Dave Johnson's Photography

Photos & Thoughts


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A Day at the Races

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of going to York races with my best friend to celebrate his upcoming marriage to the wonderful Miss Frank. Now it is not normal that a camera attends stag parties due to the potential for life changing, marriage wrecking incriminating evidence that might be captured by that little CMOS sensor! However, fortunately I decided to leave my camera at home once the races had finished so there was no chance of this catastrophic event happening 😉

The Saturday races are one of the biggest in the calendar for York racecourse with the big race, both in prize money and runners, being the 4.15pm Ebor. With it being a stag party we decided to all put a £5 in to the pot and to let the Stag choose a horse. To cut a long story short if it had come in we would have had a tidy £1.2K to share between 15 of us, however, it didn’t win and we walked away empty handed! In fact the result on this race pretty much summed up how my day at the races went from a gambling point of view – lots of bets+duff horses = no wins! Always next year…

As I mentioned in a previous post I have been using Snapseed for editing some of my photos. The picture above was edited using this software but the same effect could easily be achieved using other photo-processing software. Basically, the colour was washed out, a blue tint and quite a strong vignette added. For an extra effect I tweaked the highlights and brightness of his eyes to make them stand out more. I like the end result giving an edgy, cool but hard look to the man – kinda like the man who would come round and collect the money, if you know what I mean!!

When major fail, if you can call it that, was when I left my camera in the trust hands of one of my friends whilst I went to spend a penny! When reviewing the images at the end of the day there appeared to be quite a few of the ladies who were sat in front of us for most of the day. In fact, there were so many photos taken in such a short space of time (my fault for leaving the camera on high-speed shutter) that I could have stitched them together to make a little gif of the girl in purple walking from right to left, but I can’t be bothered…

Have a look at the rest of the set on flickr


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To photomatix or not to photomatix. That is the question?

The photos below are a mixture of single raw files tweaked to the maximum to get the most out of the data, and a combination of three raw files with an exposure range from -2 to +2 tone mapped using the photomatix HDR plugin for Aperture. I am quite pleased with the photomatix results as the camera was only handheld to capture the images and so any movement would have resulted in a halo kind of effect on the final image. Fortunately the Canon 7D has such a high burst rate on the high speed setting that it enabled me to fire off three shots in less than a second which limited the amount of movement that might have been apparent at a slower frame rate.

As you can see from the images (with the bloomin watermarks all over) the photomatix plugin is running in trial mode. I would like to upgrade to the full version but as I would use it that infrequently I can’t quite justify the $119 price tag. However, now that I know I can good results from shots handheld it might be a purchase to add to the list for the future.

What do you think of the images? The photomatix ones are easy to spot because of the watermark – how do you think the others compare to the supposed “true” HDR images? Comments greatly appreciated!!


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Never ending options

As I move forward with my photography I am always looking at better ways to manage my image workflow. Currently I am using Aperture for organizing and processing my Canon RAW files. Whilst Aperture is extremely powerful, and with an apparent endless array of external plugins, I am always on the lookout for other software that will allow me to showcase my work. Since buying the iPad I have been using a program called Snapseed which is produced by Nik Software. What this piece of software gave me was the ability to upload photos to my iPad and then process them whilst on the go. I was impressed by the different filters and styles that could be applied to an image, however, the only downside was that I was constantly having to synchronize my photos to my main image library. This afternoon, after much reading on the ‘tinternet, I decided to get Snapseed for my iMac. The desktop version works pretty much in the same way the mobile versions do yet I feel that you get a little extra in the way certain portions of the image can be manipulated. One of the benefits of having snapseed on the desktop is that I can send images from Aperture for external editing and then have the changes update automatically back into the Aperture library – HEY PRESTO! no more manual syncing of images!!

I am sure there are many great reviews of Snapseed available on the web so I will only leave you with two images. One manipulated with Snapseed and the other with no modifications (aka straight out of the camera) so that you can see the kind of results you can get with a little jiggery pokery!

Trying out Snapseed on the iMac

Straight out of the camera


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There be a storm brewing

On Monday evening me and the missus decided that we would make use of the last night of freedom together before the cheeky monkeys come home from their summer holidays with the Grandparents. We booked to see Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, at a new cinema in New Brighton. On the drive over we came over the crest of a hill that presented us with fantastic views of the Bay of Liverpool and out towards the Irish Sea. What presented before us was a fantastic cloud formation of a storm gathering pace and intensity – appearing to hover over the wind farms out in the bay! Now unfortunately I only had my iPhone with me and as good a camera it is for a phone I was cursing that I hadn’t got my proper camera with me; so much so given that I nearly decided to bring it but didn’t feel comfortable leaving it in the car whilst we were in the cinema. Anyway, despite this shortcoming the iPhone coupled with Instagram has provided some pretty intense looking images of the impending storm.

Whilst we were enjoying the film little did I know that the storm I had nonchalantly photographed earlier was wreaking havoc over the northern part of the Wirral leaving roads flooded and rivers bursting their banks. Hopefully no long term lasting damage was caused.