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2009-11-06T14:59:00.002Z

Hi subscribers

I've updated the site and as I'm using Wordpress now, you need to subscribe to a different feed. Please unsubscribe from this one and subscribe to http://nickminers.com/feed/ instead.

Thanks!

Nick

After the Lakes...

2009-10-14T18:51:00.002+01:00

This Saturday I'm heading to the Lake District with my friend Mark Casey for another By Camera week. I haven't decided yet, but I will probably use black and white again, as I did for the Svart/Hvit photos from Iceland in May. What's more, I've been working on a new look for the site these last few weeks, and it should be ready to launch, so I will launch the site with the Lake District photos when they're ready.

Thames Barrier

2009-10-02T21:11:00.004+01:00

It's been a while since I got my camera out, so I decided to take it in to work with me today. I was initially planning to visit Borough Market again, but I decided instead to head down to the Thames Barrier in East London after work. I got there just before sunset, so all these pictures were taken at ISO 1600 or 3200, as I was travelling light and didn't have my tripod with me.

Svart/Hvít (part 2)

2009-06-17T20:05:00.004+01:00

Svart/Hvít is Icelandic for 'black and white'. As I mentioned, I spent 23rd to 31st May with my family in Iceland (again!), only this time I shot exclusively in monochrome. I was going to say 'limited' myself but it didn't feel like a limitation - certainly, I had to think in a different way about the photos, but I enjoyed the new style of photography so much that I'm certain I'm going to try it again on future photo trips.

As there are about 60 pictures in this set, rather than present them in the traditional way on this web site, I've created a special gallery at this page.

Svart/Hvit

2009-06-03T20:54:00.001+01:00

I recently spent another week in Iceland with my family, and this time I forced myself to shoot exclusively in black and white. The landscape and light in Iceland suit this medium perfectly, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I haven't included the gallery on the site yet (61 photos is a bit of a stretch!) but you can view them on flickr at this link.

The Zone System

2009-05-09T10:55:00.009+01:00

A few months ago I mentioned that I had picked up on the benefits of the Zone System, and had applied it to most of my photography ever since. It may sound intimidating at first but it is really quite simple, and once you experience the benefits I think you'll find it hard to go back. What I'm going to try now is the first in a series of little lessons, where I'll show you some aspect of photography of which the average point-and-shoot snapper may not be aware. Hopefully if you put these lessons into practice you'll be able to achieve the sort of photographs you've always wanted to. Let me know if I sound too patronising; that's not my intention at all.

The zone system was developed by the American landscape photographer Ansel Adams, and the principle is simple. A camera can 'see' a more limited range of brightness than the human eye, so it needs to be adjusted to take into account lighting conditions. Most cameras try to render a scene so that the overall lightness is what's known as 18% grey, or exactly half way between pure black and pure white. If we number these brightnesses, 0 for pure black, 10 for pure white and 5 for 18% grey, then by filling in the numbers in between we have the 11 zones of the zone system. Each zone is 1 stop brighter than the previous one.

Most modern SLR cameras, digital or film, allow you to over- or underexpose by up to 2 stops in auto or semi-automatic mode, which can be limiting, so the first thing to do when using the zone system is to switch to full manual mode. The next thing to do is to set your camera to spot metering mode; refer to your camera's manual if you're not sure how to do this. You are now equipped to try the zone system.

Each zone has a description of what it represents:
0 - Pure black
1 - Near black, with slight tonality but no texture
2 - Textured black; the darkest part of the image in which slight detail is recorded
3 - Average dark materials and low values showing adequate texture
4 - Average dark foliage, dark stone, or landscape shadows
5 - Middle gray: clear north sky; dark skin, average weathered wood, grass
6 - Average Caucasian skin; light stone; shadows on snow in sunlit landscapes
7 - Very light skin; shadows in snow with acute side lighting
8 - Lightest tone with texture: textured snow
9 - Slight tone without texture; glaring snow
10 - Pure white: light sources and specular reflections
What you need to do to apply it is to find a key part of your photograph that you can assign a zone to, then set the exposure accordingly. In the illustration above, I have mapped the camera's exposure meter onto the middle 5 zones, but that does not mean you are limited to just these zones - by using full manual mode you can go beyond these zones but you need to count!

