Travelling around the Highlands it seems that every day you find a new distillery, today it was the case for Skye's Talisker.
the sea that made Talisker
-- Gear Fujifilm X-T1 FUJINON XF18-135mm F3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR -- Post Lightroom : Cropping ,initial toning and levels Nik's Silver Efex Pro : B&W conversion
Day 7, another day, another ferry, a couple more islands. Today we started in Lewis, drove down to Harris and took the ferry to Uig in the isle of Skye.
bench on top of Skye
-- Gear Fujifilm X-PRO1 FUJINON XF10-24mm F4 R OIS -- Post Lightroom : Cropping ,initial toning and levels Nik's Silver Efex Pro : B&W conversion
Day 6 of the road trip and we have left the Scottish mainland... Is it still mainland even though Great Britain is an island? Anyway, we are now in the Hebrides off the West coast of Scotland, on the beautiful Lewis island. Getting the ferry from Ullapool seems to be the best way to get here, as it makes for a great trip with gorgeous scenery.
flowers from ullapool
-- Gear Fujifilm X-T1 FUJINON XF18-135mm F3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR -- Post Lightroom : Cropping ,initial toning and levels Nik's Silver Efex Pro : B&W conversion
Day 5 got us to our first taste of whisky at the Glenmorangie distillery just outside Tain, on our way from Inverness to the Highlands West coast north of Ullapool. Has as been the case the last few days, the day starts grey but the sun dominates the sky by lunch time.
where to inInbhir Nis
-- Gear Fujifilm X-T1 FUJINON XF18-135mm F3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR -- Post Lightroom : Cropping ,initial toning and levels Nik's Silver Efex Pro : B&W conversion
Day four got us from Glen Coe to the capital of the Highlands, Inverness. Stopping at Fort Augustus to see the south side of the Loch Ness, and also stopping at the Urquhart Castle which has some great views over the Ness.
the old bridge over the Oich river
-- Gear Fujifilm X-T1 FUJINON XF18-135mm F3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR -- Post Lightroom : Initial toning, levels and cropping Nik's Silver Efex Pro : B&W conversion
Day 3 of our Scottish road trip starts at the shores of Loch Lomond, and took us up to Glen Coe. Along the way passing through the hidden Falls of Falloch, and up to the Glencoe Sky resort which has breath taking views and a bicycle downhill course for the adrenaline junkies. Picture of the day was taken at Loch Leven where todays journey ended.
sun sets on Loch Leven
-- Gear Fujifilm X-T1 FUJINON XF18-135mm F3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR -- Post Lightroom : Initial toning and levels Nik's Silver Efex Pro : B&W conversion
#project365_year1 [day 002] Dailies from Scotland
Driving from Edinburgh to Loch Lomond, passing through Stirling to take a look at the Castle. Stopped by Brea Restaurant for acouple of nice gourmet burgers, before attempting the climb up hill towards the castle. I do recommend a brief stop at café by the Church of the Holy Rude.
coffee by the Church of the Holy Rude
-- Gear Fujifilm X-PRO1 Samyang 8mm f2.8 Fisheye -- Post Lightroom : Initial toning and levels Nik's Silver Efex Pro : B&W conversion
Starting off the Year 1 of my #project365 with the dailies from my trip through Scotland. First stop the beautiful Edinburgh, and the art-deco/brutalist building of the Scottish Government.
at the doors of the Scottish Government
-- Gear
Fujifilm X-T1
FUJINON XF18-135mm F3.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR
-- Post
Lightroom : Initial toning and levels
Nik's Silver Efex Pro : B&W conversion
So why did I start a 365 project last year, and what did I learn from my failure to make it to the end of the 365 days?
For a few years most of my photographic output was constrained by external parties, mainly by editors from the various publications I covered concerts for. This meant that the only untreated photos I accumulated we're mostly from my vacations.
Nowadays I don't have any hard deadlines to worry about, but still keep taking a staggering amount of photos each year. So, with all the distractions from my working and private life, I needed to create some artificial deadlines that I could work with. Having a daily deadline to publish a photo seemed like an ambitious but achievable goal!
The standard for a project 365 is that you produce and publish a piece every day for a full year, in the case of photography this means that each day you need to publish a photo taken on that day. For my own purposes I decided that I would publish daily, but draw from my large backlog instead.
To add to the challenge I would also include the technical details of the picture and post processing, and create a caption relevant to the image content, process or any other interesting information.
For someone who is not accustomed to producing texts on a regular basis, or even irregular like me, this proved to be the hardest habit to maintain. For the first two months I was able to keep a regular flow of interesting writings, but when the novelty wore off and the pictures being published depicted common scenes it became increasingly hard to maintain momentum and my posts became irregular.
Eventually I would stop altogether, but still have a growing backlog.
So why try again, and how to make sure I'm not putting myself in a position where failure is almost guaranteed?
The main reason for taking such a challenge hasn’t changed, an extensive backlog of photos that I need to go through, and keep publishing on a consistent basis.
But also the need to force myself to write more, and add information to the images I publish, as I believe that an image with an interesting story is less forgettable than an impressive photo with no context. Also, I want to be more capable of writing on a consistent basis, and get more comfortable doing so. The best way to get better at something is to make it into an habit, and practice consistently and with intent.
