childs play - photoshop actions
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A 4X5 crop that includes 3 pillars and creates the perspective that leads the eye to the distant bathers. A slight rotation was made to correct the horizon.
Someone asked me how I processed my photos which led me to write my workflow out on my "About" page. After some confusion, I decided to do a visual as you see in the attached image.
During the pandemic, I've been using my cell phone for almost all my pictures. I just wanted to pass along my workflow for others who haven't tried their phones yet. Just remember that a RAW file gives you much more room to adjust contrast.
Do you have a photo-taking workflow?
Before I pull out the “big camera,” I sometimes snap a quick iPhone pic to check composition and lighting. Sometimes it tells me everything I need to know, like whether to shift left, crouch down, or just give up and go get some eggs benedict for brekky at a cafe. And when my wide-angle lens isn’t quite wide enough, it's iPhone panorama to the rescue! It’s quicker than taking multiple shots with the OM-1 and stitching later. Lazy or efficient? You decide.
Fun Fact Time - The Goldfish Edition!
Have you ever wondered how long goldfish live? Most pet goldfish clock in around 5–10 years. But some have gone the distance......
The oldest was Goldie (45 yrs). A very solid name choice in my opinion. He never made it into the Guinness Book of Records due to a lack of official paperwork. While he was alive, Goldie garnered international media attention, and his family the Evans family donated any money earned by Goldie’s appearances to charity to help children with physical disabilities. How cool is that, a philanthropist goldfish!
Other notable characters in the geriatric goldfish club include:
Tish (1956-1999) – the official Guinness title holder at 43 years old. In 1988 Tish had a brush with death when he leapt out of his bowl and landed on the carpet. His mum Tilda wasn't home but luckily, when she found him & placed him back into the water, he resumed swimming as if nothing had happened. I wonder if he remembered or if every trip around the goldfish bowl was new to him! Over the years, as he aged, Tish’s scales turned from bright orange to silver, matching the colour of Hilda’s hair. That's kinda sweet.
Fred (42) and George (44). Keith & Mary Allies from Worcester UK won the pair of fish at a fair in 1974, when they were only dating. Since then, the married couple kept the goldfish, who outlived two of their dogs. They passed in 2017 & 2019. Fred & George that is, not Keith & Mary! My takeaway - a couple who raise goldfish together, stay together!
Splash (38) and Splish (36) - Haley and Matthew Wright never did anything particularly special to care for Splash. He swam around his tank all day, ate regular fish food, and fed on live plants in his tank. Splish and Splash were funfair prizes won by the Wrights in 1977 (bit of a common theme there). Mr. Wright believes that Splash mourned for Splish when he was no longer around. PS If it is annoying I listed splash before splish you may be OCD ;)
Sharkey (24) – I reckon best name, hands down! Another goldfish who survived a near death experience. His owner Paul's mother found him belly up in his bowl. She thought he was dead and flushed him down the toilet. However, Sharky was still alive and swam back up the pipe and was saved in time. I guess he felt a bit shitty about that ;)
Bob (20) from the UK – well, it's a solid name for sure. I wonder if it is because he "Bobbed" up and down in his bowl? Bob experienced his 15 minutes of fame in 2017 when his family noticed that he was struggling to swim and developed a lump on his fin. They decided to spend $250 on an operation to save his life. I'm pleased to report the operation was successful and Bob fully recovered. The doc said that his family was very pleased with the outcome as Bob was older than their children and considered part of their family.
I hope these goldfish ramblings brighten your day. Thanks kindly for any likes/comments, they are always appreciated.
Waterscape 34/100 in 2025
Not much going on in the gardens these days - I was happy to see a bee among the salvia flowers this morning...
A comment on image quality - after getting the R7 a couple weeks ago I was a bit underwhelmed. My usual Camera Raw to Photoshop workflow gave quite a bit more noise than I expected. I then read in several sources that DXO's PureRaw gave better results than ACR with the new cr3 files, and wow, that's true, in my experience at least. Also, Topaz has a new product in beta, Photo AI. Using this after PureRaw gives high ISO images better than I ever would have imagined.