Now let's take an example. Suppose you are in a forest on a sunny day, where the grass on the floor is partly lit by sun and partly in shade. The most effective way of exposing such a scene is to meter on the sunlit grass, and the rest will take care of itself. Point your camera's spot metering zone at the grass so that the grass fills the metering zone, and adjust the exposure so that the camera says '0' - i.e. perfectly exposed (or zone 5). You can then recompose, and because the camera is on manual, the exposure will not be affected. The result will be something like this:

A camera set to full auto would have seen the silhouetted trees in the background and overexposed by a stop or two, to look something like this:

Note how the vivid green in the foreground in the first picture has been bleached out, and the stump is not as isolated as a feature as it was.

Generally you will be able to find a part of your picture that fits within zones 3-7 so you can see your camera showing you how far over- or underexposed you have made it. However if you want to venture further into the more extreme zones, here's where you need to count. To expose for zone 2, set the exposure to underexpose by 2 stops, then decrease the aperture or the shutter speed by 3 more clicks of the wheel (if your camera meters in 1/3 stop increments, as in the illustration above) or 2 more clicks (if 1/2 stop). For zone 1, use 6 or 4 clicks, and 9 or 6 for zone 0. To achieve a silhouette, for example, you should ensure the object you want to appear in silhouette is at zone 2 or below, but bear in mind that you may lose detail in the background if it is not bright enough, so take another reading from the background to ensure that you keep it in zone 5 or higher. If the contrast between the background and the object isn't great enough, you probably won't be able to achieve a perfect silhouette.

I hope this has all made sense; by all means look on the internet for more about the zone system and how a camera meters, but if you do get any good results using this system I'd love to hear from you.

The next lesson will be about using Neutral Density graduated filters to allow you to control the balance of the bright and dark areas of landscape photographs.

Northern Ireland by Camera

2009-05-05T07:12:00.003+01:00

I have just returned from a tour of Northern Ireland as part of the occasional, ongoing By Camera series of galleries, where I tour a location with some friends with the sole purpose of taking photographs. Until the others have picked their photos for the minisite, I have put up a selection of mine. Click here to view, or here to see a larger selection on flickr.

Rediscovered

2009-04-18T20:43:00.004+01:00

I recently had another look through my Iceland photos from our trip to Iceland in 2007, and found 10 more photos that I'd missed the first time round. It just goes to show that you should never throw photos away too readily...

More on the 4am project

2009-04-06T22:06:00.004+01:00

Having re-read my previous post, and subsequently read posts from other people who took part in the 4am project, I have to confess to feeling that my contribution was shamefully brief and didn't give the project the attention it deserved. So here is the 4am Project, the Director's Cut.

The 4am Project was the brainchild of Birmingham-based photographer Karen Strunks, who came up with the idea for people around the world to take a photograph of their local area at 4am, a particularly unusual time of day for photography when lack of people in otherwise busy places and the (in most cases) darkness would give a new perspective to otherwise familiar scenes. I decided to take part after seeing a gallery of photographs featured in the Guardian, and I admit to a certain fondness to early rising that makes me seem somewhat unorthodox to my friends.

So I set my alarm for 3:30 on Saturday (the key being that it was the 4th day of the 4th month) and after a strong cup of coffee and some breakfast to line my stomach, headed out to see what I could come up with. The sound of the car's engine sounded so much louder to me than usual, as I was painfully aware that most sane people were still trying to get over Friday night's excesses and wouldn't welcome being disturbed at this ungodly hour.

My first stop was a viewpoint on Old Redding, near the Grim's Dyke hotel made famous by the residency of WS Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. The viewpoint has a large car park and there was a nagging concern that I'd stumble across a secret dogging location. Fortunately there were just three other cars, two of which appeared to be unoccupied, but the third had its engine running, and all the lights were out. I just kept my head down and got on with my photography. I couldn't see much with the naked eye - the view was all blackness punctuated by street lights, but the photos I captured (here and here) show a lot more detail, in the first of which you can clearly see the Kodak factory at the north end of Harrow, and the dark outline of Harrow-on-the-Hill against the sky.

This being 4am, the usually busy thoroughfare of Old Redding was empty, so I took the opportunity to grab a couple of shots from the middle of the road, having to make way at one point for a slow and silent milk float, by far the most frequent sight on the roads at that time of day. In this picture you can just make out the red glow of the tail lights in the vanishing point.

