photography – Page 2 – PR Photography Paul David Drabble

Santa Clause Saddles up beside the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow

Dec 222015

Santa Clause Saddles up beside the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow

Ricky McConnell (Santa Clause) 52, drew a crowd in Glasgow on Monday December 21 when dressed as Santa he Saddled up beside the Duke of Wellington in Glasgow. The statue which stands in Royal Exchange Square Glasgow usually sporting a traffic cone hat was where the publicity stunt was carried out to raise awareness for ‘Kids Have Rights 2’. According to media reports Ricky was given a fixed-penalty ticket for performing the same stunt in 2014 after firefighters had to be called in to help him down. Apparently he avoided a fixed penaty this year as the cherry picker hired to lift him into place was also used to get him down. Once safely back on solid ground Ricky was taken to one side by a uinformed officer from Police Scotland for a quiet word.

London Poppy Display “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red”

Sep 102015

Part of the London poppy display from the Tower of London massive art installatio,n marking 100 years since the start of the First World War. The Arch segment, also Know as “The Wave” has been installed on The Yorkshire Sculpture Parks Cascade Bridge. The installation was opened to the public for the first time on September 2015 and will remain in place until January 2016.

Fuji X-Pro1 60mm F2.4 Real World Update

Jul 272015

I used the Fuji X-Pro1 60mm f2.4 at couple of 1940’s events over the last couple of weekends, Kelham Island Sheffield and East Park Hull. Probably the most challenging of things to shoot were the Spitfire/Hurricane Flypast at the Hull Veterans weekend. I intended to use my Nikon D700 with 80-200mm but was caught out after being told the flypast would be Sunday. It actually happened very late on Saturday. I only had time to flick to AFC and shoot fortunately the camera was set as described in my last post resulting in the aircraft images included below. The exposures were f11 1/350 or better all at ISO 400.

Kelham Island & Hull Veterans 1940’s – Images by Paul Drabble

Fuji X-Pro1 and Fuji XF 60mm f2.4 Macro

Jul 152015

Fuji X-Pro1 and Fuji XF 60mm f2.4 Macro

Today I added the Fuji XF 60mm f2.4 macro lens to the Fuji X-Pro1 XF 18mm f2 & XF 27mm f2.8 in my kit bag. My understanding is the XF 60mm f2.4 is a tad on the slow side when it comes to focusing, especially if compared to the rather more expensive XF 56mm f1.2 but is there away to gain an edge if using the XF 60mm for anything other than Macro work?
I would say yes and the trick is understand the problem and plan ahead. Think what you want to achieve with the camera lens combination. One thing I want to try with the lens is some candid portraits and grab shots without getting too close to a subject. The problem that needs to be overcome with the Fuji is a combination of slow focusing lens and the fact the the Contrast Detection AF (CDAF) employed by the X-Pro1 cant predict where the subject is going to be. I should probably also point out that unlike a DSLRs which use Phase Detection AF (PDAF) you don’t press the shutter halfway down to start the continuous AF. The correct way to use AFC on the X-Pro1 is to aim the camera at the subject with the cross hairs on the bit you want sharp and squeeze the shutter release in a single movement until the camera fires. I figured a small enough aperture with a reasonable DOF would help the focusing but as with all cameras that results in a drop in shutter speed and the possibility of losing the sharpness to camera shake or subject movement. My first instinct was to wind the ISO up but that has two drawbacks first is a drop in image quality second is a danger of over exposure in bright light. Fortunately the X-Pro1 has the option to program an Auto ISO. You get to tell the camera the minimum & maximum ISO you want to use and the minimum shutter speed it should be trying to achieve. What it doesn’t do is stop the camera working if the shutter speed drops too low it just tries to get up there if it can.
After a little fiddling about I settled on a minimum ISO of 800 a maximum of 6400 and a minimum shutter speed of 1/250. With the aperture set to f5.6 and AF set to continuous I roped in some help from my partner and our dog. As you can see from the images I had her throw a dog toy towards me so he would run towards camera chasing it. Each of the four images below is from a different throw of the toy. There were five throws in all and the results are pretty consistent for a slow focusing macro lens. The first throw I failed miserably and got only grass throws 2, 3, 4, 5 resulted in the images below. They have been cropped but still I think they are pretty impressive. You can find the camera settings for each shot in the captions. I have included the Thistle, shot in Macro, and the dog portrait to give a feel for what can expected if you forget to change the setting back to your ‘usual’ ones for situations that are more sedate.

