Pebbles From Paradise

Time to crash out Early Leica cameras had a collapsible Elmarit lens. This made them truly pocketable. Today’s digital equivalent is perhaps a camera like the FujiFinepix® E-900 which has a receding zoom lens. Time for a romp The little Fuji is an ideal beach camera. It takes up less space than any SLR. It [...]

Bliss!

FinePix® E-900, Lightroom® and Photoshop® Sometimes I promise that during the winter months I will take more images of the local flora. But photographing nature demands more than simply pointing an automatic camera at the unsuspecting flower and hoping for the best. Yesterday Brian Mosely wrote suggesting that I experiment with Lightzone® and so yesterday [...]

Created and Split-Toned in Bibble Pro® Those of you who read yesterday’s post know that following a recommendation by Brian Mosley I mistakenly installed a trial version of Adobe Lightroom® on my computer, when Brian had recommended Lightzone® from Lightcraft’s Products. Normally I convert my Olympus E-400 files in Bibble Pro®, and FujiFinepix E-900 RAW [...]

Yesterday I stated that with some tinkering I could probably obtain an image of equivalent quality to that achieved by Lightroom®, or Lightzone®e using Bibble Pro® 4.9. It really didn’t take very long to manage this, which just goes to show that what really matters in RAW processing is to purchase a professional product and [...]

Kumlubük, Bibble Pro® version 9.3 At last I’m getting to the stage where I can approach making images of my liking in Bibble Pro®, Lightroom® and Lightzone®. But which do I prefer? In some respects I still prefer Bibble Pro®. It has a one click technology which lifted this flat RAW file into something dynamic. [...]

Camera jpg from Konica/Minolta Dimage® X50, ISO 160, 4 seconds at F 2.8 My long suffering brother Eric sent me this image a day or so ago. It is a picture of the moon rising over Amos Bay, which he took on his visit here two years ago. The file is noisy, and also has [...]

The Leica M-5 a heavy, well specified camera that few people wanted to buy in 1973 now fetches $1000s on the second hand market Ever since I purchased my first digital camera, a Ricoh RDC 5000 with its modest 2.3 megapixel chip photography seems to have become easier. Hours wasted in darkened chemically polluted rooms [...]

Waiting for the metro on Eminönü Station Yesterday I wrote about how I have a dread of battery failure ruining crucial photographic opportunities when shooting either digital, or with a camera reliant upon an electronic shutter. Many cameras in this class also suffer with another deficiency. When you switch them off the lens resets itself [...]

In a small shop in Eminönü I came upon a Leica IIIa in what appeared to be pristine condition. Manufactured as one of a batch of 100 in 1939 the machine is even older than me. One would have to be lunatic to purchase such an item, so naturally within a few minutes I had [...]

Just when I thought my walk would take in just dilapidated concrete homes or hairdressing salons I saw this magnificent view of the Kılıç Ali Paşa Camii, one of the masterpieces of the Ottoman Master Architect and Builder Sinan ~~~~~ Normally I process RAW files from the compact FujiFilm® FinePix® E-900 I use S-7 RAW. [...]

Amazon waits by her school transport When I returned to Amos from Istanbul I learned that Amazon had insisted that we buy her the school uniform for her infant class. Although still only three, four next month, she has for some time liked to visit her friends in school. Last week the infant’s class teacher [...]

A Wonderful Paper Weight! My Leica IIIa is turning out to be a heap of trouble. But it is a beautiful paperweight and I enjoy taking photographs with it, if only they would come out! When I put my second film through the camera in Istanbul every image was under exposed and out of focus, [...]

The FinePix® RAW file was converted in Lightzone® but not adjusted in any way. The orange colour cast is due to the sun being diffused by some yellow blinds. ~~o~~ It seems like yesterday that I was proposing that the easiest way to obtain that old Leica print quality is to manipulate a compact’s digital [...]

Irem Bray, courtesy of Lightcrafts’ Lightzone® Today’s post is by way of an apology to Baz. He hates it when I take a photograph of Irem and manipulate it using all the wonders of digital imaging. But sometimes Baz digital post production is necessary. For example this image of Irem looks good, but if you [...]

