloned out.

 

A separate image of a kettle was produced.

Although it looks to be a large kettle in the image it was bought in a charity shop for 99p and not much bigger than 3 cm lol.

 

Next Peter used various parts of the smoke to clone / add in to make the genie’s eyes

Then layered in the kettle

 

Finally squashing down the smoke to generate a reflection

 

Finally I talked about my Busker

Looking at portraits of various people that have interesting faces,  I took a picture of an accordion player on holiday who had a hat on but on looking at the shots afterwards it just did not do anything for me.

However, later in the holiday I came across a second accordion player who had an interesting face. So I asked and took  his picture which looked as if it had good prospects but not at the time of unloading it onto my laptop.

I just took two quick shots not wanting to annoy the accordion player.

The light had quickly changed between shots so a lot wrong with it.

So in software I put up the exposure, cloned out a lamp post coming out of his cheek, cloned out a drinks bottle and a white tissue on the bench.

 

Earlier I had taken about 50 shots of an egret and I had my ‘f ‘ settings on f 11 and that was not going to blur out the background

So I cloned and cropped out the palm trees and changed it to monochrome.

I  realised this was probably turning into one of my best pictures and emailed it to Chenxi for the Chiltern 100 competition and asked him his opinion.

“If I’m honest” he said, “I don’t like the monochrome process used”.

So I changed it using one in Infinity software.

So now it was critique night and Kathy did not like my tree and Julia said, the guy’s white bag below was a distraction

 

So the tree was carefully cloned out and the bag dodged and burned.

So that is the story of how a shot taken in the sixties would have come back from Bonus Print with a sticker saying ‘underexposed’ on it.

and now I changed it into a satisfying shot.

So check your old images carefully  before deleting them lol

 

Thanks to all the people for doing their talks

Next Week is

What can you do with the club’s studio lights?