I have to admit It was a glorious sunny day and the results may not be so good in poor lighting conditions but I feel I may just have an edge that maximises my chance of the subject being in focus while minimising the chance of camera shake with a set of camera settings that alow the X-Pro1 and Fuji XF 60mm f2.4 Macro lens to be used quickly and without too much though of anything other than composition.

Yorkshire Man of Steel Cake

Jun 032015

Made by Cake Artist Rose Dummer and depicting the Yorkshire Man of steel (a planned 35m high landmark sculpture overlooking junction 34 of the M1 and Meadowhall in South Yorkshire) this impressive Double Death by Chocolate Man of Steel Cake was produced for Oak Furniture Land to mark the opening of their new store at the Foundry Retail Park in Rotherham. At an in store celebration breakfast on Wednesday 3rd June the Yorkshire Man of steel, with the chocolate heart, was donated to Rotherham Hospice. His next appearance will be during the Hospice Summer Gala at Phoenix Sports & Social Club on the 7th June, where he will help raise funds for the Hospice

Sheffield Industrial Estate Fire

Sep 062014

Sheffield Industrial Estate Fire – A major fire broke out on an industrial estate in Sheffield on Wednesday night 3rd Spetember. The fire started just after 9.30pm and a number of loud explosions were heard during the course of the night. The large large blaze at a single storey warehouse just off Station Road in Ecclesfield, close to South Yorkshire Police Sub Divisional HQ and Chapeltown Academy involved 2,000 tonnes of waste plastics. It destroyed the building and caused serious damage to a car paint spraying unit close by and was tackled by over 40 firefighters.

Make Modern Photographs Vintage

Aug 292013

Make Modern Photographs Vintage- With the increase in popularity of vintage events, 1940’s weekends and re-enacting seems to have led to a trend for ageing digital photographs and trying to make them look like period images. To help photographers who want their photographs to look like film from the 40’s here are a few tips to make modern photographs vintage

The first problem is image quality. Most modern digital cameras handled correctly produce images of significantly higher quality than than their equivalent from the 1940’s. My method of knocking down the image quality is to take my original image, size it down by 50% or more then interpolate it back up to its original size. This can still leave the image too sharp if it is I use a blur filter to soften the image further.

Next desaturate the image but desaturation alone tends to give a harsh and crisp black and white, which leans towards having a blueish tinge. Using colour balance tools to add yellow (or remove blue depending upon how you look at it) and add red will allow you to get a warmer tone that you can make look anywhere from a natural looking black and white through to a sepia tone.

Now add the film grain effect. Create a new layer which will need to be in overlay mode or similar with 100% opacity of middle or 50% grey. On this new layer you carry out two steps.

First add noise, how much will depend up how grainy you want your final image to look, again I start around 50% however make sure the noise is monochrome, there would be no colour noise in a 1940’s B&W photograph.

Second step is to blur the noise so it looks less like sharp dots and more resembles real film grain Gaussian blur is my preferred choice usually around 2 or three pixels.

At this point it’s worth comparing your manipulated image with genuine pictures from the period to make sure you have a reasonable match for colour tone and softness before merging the layers and moving onto cropping.

I prefer to crop either the 3:2 proportion of 35mm format or the square format of 6×6 you could also use 10×8 but a give away that your image may not be “period” would be to crop it at A4 as this probably would not have been a popular shape of the time unless you are going on to mock-up a period magazine cover. Once cropped its time to add a white border I add a 10% border relative to the cropped photograph This can be done by using something like the “Canvas Size” tool in Photoshop or you could just create a new plain white image document in your editor then drag your manipulated photograph into the middle. Once the border is sorted for that final touch of authenticity you can use a softening tool like adobes blur tool to soften the really hard edge between the beginning of the image and the white border and really make modern Photographs Vintage.

Sheffield News Images, Man Charged With Murder of Girl Aged 3

Feb 112013

Sheffield News Images – One of the things people considering getting into news photography don’t consider, especially when thinking about freelancing, is covering stories like this. Work has been very thin on the ground recently and sometimes in order to stay in business you end up going out on spec to stories like this one.

