New book

I’ve signed the contract today to write a third book in the ava Academia Basics Photography series. This one will be called Working with Black-and-white. The call is out already for quality B&W images.

Nikon D200 ‘colour cast’

One of the delights of a blog is to see the search terms that bring people to your site. One of yesterday’s searches was ”d200 magenta cast”. I was beginning to think I was the only person who had noticed. I’ve never quite enjoyed the same degree of saturation accuracy and clarity of colour from my D200 than I got from my D100 – I put it down to the fact I had calibrated the D100 and used those figures in Camera Raw. I tried the same with the D200 – large adjustments in the red hue and saturation were suggested. All very odd – I’ve not got to the bottom of this and then Nikon announce the D300 – a whole new chip to get to grips with.

Depth of field calculator widget

New version of the Depth of Field calculator (Mac widget) is available for download at: Redex.

There is also a web version of the calculator available – a complete camera/lens database included with the appropriate digital crop factor. So if you never need calculate depth of field for a given lens and aperture, or have no interest in the hyperfocal focusing distance, you can at least see what equivalent focal length lens you have on your digital SLR. 

Temptation

My little Olympus SP350 produced good pictures from our trip up the West Highland line. On getting home I see Canon may have announced a camera to replace the SP350 – the PowerShot G9. The G7 offered most things I wanted: viewfinder, manual exposure and focus but had no RAW mode – which for me is a must. The revised G9 has that, image stabilisation plus a 12Mpx CCD and a 3inch LCD. Santa may be getting a letter yet.

Over-elaborate but fun

Most impressed with the refurbished Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow – this is a Photoshop Photomerge of three image shot in RAW on my little Olympus SP-350. The Raw files were white balanced and tonally adjusted before the lens distortion was corrected. The three corrected images were merged and the final 16-bit file then very gently tone mapped to adjusted the appearance of the big globe lights. The image is rather large for the blog page so just right click to open it in a new window.

Foreign language books

Pleased to see that my books on Composition and Lighting are now available in French language editions translated by Robert Pinto and in German language editions. Cover images for the German editions are quite different.

New pages

I’ve added pages with some comments on the cameras and lenses I use – I’ve come to the conclusion I’ve too much choice (ha! ha!). To keep the pages manageable length I’ve split things into digital and film – for no other reason. There’s no large format nor our older Nikon kit listed.

Composition frames

Anyone who has read my book Composition will realise I don’t put great faith in geometric compositional aids. That said, it is informative to see you own pictures analysed using the classic tools like the Golden Ratio. A neat piece of Mac software arrives – FrameAway 1.0 that lets you drop a transparent grid over your images to see how they are composed. It is nothing more than a visualisation tool and does no cropping but it very elegant. Tiny download at http://frameaway.dv8.ro/index.html