Rich reviews all the consumer cameras for CNET.co.uk, and a bang up job he does of it too.
Part of that job is recording video reviews, the setup for which he can be seen enduring here in our second studio.
He occasionally lends me neat bits of kit that he’s got in for review, like the Aiptek graphics tablet that’s sitting on my desk as I write, for which I am ever appreciative.
Rich Trenholm’s Flickr Stream (awesome pics of the grand canyon)
I had the pleasure of visiting the Emirates Stadium recently – quite wonderful piece of architecture that strangely seems to lack the blood curdling atmosphere of other stadiums i’ve been to. The sound seems to waft straight out of the top of the stadium. In contrast, the new Wembley, which I went to a few weeks after this, had much better acoustics.
Arsenal were pretty spectacular that day, humbling poor Derby by five goals. I’m not an Arsenal fan, I should say :) My heart belongs to Liverpool.
Post production notes: This is a panorama made up of 5 different images. Getting good panoramas is tricky. The key, for me, is getting the right manual exposure. I hold the camera up and take exposure readings across the range that I want to photograph, from left to right. Usually you get a range of readings back, as some shots will be darker than others. The trick is to set your camera to something roughly in the middle and then take all the shots at that exposure.
Then you need to download an amazing little application called autostitch which does all the hard work of melding the images together. It really is incredible how accurate it is – i’ve been trying to do good panoramas for years now, and autostitch is by far the most usefull tool i’ve come across. Once autostitch has worked it’s magic, I brought this image back into photoshop and cropped and straightened and did the usual saturation boosts and contrast adjustments.
While primarily a video producer, part of my job at CNET Networks (soon to be CBS Interactive Media) is to take photographs, when occasion demands. Last week, on a beautiful Thursday morning, SmartPlanet.com journalist Marian Smith and I went out onto the streets to ask people what they thought of World Environment Day.
We stuck mainly to the area around Tate Modern, including the Millennium Bridge. It provided some lovely backdrops for the images, and we met some splendid people who were happy to let loose about how little they knew about World Environment Day :)
Sarah, pictured above, was the catch of the day for me (photographically speaking!) As soon as I spotted her strolling along on the Millennium Bridge, keeping the sun off her back with a parasol, I nudged Marian in her direction. She was one of those disarmingly proper elderly English ladies. Look at that neat, buttoned down collar. They just don’t breed them like that any more.
Kuku on the other hand (below) was on his holidays and didn’t speak much English, though he had a charming way about him, and was at ease while I buzzed around snapping shots off.
The images on the SmartPlanet.com had to be turned around quickly, so I just did some basic touching up and cropping on them and sent them over to Marian, but the versions on the site here I’ve spent a bit more time with, and I’ve got a couple more that I’ll process over the next few days and post up here.
If you’re a photographer and you don’t know about David Hobby’s Strobist blog then head over there immediately and absorb everything his wonderful site has to offer. Pretty much everything I know about stobe lighting (using flash guns to light your pictures) I learned from him.
This is the first strobist lighting assignment I’ve taken part in – it involves the use of CTO lighting gel. CTO is essentially just a light orange filter that you place over lights to warm their colour up. The effect that this has when you combine them with the tungsten white balance setting on your camera is what you see above; everything that isn’t lit by your CTO gel filtered light comes out blue, while everything that is lit by the CTO gelled light has true colours.
What’s so brilliant about Strobist in general is the way the site continually throws simple, pratical ideas at you and encourages you to go out and shoot with them. It’s a tremendously satisfying way to learn.
Subscribe to the Strobist flickr group and join in the fun!
I went to see the England vs Barbarians rubgy match on Sunday, from the pampered luxury of a corporate box. In amongst the predominantly grey and black suits was this angelic little chap. The weather was very overcast, which might not have made for a very nice day, but the diffuse light was perfect for capturing candid portraits in the crowd. The light caught his bright white rugby shirt and made him pop nicely from the rest of the crowd.
Processed in Adobe Lightroom to crop to 2.39:1 aspect ratio, and in Adobe Photoshop for dodging, burning and colour correction.
This little fella was going nuts on a little patch of grass next to where we were eating lunch in London Fields park on Saturday. He was climbing about like a hyperactive kid hopped up on E numbers, flitting from one blade of grass to the next in his frenzied attempts to reach the tasty daisy pollen.
I processed it using Lightroom to crop into 2.39:1 aspect ratio, then in Photoshop to dodge and burn the contrast and to adjust the colours.