Followed the instructions here for an authentic vintage feel, using Gimp.

A personal selection of my photo-art. Enjoy.

And I thought that the only way to make people cry using sand was to throw it in their eyes. The winner of Ukraine’s Got Talent managed to accomplish that without throwing sand at anything except a light-table. She told the story on Germany’s invasion of Ukraine during WW2 with nothing but sand and looking at the audiences’ reaction, I would think that she was a worthy winner. I never knew that one could do that with sand. Amazing!

Always by your side.

PS: I wonder what she could do with a Microsoft Surface?

Alright, as promised. Here are some of my photos from Singapore! You can also go directly to the album by clicking here. I tried to take different shots of Singapore. On this trip, I managed to exercise my new 50-200mm lens to the fullest. I had only switched over to the 18-55mm lens for a single shot, when I had to shoot something on the ground.

As for the photos, none of them were post-processed, besides merely some simply white-balance adjustments and inserting my little signature brush here and there. Aside from the obvious long exposure shots, the rest of the photos were taken hand-held. I truly think that this long lens was a good buy. It produces excellent shots, even at a distance.

Even the various Night Safari shots, were all taken without flash, hand held and with the long lens. I am quite surprised that as many of them turned out as good as they did. You have to understand that the lighting was barely enough to see by, much less take a photo with. I could not even see much through the lens and had to use a lot of guesswork to manually adjust the zoom and focus.

Enough about the photos. Just go look at them and leave comments if you so wish to.

I had just taken this photo of a sunset, a few hours ago. This was taken from behind my house, in the bit of green right opposite Midsummer’s Common and Jesus Green. I just stood up in my room and saw this beautiful sunset outside my window. Knowing that it would not last for long, I picked up my camera, tripod and lenses, and ran off towards the sunset. It was beautiful.

Although it may seem like it has been post-processed extensively, this photo was surprisingly original. All I did was set the white balance. There was no other post-processing step and certainly no HDR work. The photo was a 30 second exposure, taken with the use of my new remote shutter. That is why you can see the floating lines above the roads, where the lamps from the vehicles and cycles passed through.

I think that I kind of like how vivid colours can get in the dark.

I’ve been having a lot of Boots meal deals for lunch recently. As a result, I have amassed a small collection of discount coupons for photograph processing. So, I decided to send a bunch of photographs in for processing yesterday. I ordered a bunch of 9×6 prints for next day processing. I went to collect the photos today and was told that there were problems with my order. They suspected me of breaching copyright and developing professional photographs.

So, I had to explain to them that I had taken those photographs myself using my own camera. The problem stemmed from the fact that I had embedded my signature brush on all of them. The people working there told me that the photos had a professional logo on it and asked me what it was. So, I had to explain to them that it was my signature and I even had to give them a sample of my signature. After comparing it with the signature brush in my photos, they decided that it was okay for them to release the photographs to me.

Well, that was good. I would have gotten into a fit if they did not release the photographs to me. I’m glad that they took the extra precautions to verify that the photographs actually belonged to me first. I guess that they have to do that with the strict intellectual property laws in the country. I doubt that they would want to be caught in any copyright infringement scandal. I guess that most professionals would not take their prints to Boots for processing.

As for the quality of the prints, I actually went to Boots to experiment. I wanted to see how the prints would come out in real life. As far as I can tell, the prints came out okay. Noise in the photographs were made more prominent in print than on screen. Dust specs on the lens appeared prominently on the photographs, especially against the sky. The colour saturation was just right although they seemed to have stretched the contrast a little.

So, this means that I’ll need to take photos at low ISO settings, and clean my lenses more often. At least, I should be very careful and treat my lenses with tender loving care. Also, I may not want to stretch the contrast of the photos too much. For post processing, I will just increase the colour saturation and correct the white balance. Prints tend to look duller and darker than on screen.

I still have another 5 coupons that I can use, which means that I can order another 75 large prints for a very cheap price. I’ll try to use up as many of them as possible, before I leave for home. It is certainly not cheaper to develop them at home

Most of you must have visited my blog and noticed the new look and feel it has. Some of you would have noticed the four little photographs on the right. I thought that I should describe the process behind turning my blog into this new look. It might be good if others are interested in adapting the process to modify their own blogs. I changed the theme, colours and customisations.

First, I looked up some good themes on the Internet. I wanted a theme that was simple and classy. A very quick search brought me to the grid focus theme. I liked the style and the fact that most of it was accomplished without many graphics. However, the theme was a little old and did not cater to WordPress widgets. Another quick google and I found this site, which explained how to widgetise the theme. I modified the steps slightly as the sidebar_widget class does not exist.

Next, came the time to customise the colours. To do this, I created a new custom.css file to override the original styles. I like to use this website to choose colour schemes. In my many years of web design work, this is the best website that I have found for colour scheming. So, I just browsed through some random colour schemes until I found one that I liked. I looked for a dour single colour scheme as I tend to like them. Then, it was just a matter of substituting the styles into the custom style sheet.

Finally, came the decor. I realised that as nice as the design was, it would be better if it was garnished with some photographs. So, I perused my collection of photographs and picked out four nice ones. As there was little space to place a photo anywhere else, I decided to composite them into a montage and put it in the sidebar. The result is the “vanes” image on the right. From left to right, they represent the time of day from morning to night, and the four seasons from winter to autumn. The dimensions of the image are close to the golden ratio. Then of course, the final flourish was the signature brush that I have described earlier.

Throughout the process, I relied solely on open source tools. For making the custom style sheet, I recommend using Firefox with its web developer add-on to display the names of the page elements, which can then be accurately styled. For the images, I used the Gimp, of course. No animals or children were hurt during the production of this theme.

