Photo taken in the garden on one of those rare sunny days here.

A slightly long walk away from the house I found these fields ripe.

I was out with the long lens one day and captured a few shots of the sheep and their pups who were in a field behind out vet.

Hello, this is my first proper new photo in ages!! Sorry for being away for so long. Just lack of time, lack of motivation and lack of access to Photoshop CS. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a few more done before my trial runs out in 12 days time.

This was taken in the fields near my house after a we got covered in snow (for the first time in years) in February 2009. We don’t get much snow here so I made the most of it and took lots of pics.

Featured text to be added later.

Featured text to be added later.

Comments will appear on the blog and on FriendFeed.

These chaps were so easy to photograph. As soon as I walked up to the canal near Tonbridge Castle they were everywhere. I was only there for a minute or two but got lots of photos.

I’ve given this one a comic feel with the help of a PS action.

To me this shot looks like it’s an HDR image but I can ensure you that it’s not and most of the processing was done in Camera Raw with some tweaking in Photoshop.

Shot taken with my Sigma 10-20mm wide angle lens, which I’ve not used in ages!

A peony in the back garden. I’ve had a little play with the saturation.

]]> http://www.e-lusion.co.uk/blog/2009/02/22/peony/feed/ 2 http://www.e-lusion.co.uk/blog/2009/02/21/drops-leaf/ http://www.e-lusion.co.uk/blog/2009/02/21/drops-leaf/#comments Sat, 21 Feb 2009 17:54:23 +0000 koltregaskes http://www.squashyfrog.com/?p=287 In a continuing effort to post something, anything here (instead of just leaving it to collect dust) I’m going to try and post a pic a day from my Flickr stream.  Nothing fancy, but please add your comments here and/or on Flickr.  I’d love to have any feedback on this and anything I post here, on Flickr as well as FriendFeed (which I’m trying to link to this blog as much as possible).  Today’s pic:

High contrast shoot of a water-covered leaf in the back garden.

Click on the image to go to the pic on Flickr.  There you can see the original plus comments already posted.

Dark and dirty (ie. the first photo) can be found here.

I’ve recently been taking him to a new place behind our vet.  It’s near a field of sheep but completely fenced off so he doesn’t cause them any grief.  It’s a long walk to get to it and so is very quiet, though the odd train going by does break the silence.  It’s also near the oh-so-lovely sewage works but I don’t really notice it.

You get a pretty good view as the field is on a hill so I hope to put up my shots from it.

Have a browse of the the available photos below.  They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and canvas and mugs are available too.  They are all bordered as seen here, but please let me know if you wish a non-border version or if you would like prints of any other photo of mine, found on my flickr page or my .photography collection.  Please also let me know if you would like other products such as calendars, mouse pads, magnets, postcards, coasters, puzzles?

]]> http://www.e-lusion.co.uk/blog/2008/06/29/prints-available/feed/ 0 http://www.e-lusion.co.uk/blog/2008/06/22/improve-colours-firefox-browser/ http://www.e-lusion.co.uk/blog/2008/06/22/improve-colours-firefox-browser/#comments Sun, 22 Jun 2008 12:37:41 +0000 koltregaskes http://www.squashyfrog.com/?p=170 Basically if you are using Firefox as your Internet browser you can quickly change a setting to improve the colours you see while visiting sites with images and photos.

The details below have been taken from the International Colour Consortium’s site here (which tells you how to check and test the colours) and from LifeHacker’s site here (which tells you how to fix the colours).

I didn’t see much difference in some of my photos, but did in this photo on my Flickr page.  The colours become more vibrant so its well worth giving it a go.

From LifeHacker:

“If the digital photo you just uploaded looks washed out on Flickr compared to in your desktop image editor, that’s because Firefox 3‘s advanced color profile support isn’t turned on. To enable it, type about:config in Firefox 3′s address bar, then click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button. Then, in the Filter field, type gfx.color_management.enabled and set that value to true (its default value is false). Restart Firefox. From there on in, your photo colors will be richer than they were. Why isn’t this value true by default? Well, according to Mozilla, you’ll see a 10-15% performance hit using this setting, but if you’ve got a reasonably fast machine, it’ll be worth the better-looking photos. Hit the link below for an extended explanation of Firefox’s color profile support.