I headed back into Watford, passing two more milk floats on the way, to the railway arches outside Bushey station. These have recently been cleaned up and some fancy lighting has been installed. Concerned that it may have been switched off to save energy, I was relieved to find it still going strong at 4:30, so I took a sequence of shots showing how the colour fades from red, to pink, to blue over time. For good measure I took one last shot with the 16mm lens on which I think nicely juxtaposes the white light from the traffic bollard against the orange glow of the street lamp and the pink arch in the middle. This is one of Watford's busiest junctions, and it was very strange to see it so deserted.

I arrived back home just after 5am, and after uploading and tweeting my efforts, headed back to bed to wake again at a more 'normal' time of 10am!

4am on 4/4

2009-04-04T10:03:00.007+01:00

The 4 am project is a worldwide project to collect photographs taken between 4:00 and 4:59 (local time) on 4th April all round the world. I thought I'd give it a go, so I set my alarm early and headed off to a viewpoint near us with views over Harrow. I then stopped on the way back home to shoot the railway arches nearby which have recently been fitted with a lighting installation. It was quite unusual to be out at that time of the morning, but not an unpleasant experience, and I might have to give it a try later in the year when the dawn starts to light up the sky that early.

Click here to see my selection.

OT: Hillsborough; 20 years on

2009-03-27T12:52:00.005Z

On 15th April, 1989, thousands of Liverpool fans travelled to Sheffield Wedsnesday's Hillborough football stadium to watch the FA Cup Semi Final against Nottingham Forest. 96 of those fans never returned.

The Taylor Report into the disaster was unequivocal that the policing of the match was to blame for allowing far too many fans into the Leppings Lane end of the ground than could safely be accommodated, and yet today, almost 20 years to the day, nobody has been held to account for the deaths, and the Hillsborough Justice Campaign continues unabated.

In addition, the Sun newspaper infamously reported as 'The Truth' that Liverpool fans had, among other crimes, urinated on and stolen from the pockets of the deceased. Its editor at the time, Kelvin MacKenzie, has been unapologetic to the last for this unthinkable fabrication.

The club will be holding a service at Anfield on the afternoon of 15th April 2009, as it has done every year since the disaster, and a minute's silence will be observed at 3:06pm, to mark the time that the match was finally stopped when the authorities realised exactly how serious the situation had become.

It is because so many people died that top flight stadiums across the UK are now all-seater, and fans can enjoy watching the most high-profile of games without fear of losing their lives in a similar incident. We should never forget those 96 men, women and children who never got to watch their beloved red men play again.

Most striking of all, the first scarf that was tied to the Shankly Gates that day was blue.

A Little Wave

2009-02-27T12:35:00.002Z

Clark Little takes amazing photographs of tube waves. It's a shame that his watermark is so prominent on the photos; however with pictures this good it's probably a necessary evil as using someone else's photos on the internet is so easy.

Rye and Camber

2009-02-21T12:19:00.004Z

I'm spending the weekend with a friend down in Kent, and we visited the beautiful town of Rye, just over the border in East Sussex, before driving down to Camber Sands to watch the sunset. Click here to see the pictures.

DPReview looks at the 5D Mark II

2009-02-14T13:14:00.003Z

One of the most respected photography review sites on the internet has (finally) published its review of the 5D Mark II. Apparently it took so long as they had to wait for a review model from Canon that wasn't a pre-production model, and they also wanted to wait untli after the firmware update to get rid of the dreaded Black Spot problem.

Why Flickr still makes me uncomfortable

2009-02-12T13:12:00.002Z

The Guardian has a report of the BBC using a photograph they found on flickr for commercial purposes, in contravention of the Creative Commons terms under which it was published. Given that it was only pure conincidence that the photographer noticed this particular breach, it makes you wonder how often this sort of thing happens. Flickr is all well and good as a ready-made gallery site, but if you use it to store full resolution copies of your photographs, then no matter how restrictive a licence you apply to them, it would be very difficult to prevent unscrupulous or, to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt, careless use of the photographs for purposes specifically excluded by the CC or copyright terms, unless you make sure that you only allow friends and/or family to download the originals.

Barack's Big Day

2009-01-21T21:42:00.005Z

The Boston Globe has this astonishing collection of photographs from the inauguration of President Barack Obama. I found some of these pictures genuinely moving, but it's hard to know whether that's because of the context or the content (or both). Thanks to John Gruber for the link.