A man has been charged with murder after the death of a 3 year old girl in Sheffield. An ambulance was called to a house on Beck Road Shiregreen Sheffield on Friday 8th February and a 3 year old was taken to Sheffield Children’s Hospital where she died in the early hours of Saturday Morning . A man aged 30 appeared at Sheffield Magistrates Court on Monday morning Charged with Murder.

Once you have the images the next job is ringing around to sell your speculatively shot images. News photography isn’t always all about glamour, celebrity, sport and big occasions its also about people, tragedy and death. This job I supplied to a news agency who will try to place the images and story.

If you are interested in using any of the images on this story they can be obtained by contacting Caters News Agency

Adobe Photoshop CS2 free Download

Jan 242013

Where can you download a fully working copy of Adobe Photoshop CS2 & serial number free?

I’m not talking about a trial version I mean a genuine fully operational version of Adobe Photoshop CS2. How about from Adobe’s own website. If it sounds far too good to be true it may well be but the fact of the matter is Adobe are currently hosting a page where Creative Suite 2 (CS2) programs including Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Elements 4.0/5.0 can be downloaded and beside the download Adobe are list the required Serial numbers to make those programs work.

There followed some discussion on the internet as to whether it is actually legal for any Tom, Dick or Harry to come along and help themselves to these programs as it seems the origin of this list lies in the fact that Adobe are ceasing support for the CS2 range of software and that means switching off the activation server for those products. If the web rumours are to be believed this caused complaints from CS2 product owners who would not be able to reactivate products they had paid for should the need arise. That in turn led to adobe listing all CS2 products for download and giving a serial number for each product.

In January 7th this year (2013) Adobe issued the following statement…

“Effective December 13, Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers.”

While according to “Adobe scientist Dov Isaacs” as reported by Forbes.com the word is…

“You have heard wrong! Adobe is absolutely not providing free copies of CS2!” You have to have purchased a copy of CS2 before you can legally within the strict letter of the law help yourself as it were.

So there it is crystal clear except if you follow the link to the “free” CS2 Downloads page you now find Adobe asking you to log in or create a free account which once logged in takes you a page which announces

“Adobe has disabled the activation server for CS2 products, including Acrobat 7, because of a technical issue. These products were released more than seven years ago, do not run on many modern operating systems, and are no longer supported.

Adobe strongly advises against running unsupported and outdated software. The serial numbers provided as a part of the download may only be used by customers who legitimately purchased CS2 or Acrobat 7 and need to maintain their current use of these products.”

Click “I Agree” and you end up right back where we started Adobe’s own website providing download links with serial numbers for CS2 products where if you are dishonest enough you could steal some genuine CS2 Products.

So Adobe have problem, on the one hand they have a product that’s their IP and if its good enough to use its good enough to charge for, but they wish to retire it while customers who legally purchased it may still need to re-activate it.

I do wonder if, in the long run, this may even gain them customers. By risking have the old software stolen by people who didn’t pay for it while keeping legitimate customers happy shows loyalty to existing users and maybe just maybe some will “steal” a “free” copy and decide its good for them and while they don’t need or can’t afford to buy Adobe Photoshop CS6 they may consider Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 which can be legally purchased directly from Adobe for under £80 .

Mam Tor Hill fort – Photo of the Day

Jan 172012

Mam Tor on the Western end of the Hope Valley in the Peak District is a 517 metres /1696 feet hill. Known as Mother Hill around 3000 years ago a group of Celtic People built a Bronze Age hill fort here and called it home.

Mam Tor is also known as the Shivering Mountain because of its instability. A land slip that probably began in pre-historic times and is still active today has opened up the whole side of Mam Tor, revealing what’s inside. It’s a classic example of a rotational landslip and during heavy or prolonged rainfall water seeps between the layers of rock causing them to become slippery. This allows the different layers shale and sandstone of to slide over one another resulting in further land slips. Experts believe this will only stop when face of the land slip reaches 30 degrees in probably another 1500 years.

Don’t expect to visit here and be able enjoy solitude especially at weekends not even on a cold January Winters day. It is such a popular spot that steps and a paved path have been added to protect Mam Tor from the thousands upon thousands of feet that tramp over it every day.

Photography Information

Nikon D700 Camera

Nikon 50mm f1.8 lens.

Shutter Speed 1/3200 sec

Aperture f4.5

ISO 640

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