From International Colour Consortium:

“Is your system ICC Version 4 ready? One way to find out is to view or print this page using your system. The test image uses a mix of unusual ICC version 4 and version 2 profiles, one for each quadrant of the image. The test is also available in pdf format, as in both html and pdf file formats each image can use an unique profiles.

Profiles in each quadrant:	v4 e-sRGB	v4 YCC-RGB
	v2 GBR	v2 Adobe RGB

Expected Results

The display of the above test image on your system will change according to the abilities of your system. Here are three possible outcomes. (These are RGB screenshots from actual systems)

	The system supports these ICC version 4 and version 2 profiles
	The system supports ICC version 2 profiles only
	The system does not support these ICC profiles

Sources

The test and image were provided by Lars Borg, Adobe Systems, November 2003. The embedded profiles are provided by Adobe Systems. GBR is a Green-Blue-Red color space.”

This was taken on my trip to Hampshire and the New Forest where we found some wonderful donkeys . I was visiting my Aunt who lives with her dog in a mobile home very nearby. The couple in shot are my brother and his girl friend. As you can tell it was cold but you don’t know the half of it – it’s was really cold. We were having a quick wander around while my Aunt had a rest and over the hill we found a few horses and gusts of winds only normally found in the Arctic.

I took this shot and a closer shot but went with this one. From the original I tried to up the mood and atmosphere here.

Vote for the shot on PictPicture.

Flickr entry is here. And bordered is here.

Main Portfolio Page

Animal
Event
Landscape
Nature
Portrait
Sport
Travel
Urban
Wildlife
Other

Anyway, I don’t think there is much to do before next week.  The About page has old content on it and so needs a complete re-write (and if anyone has any questions they want answered about me or would like to see anything specific here just give me a shout).  Something that I will add to About is links to my social news/networking sites, so you can catch up with me in the various ways if you like.  Also, you might have seen articles appear that are backdated (as far as this time last year).  These are old articles from the old blog that are relevant here.  They are basically manually copied versions of the original entries with the odd correction and tidy-up.  I have some more articles to bring over and so that needs to be done before launch and clears anything wrapped up in the past (always look to the future I say ).  And then I have a few photo entries I’ve written for the old blog and Dark Matter Magazine to pull in.  Other than that and the ongoing tweaks and fixes that’s it!

So I hope everyone can stick with me during the site conversion and start-up.

During one morning the light outside our house was amazing. It was very moody and mysterious, so naturally I fired off a few shots. This is one shot which I’ve toned in sepia. I changed the tonal colours as the original lacked colour anyway and so thought the image would work in a sepia-style. Other than that I’ve not changed anything, so that is what the light looked like. Cool eh?

What you’re looking at is the view outside my office window. I’ve set myself up in a small downstairs room – nice a cosy. I saw this light just after getting up and logging on in the morning. The fencing you see is the basketball court that is mainly used by the local kids on the estate as a football pitch. It’s a big bone of contention it being their but if the kids didn’t have such things then they’ll be causing trouble on the streets elsewhere so we shouldn’t complain. The court is built in the middle of the housing on a small patch of grass and you can see the trees on the remaining part of the field.

It was amazing, not sure what caused it, was it the low light coming through the gap in the houses or something else? – but it only lasted 2 mornings and it’s not happened since.

Blog entry at Dark Matter Magazine is here.

Flickr entry is here. And bordered here.

A shot of my Golden Retriever, Kaz. He’s a poser as you can tell.
Seriously though, it’s very hard to capture him as he doesn’t stay still for more than a few seconds. At just 3 years old he’s is so full of energy especially when I take him out for his walk! I reckon he could keep going all day long!