This is the declaration of intents for my second try at the Project365.
What am I keeping from year 0, and is going to be new and shiny?
To start I will only promise to publish a daily photo, keeping the technical and processing information, but with a much shorter caption. Perhaps that will consist only of the location, or a basic description of the scene depicted, or even what I was thinking when I was taking the photo. They will always have a title and a location.
To offset the loss of the longer texts that accompanied my images, I am creating a weekly post that will be longer, and go into deeper detail for that image. A picture of the week, that might not be the most impressive photo for that week, but it will the one I have more to say about. This will also give me the opportunity to delve deeper into my post-processing techniques and tools, as well as the thought process behind my style of photography.
Having less daily texts to write should also allow me the time to write a few reviews of the gear and software I use, and also a few books.
Thankfully I also learned a bit about ways to create better processes to be able to keep up, and have the least amount of wasted time/effort.
Also, by making this manifesto publicly will increase my sense of accountability for the project, which should help me see it through to the end.
For the last part of this post series dedicated to Long Exposures I wanted to give a brief overview of the equipment I am using at the moment, and also go through one photo from start to finish, from the idea to the finished product.
By now you know I have chosen to go for the Lee Filters system, and the main reason I made that choice. I got their Seven5 system, designed for Compact System Cameras, which is a lot smaller and slightly cheaper also. There is a trade off however, specially if you are using Fujifilm X cameras, the maximum thread size is 72mm and at that point vignetting is an issue for wide lenses. So some care is needed when pairing this with the wonderful Fujinon 10-24mm.
For my first field test with the filters I picked up my trusty X-PRO1, paired with the 18mm prime lens and a GorillaPod Focus, and set off to the Western side of the Isle of Dogs to capture some nice views of the Thames. This has become my lightest setup for capturing long exposures in the city, where you can always find a place to put the GorillaPod on, the 18mm is just wide enough, and it all fits on a bag made to carry one DSLR with a single lens. I chose the spot because at that time of the day the sun won't be in the frame and will give a great contrast with the clouds. The traffic on the river will add lots of money movement to the water, and might result in some interesting subjects coming into the frame.
When choosing my composition, I wanted to have a stationary object in the foreground, and ideally in the river like the post you can see on the right side of the frame. The railings gave me a support for my GorillaPod, and I thought would also add some interest to the foreground. After the camera as in place, I started taking some test shots, still with no filters, so I could get base values for exposure. At this time I shot a few frames capturing some passing boats, which I thought might come in handy later. At this point exposure values were 1/250s @ f/11, ISO200.
breaking the stillness of the thames
25s @ f/11, ISO 200
Since at this point I only have a couple of ND grads (Neutral Density graduated), namely the 0.9 hard, and 0.6 soft, the choice here was simple. With a clear line dividing the sky from the ground, the hard grad was the initial choice. The bright cloudy sky was just about 4 stops brighter than the river, which makes the 0.9 also the best choice. With the ND grad in place, I took a few more shots to evaluate its positioning and overall exposure, before I got the BigStopper out.
Placing the BigStopper in front my lens drops the exposure by 10 stops, which my camera meter was able to tell me would be 15s @ f/11, which I used as the starting point for the final exposure value. Dialling those values in manual mode, and reviewing the test shot it looked like a good image. But looking into the histogram, there still was more information I could get in the photo, so I pushed the exposure up until the highlights began to clip. This got me to the photo final exposure of 25s,and a very smooth water texture but still not enough to blur the clouds.
Post processing here was actually very simple. Like normal I start off in Lightroom to get as much information as possible from the RAW file, by flattening the whites and blacks a small amount, and since the BigStopper leaves a light cool color cast, also warm-up the image using the White-Balance slider. Although the end result was a black and white photo, I always start with a flat and calibrated color image.
In this image, I thought that the color didn't add anything interesting to the mix, and by making it Black & White it would accentuate the graphical nature of the few elements present in the foreground. With the bold clouds in the sky as a source of drama to offset the stillness of the water. The conversion was made in Lightroom also, using it's inbuilt Black & White Mix tool to darken the blue in the skies and lighten the greens of the trees on the other side of the river.
I also applied the same settings to another image I had taken which featured a fast boat streaking through the river, so that both images could be transferred as layers into Photoshop.
Inside Photoshop, I added the streaking boat and water trail to my main image, before starting the final touch ups. Since this would be a small detail on the end image, I thought that it would not be distracting to add it, and would offer some interest when the viewer looked more intently at the finished image. Next I used the Orton effect to add a bit of a glow effect to water, and used Nik Silver Efex Pro to add more drama to the sky.
That is the whole story of this image, which actually took longer to write than it took to actually take the image and process it, but might be due to my very slow writing!
Hope this was of some value to any readers, and for now I'll stop with these very long posts. Any comments and questions are welcomed, and I'll do my best to get back to you promptly.
APN
-- Gear Fujifilm X-PRO1 Fujifilm XF 18mmF2 R GorillaPod Focus tripod Filters : Lee Seven5 Big Stopper + 0.9 hard ND -- Post Lightroom : Initial tone and final crop. Photoshop: Clean up and sharpening. NikCollection Silver Efex Pro : Toning and Detail extraction.