This is the kind of scene that drove me to plunge into nightscapes and Astro photography. I have taken/composed images I’m quite pleased with, but none have so many elements as this one. I was scouting locations proximate to Kanab, Utah where I was planning to attend the Nightscaper conference. I was a little sour on Lake Powell because the easy to reach locations are kind of “meh” at least if you are familiar. I wasn’t willing to spring for a boat rental, so I wasn’t giving it much thought. Then I learned about Alstrom Point.
Reachable with some ground clearance required. I was pretty sure my Prius wouldn’t qualify and was definitely not willing to chance it. Turns out the route is passable with a Forester if you are careful—most folks had even better clearance. As the crow flies, you are not far from Page, AZ, so despite traveling more than an hour off pavement, still sitting with full cell service.
All the nights away from home on this trip were clear, but I am glad this was the last location I visited. Having the car right there also lets me use all the hardware. I was using my tracker and telescope early in the evening to do some DSO imaging while waiting for the Milky Way to rise. I kept the tracker going for this composite - 4 landscape aspect images with the sky and land shot separately, but at about the same time.
Shot with a Canon EOS Ra and a Samyang 14mm f2.8 lens. Sky: Tracked, 20 shots, ISO 1600, 30s at each azimuth. Land: Single images, fixed tripod, ISO 1600, 300s. The 20 sky images are stacked using Starry Sky Stacker (appropriate for tracked sky). I process the sky with a modified DSO workflow that pays extra attention to color faithfulness (at least compared to earlier techniques I’ve employed!) and tries to keep the histogram from being blown out in stretching. I did emphasize the saturation of the H-alpha clouds in the Milky Way. The landscape was processed mostly in Lightroom and using Nik Color Efex mostly for contrast control and to soften some of it—very grainy from the long exposures.
May you too dream beneath the desert sky.
Peace & cheers!
- Thanks to everyone who looked at my picture, favors and have commented. Please press "L" or "Z" for a large view - an absolute must to fully enjoy this picture!
Said Bear has had a word with me about improving my workflow - whatever that means - and we published this picture directly from within Shotwell (a photo manager for Linux).
Said Bear has definitely settled into his new home, and I think he is actually taking over. No bad thing tbh.
hybrid workflow Mint SLR670S/instant Lab, Polaroid bw 600 film film, Bonn Germany, day one 1/2
Happy PolaroidWeek to you all! so looking forward to see your great polas this week. this community is so inspiring, glad to be a part of it.
don't forget to join the polaroidweek 2025 group:
and please follow Polaroid Week on Bluesky:
- bsky.app/profile/polaroidweek.bsky.social
you can find me or my work here:
Side-lit diffused sun, against a black board, lit to zone2.
Toned in LR6 to emulate chlorobromide tonality (of papers such as Agfa Record Rapid developed in Agfa WA). This is not toned; many photographers of my age and older used this workflow as standard as an alternative to the "cold" tones of bromide paper.
Can you believe this? Only 9 days old . . . . Such incredible luck to catch this gassy smile while she was being held like this!
Yet another pict of my new little niece.
edited with my soft pop action from my Workflow set
It's always fun to learn that there are roads and places within a well-visited (by me) county that I've never seen before. And under certain light (even shitty meridian light), there's something I can more or less do with a camera.
The damage to this negative was through user error. I clearly dropped some fixer or water or something on the sheet prior to development. No idea how that happened, but it could have been worse.
But really, it doesn't matter. What I enjoy about film is that everything that goes into a photo is part of the photo (if you want it to be).
For X-ray film that means: the cutting, the loading, the shooting, the unloading, the storage, the development, the fixing and finally (for me) the scanning (for others, continue this list with whatever printing workflow you've got going on).
Of course, this is the same for most film, (usually apart from the cutting thing). But X-ray film acts as a sort of catalog of everyone little mistake you've made along the way. Apart from the actual exposure, this film is unforgiving.