But luckily on one of my early morning expeditions I caught him here. He was standing up on a mound near a pond while the Sun was coming up and the sky was a wonderful yellowy-orange. I think he might have heard a train coming and so went into ‘alert mode’ – Kaz loves to chase the trains, but so far he’s never caught up with one.

Again this is Edenbridge and at a place called Prettymans Pond. I’m not sure what it’s called that but it’s fantastic little pond and I’ve spent many an hour here practicing my photography and taking shots of the pond and the trees in every way I can think of. I’ve found that by going back to the same place over and over again you eventually see different angles for shots and find different ways of capturing the same subject. I’ve also tried to go here at different times of the day in different weather conditions. It’s been very interesting to see the changes these bring and I’ve certainly learnt how to look at things with a ‘photographer’s eye’.

This is a slightly adjusted photo (see below for original). I’ve cropped the top and left a little and increased the saturation throughout. Also I’ve lightened Kaz a little as he was a bit too dark. What does everyone think? I still think the sharp foreground branches are a little distracting?

In the process of creating this photo I thought of two questions:

Question 1: What is the best way to convert an image from Photoshop (PSD, TIFF) to JPEG? What I normally do is save the PSD as a TIFF then go into ACDSee and convert it there at max. quality to a JPEG (thus keeping the EXIF data). But this photo really highlights a problem (or two) I’ve noticed in that converting to JPEG reduces the saturation and darkens the brightness. Is there a better way to convert to JPEG to keep the exact tone of the image as well as the EXIF info?

Question 2: I had to refine and touch up the selection of Kaz in Photoshop as left alone he stuck out too much and his hair (especially his underneath) had a nasty line where one part of the image was dark+saturated and the other was bright+lightened. What’s the best way to blend these areas? I used the smudge tool on the selection layer and the result seems OK but is there a better way?

The original photo has been printed in the UK newspaper, Kent & Sussex Courier on 01-Feb-2008 (my first print!) and made it to onto Flickr’s Explore on Jan 8, 2008 at #434. The scan of the newspaper print is below:

Blog entry at Dark Matter Magazine is here.

Shot taken near Boxham Farm in Edenbridge, Kent (UK) and not too far away from my previous shot. The light was amazing that morning!I had scouted this area out previously and knew I had to be there for sunrise. So on the next occasion of a bright morning I was up and out the door at about 6:45am. I trekked up to here in the near-dark (which was a good half hour) and then basically waited for the sun to come up through the trees.

When it did, I was up and down this hill over and over, taking lots of different shots from different angles and of course with different light. If anyone saw me they would have thought I was a right nutter. But it was all worth it and got this and many other wonderful shots.

Second entry on Dark Matter Magazine’s web site. Blog entry is here.

Before we talk about what the alternatives to Flickr are, let’s first consider what flickr does for us. Flickr is great for sharing photos for free. It’s definately the biggest photo sharing community on the web.

The community features on Flickr are very deep and part of what makes Flickr so successful. Groups are one of the easy ways to get involved in the Flickr community. Groups revolve around a general topic that’s usually related to the kind of photos that users take or the kind of gear that they use. You can share your photos in the groups’ pools or engage in discussion in forums with the groups.

Still, there are some limitations to Fickr’s free accounts that detract from its usefulness. When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 100MB worth of photos each calendar month. This is a bandwidth limit, and not an amount of space that you have on Flickr servers.

Flickr also allows you to create sets for photos from a particular event or just photos that you want grouped together. I’ve put together sets for things like the 2007 Tour de Georgia and 2007 NORBA Showdown at Sugar. With a free Flickr account you’re limited to only 3 sets.

If you spring for the pro account at $24.95 per year, you get a whole lot more:

• Unlimited uploads (10MB per photo)
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited photosets
• Archiving of high-resolution original images
• The ability to replace a photo
• Post any of your photos in up to 60 group pools
• Ad-free browsing and sharing

Considering what you get, this is quite a bargain. For some reason, I’ve never upgraded. Perhaps it’s because Smugmug is my service of choice. Before we get into that though, let’s take a look at the other alternatives to Flickr.

To read the rest head over to here.