Haze

2009-01-18T20:02:00.003Z

I went for a walk today up Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire, and it occurred to me how the problem of haze in long-distance telephoto shots can be effectively eliminated using a combination of the wider exposure latitude of modern digital sensors, and the tool available in post-processing software such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Here is a picture I took today, the sort where the view looks spectacular but the haze gets in the way:

A quick fix to the contrast and black levels improves the photo somewhat, but it affects the foreground more than the background, leaving the windmill still in a bit of haze:

However here is where Lightroom really came into its own. The new graduated filter tool, available from version 2, allowed me to add an effect that is more pronounced at the top than at the bottom, so I applied a contrast adjustment and added a hint of yellow to counteract the blue cast from the haze:

Finally I used the clarity tool to add a bit of extra punch:

Of course, wherever possible I try to get the shot right in camera, but in situations like this where that just isn't possible, it's good to know that you can capture enough colour depth to be able to recover what might have been a lost photograph.

Mr President Elect

2009-01-14T19:01:00.001Z

Not wanting to gloat or anything, but check the EXIF data on the newly-release official portrait of Barack Obama.

The RE Bar

2009-01-12T14:28:00.001Z

A friend of mine runs a bar in Eastcote, west London, and asked me to create a website for him. He also wanted photographs of the bar, so this weekend I finally managed to find the time to pay the bar a visit and get some night and daytime shots. The website was also finalised, and is now online at re-bar.co.uk. I used Lightroom 2.2 to create the gallery of images.

Pick of the Pics

2009-01-02T14:55:00.001Z

The Guardian has an audio slide show of the best of their photographs from 2008. Well worth a look.

Into the MMIX

2008-12-31T11:29:00.005Z

Happy New Year to all (both?) of my readers (is there anyone there reading this? If so, please say 'Hi' in the comments)! Here are some end of the year pics from London; we were let out of work early so I brought my camera in for some late afternoon abstracts...

I hope 2009 brings everything you want and more.

Three legs bad?

2008-12-21T11:46:00.004Z

I went to Cambridge yesterday, primarily to hand over my old 5D to its new owner, but also to take some photos with the new Mark II as well as allowing my friend to try out his new toy at the same time. The vibrant colours of the market were a good source of photos, but we were both rather disappointed at the attitude of the university staff. While I was framing a photo (hand-held, I should add) outtide Kings College Chapel, I was told we weren't allowed to use tripods on the University Grounds. I pointed out I wasn't using the tripod, but as it was standing next to me, that counted as 'using' it apparently. When I asked why not, all we got was 'it's the rules'.

Something similar has happened to me before, next to the London Eye, where I concede that using a tripod could be construed as an obstruction given how busy it is there, but as we were pretty much the only people outside the chapel I can't for the life of me understand why such a restriction would be in place. Of course we both left the grounds immediately, pondering the increasingly suspicious attitude of people towards photographers in general.

Anyway if you want to see the pictures I did manage to take, with or without a tripod, click here.

Low light, low noise

2008-12-19T22:59:00.006Z

I'm thoroughly enjoying getting to know the new camera, and in conjunction with Sigma's increasingly impressive 105mm EX-DG Macro I am getting some very pleasing results. Here is a set of pictures taken at lunch time today at London's famous Borough Market, a food market selling fresh, high-quality and expensive food. Every single picture in this set was taken at ISO 3200, and the colours you see are just as the camera recorded them.

After returning from the shoot I had a message from Jacobs that my new battery grip had arrived. So, with today's release of the Camera Raw update for OS X, I now have everything in place for a complete EOS 5D Mark II workflow. All I need is to take some more pictures...

Mist

2008-12-14T11:58:00.005Z

First chance to take the 5D Mark II out this morning; live view came in very handy for some of the macro shots, as did the fantastic high ISO performance. Several of these shots were taken at ISO 800 or 1600. Click here to see the gallery.

Opening the box

2008-12-12T13:20:00.004Z

For those of you who like this sort of thing, there is a set of pictures of my new 5D Mark II being opened at flickr, here. I haven't put the camera through its paces yet, but to summarise my first impressions:

Very solidly built - the magnesium alloy body feels much more rugged than the 5D's, and it has a nice matte black finish to it

Superb screen on the back - coated to minimise reflections (this works well) and astonishingly clear, sharp and accurate compared to the old one

Live view is going to come in very handy, especially for macro work

Autofocus is, as expected, identical to that of its predecessor, which by today's standards means it's not great, especially compared to the Nikon D700

I needn't have worried about detail in the 21MP sensor - with my Sigma 105mm macro, even at f/2.8, the detail is pin-sharp. Looks like we haven't reached the limits of lens resolution just yet

I'll be taking it out properly this weekend - watch this space for the first shots.