  Can an apple a day keep Dad’s Photoshopping at bay? Don’t think about Leica sharpness, my Leica IIIa is equipped with a sixty year old F-2 Summar. It is notoriously soft when wide open and since it has many cleaning marks even at F 5.6 it suffers somewhat. Also don’t think about film-grain, which [...]

Lightroom® Removed From The System Yesterday I removed Adobe Photoshop® Lightroom® from the computer. I quite liked it, and if it were a free product I almost certainly would have kept it. But it costs money and I can’t justify too many RAW editors on the system. I find that I have been using Lightcrafts [...]

It amazes me how a morning’s housework can put a smile on every woman’s face! Here’s a picture of the chick-a-dee. She’s celebrating because our cleaning lady didn’t arrive today and so she is able to bleach the loo herself. She’s been in heaven all morning. Oh my God, she’s turning into my mother! Anyway [...]

First we drop the gunge into the saucer If you come to stay in Turkey it’s quite likely that you will be offered Turkish coffee. This is prepared using freshly ground coffee boiled in a small sauceman and then poured into the coffee cup. There are three grades of Turkish coffee. Şekerli which is sweet; [...]

To The Beach but, methinks, only for a few more weeks! I took this picture for Peter and Pat. They are feeling a little grey at the moment because they’re back in the U.K. and their little stone-house here is tucked-up snug for the winter. This is the path they take each day to the [...]

Naughty, but nice, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more!

Bibble Pro® plus Adobe Photoshop®, around half an hour to create this effect Here’s a picture of Amzon. I processed the Olympus RAW file in Bibble Pro 4.7 and used Ansel, a plug-in to obtain the best range of facial tones that I could muster. To be fair to Ansel, I haven’t practised much with [...]

As created in Bibble 4.7 last July Last summer I remarked just how difficult it is to balance mixed lighting, as in this shot of Irem above taken in Turunç in July. It’s not that the picture, or Irem, are unattractive but rather that rendering a natural skin tone has forced colours behind her to [...]

A common site in Kumlubük during the early spring Alper Erkalan the chief aikido instructor at Marmaris Zen-Center recently requested that I shoot some images of his dojo practice. Frankly I prefer taking pictures of local flowers and wild-life, and Peter and Pat have requested more of these here, so watch this space. In the [...]

The Path To The Beach at Amos Peter, of Pat and Peter, who sometimes live at No: 5, hinted recently that he would have preferred a colour version of my print ‘To The Beach’. I am not working much with colour at the moment, but nevertheless I am happy to oblige: To The Beach!  

Just three days ago I posted about how Lightzone® from Colourcrafts® may be used to merge two areas of a photograph that have been lit by sources of different colour temperatures. In this case the image is lit by both a tungsten light from the illumination of a shop, and also what remained of the [...]

R.I.P. This can, that looks to be past sell-by-date beanz, is one of the saddest fine art images that I’ve seen on the Internet. You see I have spent many happy days working in lunatic asylums, and grown fond of many of the characters therein, both staff and patients. This copper can is the grave [...]

Photographed earlier this year! Here’s another shot for Peter and Pat. It was taken earlier in the year, and I simply hadn’t got around to using it. It was taken as an in camera .jpg and then adjusted very slightly in Adobe Photoshop®. A question is now emerging in my mind about the plethora of [...]

The Statue of Atatürk, Turunç It’s that time of year agin. More precisely it’s already that special day for all Turks. Cumhuriet Day when we celebrate the birth of the Republic and thank Atatürk, and our grandparents for his initiative. That is if we are Turkish, of course? In Turunç we meet under Atatürk’s statue [...]

A Power Retouche ‘Platinum Print’ Platinum printing is a process requiring funds, skill, patience and most probably a sense of humour. The chemicals used must be prepared in the darkroom and applied to the paper using a brush made from goat hair. The process was first used by C. J. Burnett in 1851, and a [...]

Irem in a reflective mood I suppose most of us have taken holiday snaps. We go somewhere nice for a meal and then ask the waiter, or a passer-by, to take our photograph in front of our lunch, or some exotic background. And why not? But when you study the images of great portrait photographers [...]