PS: Feel free to let me know your thoughts on this new look by voting in the polls to the right.

Having seen a digitised signature on a friend’s blog, I decided to make one of my own. The result is the signature image that you see on the right part of this blog. Instead of using the method that he suggested, I decided to do it using a different method. This was primarily because most of the tutorials used tools that were not at my disposal. So, this is my technique for creating a signature brush using only Gimp and Inkscape.

1. We need the raw signature, which can be obtained through a variety of means. I used a sharpie and scribbled my John Hancock on a piece of white paper. Then, I used my digital camera to take a photo of the raw signature. This raw photo will need to be processed.
2. The photo needs to be cleaned up first. This can be done in Gimp using the Colour-Threshold settings to clearly define the paper and writing. The resultant image will be a largely black and white image.
3. The signature now needs to be cropped. Once again, using Gimp, the signature is selected using the selection tool. Then, using Image-Crop to Selection the signature is cropped and everything outside the signature is removed.
4. Being now cleaned and cropped, the signature can be imported into Inkscape using File-Import. Then, using Path-Trace Bitmap and setting it to Brightness Cutoff mode, the signature is converted from a bitmap into a vector image.
5. As a vector image, the signature can be made a little artsy by using the Path-Simplify command in Inkscape. This reduces the number of points in the vector image and smooths the stroke edges. This can be repeated a number of times for artistic effect. The resultant image looks like it is painted.
6. Using File-Export Bitmap from Inkscape, the vector image is saved as a raster PNG file. This PNG file should be sufficiently large in size in order to allow the signature to be resized without too much distortion.
7. This PNG can be imported into Gimp for final post processing. The image is flattened using Image-Flatten Image and converted into grayscale using Image-Mode-Grayscale. This is an important step to ensure that the brush works correctly.
8. Finally, the resultant black signature on white background, is exported as a Gimp brush. Use the File-Save As command to save the image as a Gimp brush (*.gbr) format image. This image should be saved in the ~/.gimp-2.4/brushes subdirectory. Then, refresh the brushes and it is ready for use.

And the result is the signature brush as seen in the image above. I can use this brush to insert a signature into any of my future photographs, like how artists of old used to scrawl their names into the corner of their paintings. My signature brush is 900 pixels across, which should be good for use in any decent sized image.

I think that my photography skills have reached a medium level. At the very least, it is enough for me to understand what my limitations are and to give me enough insight into appreciating the photographs of others. So, I have recently been thinking about focusing on a specific skill to further develop it. After some consideration, I think that I will try to do some black and white photography.

I have always had an interest in black and white photographs. For some reason, I have always found black and white photographs to be very strong, emotionally. After some consideration, it becomes obvious why. Due to the lack of colour, there is nothing that can carry the photo through except the emotion that it captures.

So, I’ve been doing a little reading on black and white photography. And surprisingly, it seems that the best way to shoot black and white, is to actually shoot in RAW colour. The different sites all distinctly recommend against shooting in JPEGs. With the added colour space available in the RAW format, a more dynamic black and white photograph can be obtained from it. This was good to know because my camera does not have a black and white mode.

So, it wouldn’t make much difference for me when taking the actual photograph. I will just need to take them in colour RAW and do the post processing on my PC. The main difference will come from composition and lighting. But seeing that I have always made composition an integral part of my photography, it should not be a problem for me to compose subjects. But the issue that I will need to look at is lighting. Lighting plays the most important role in black and white photography.

Well, I won’t have anything to show for the moment as I am not going anywhere interesting. I will probably play around with it, and my new lens, after I go home.

I have been contemplating on getting some new lenses soon. I have grown to realise that the 18-55mm lens that I am currently using with my camera, is rather limiting. So, I was thinking of either getting a telephoto or a prime lens. However, after checking them out, I think that I’ll get a telephoto lens first, and maybe a prime at a later time.

The telephoto lens that I have decided on getting is the Pentax SMC 50-200mm (f4-5.6) zoom lens. From the different reviews that I have perused, it seems to be a very decent lens. I have also found a site that sells it for under £100 even though the SRP is almost £200. This makes it cheaper than the equivalent third party lens from Sigma, which goes for about £140.

What is good about this lens?

It is supposed to produce exceptional images at f/8 throughout the range from 50-200mm. While my 18-55mm was suitable for taking wide-angle landscape shots and portraits, the 50-200mm would be suitable for taking portraits and to zoom in for long distance shots, such as for events and parties where I may not be able to locate myself at the front row (e.g like at some friend’s weddings).

One amazing feature about this particular lens is it’s size. Most telephoto zooms are rather huge, in the range of about 12cm long closed, but this lens is only 8cm long (the image is the lense fully extended), which is the same size as my existing 18-55mm. This means that I can conveniently carry it in my existing small camera bag. This lens would be all I’d need to bring with me for outdoor holiday shots. The 18-55mm is better suited for indoor shots.

And for a prime lens, I am presently considering the 40mm (f2.8) lens, which would be very suitable for low light indoor party shots. The first party lens is only 1.5cm thick, which makes it convenient enough to store in the same small camera bag, right under the camera. However, this lens starts at around £220 and up. So, I will not be able to afford it at this time. I guess that these 3 lenses are all that I’ll need for a while. They would cover the wide-angle through to telephoto zoom range and a prime lens for indoor party shots.

One thing about getting into serious photography is the cost of the lenses. Once I invest in these lenses, I am unlikely to change camera brands for the future. The good thing is that Pentax is one of the only 2 camera manufacturers who have compability in their lenses since 1975. Yes, it is possible to use 30 year old Pentax lenses in my present camera. Presumably, this would stay the same for the next 30 years.