You'll notice the white border around the image, just inside the black boarder created by the film holder. Is this from over agitation in the tray? Obviously, there was some fogging or a very very slight light leak on the right of the frame. But what of the sort of anti-vignetting around the whole thing? It's prevalent through most/basically all of the sheets. I've never seen that before.
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'Cursory'
Camera: Graflex Speed Graphic
Lens: Steinheil München Anastigmat Actinar 4.5; 135mm
Film: Agfa CP-BU M X-Ray Film; 50iso
Exposure: f/12.5; 1/100sec
Process: Rodinal; 1+100; 3ish mins
Washington
August 2022
Website www.vulturelabs.photography
My next B&W fine art long exposure photography workshop will be held in London on the 9th and 10th of April, and again on the 23rd and 24th of April, (only one place available) Learn my composition techniques, and my complete post processing workflow. Please email vulturelabs@gmail.com for more info
If you would like one to one tuition, at a time that suits you, then please get in touch
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Thank you all, for visits, comments and faves, most appreciated ;-)
You've probably noticed it already... but for those who haven't... there's this viral thing going around Facebook at the moment where photographers challenge each other to post five black & white photos in 5 days... and to nominate one other person for every photo that they post.
So last week my buddy Mike Scott invited me to participate in the 5 in 5 B&W challenge. At first I thought it was a really lame idea... I only ever see the world in colour... so why should I post black & white photos!? I have been known to post the occaaaasional monochrome photo... but only when the colours are so flat that they don't add anything extra to the image.
But after thinking it all over for a few days... I decided that this challenge was probably a good thing... it would force me to try something different... force me to step out of my colour comfort zone and see the world in a more artistic way. So I dug deep into my archives and reprocessed a five image panorama that I shot at Namibia's iconic "Dead Vlei" way back in September 2009. After I'd processed with my standard workflow... I converted it to black & white with the Nik Silver Efex filter plugin. But no matter how much I tweaked the photo in Silver Efex... I still preferred the original colour version... damn!
But then I adjusted the opacity of the mono layer in Photoshop... thereby reintroducing a little bit of colour to my mono conversion. I stopped at 80% opacity... hey this works for me... sure it's not a true black & white photo... but it certainly ain't a colour photo!
Sorry Mike... I tried but failed.
I now challenge Jan Zwilling to post 5 black & white photos within the next 5 days.
Nikon D300, Sigma 18-200 mm at 36 mm, ISO 200, aperture of f/16, with a 1/320th second exposure.
This image is the intellectual property of Paul Bruins. It may not be used in any way without my written consent.
You can now also find me on my Website | Facebook | 500px | OutdoorPhoto
Here, Godzilla is holding a tintype of a couple and their cat.
This is one of the test images I took to dev in the new-ish darkroom set up. For this, I was testing the red light to see if it fogged anything during my normal workflow.
It does not. Huzzah, etc.
I took a few others to test various arrangements of how I might try things (cut under a red light, dev under a red light, etc), and everything really does seem fine.
I'll still probably do most of my work in complete darkness. I've found that I'm a bit more gentle with film when I can't see it, especially when I'm developing. But also, it'll be nice to see what I'm cutting for a change.
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'Display'
Camera: Chamonix 45F-2
Lens: Steinheil München Anastigmat Actinar 4.5; 135mm
Film: Agfa CP-BU M X-Ray Film; 50iso
Exposure: f/6.3; 1sec
Process: HC-110; 1+90; 7mins
Washington
March 2024
Sometimes I wish I had recorded my workflow especially when the results are like this. I tried very hard to replicate it with another similar image but got nowhere near.
Selati Game Reserve
Gravelotte
Limpopo
South Africa
Not quite the same as my other re-visited images as I never really got an image from this trip that I was totally happy with, a few years on and a totally different processing workflow and I am at last happy with an image. I knew there was a reason that I did not delete old images.
Having a bit of a run on lighthouses at the moment, something different next time