Archive for the ‘Seeing’ Category

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Damien’s landscapes in exhibition, portfolio reviews and software talk

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
Morning Frost, Damien Demolder

Morning Frost, Damien Demolder

Join Damien Demolder for the Masters Of Vision II exhibition in Southwell Minster for the weekend the 29-31th July. The exhibition of landscape photography, featuring the work of eight other photographers including Dave Noton, will run for the duration of August, but Damien will be on hand for the first weekend to give you advice on your own photography and to discuss his own shooting and processing methods. Book a one-to-one portfolio review so Damien can give you personal guidance on any aspect of your photography. If you prefer you can join a group session with a small number of other enthusiast photographers during which Damien will lead discussions on your work as well as that of others in the group. Need help getting the best out of your image processing software? Damien will be holding a master-class demonstration where he will reveal the secrets of his own fine-tuning techniques that will help you to draw the very best from your own images.

Damien is the editor of Amateur Photographer magazine as well as a professional photographer. His expertise is called on to help judge a wide range of photographic competitions from Landscape Photographer of the Year, International Garden Photographer of the Year, to The UK Picture Editors’ Guild Awards as well as the Amateur Photographer of the Year competition, and many others. He currently has a wildlife exhibition in the head office of on-line printer Photobox, and gave talks this year at the Sony World Photo Organisation Festival of Photography in Somerset House, London. He has just presented a talk on street photography to the journalists of the BBC World Service at Bush House.

Damien will be available to chat you through his own pictures displayed in the Minster at the Meet the Photographers session when the exhibition opens on Saturday morning at 10am. This session ends at 1pm.

Midday Red Sea, Egypt

Midday Red Sea, Egypt, by Damien Demolder

Events with Damien Demolder at Southwell

• Personal Portfolio Review – 35 Mins £40.00

Friday 29th July 2-5pm & Saturday 30 July 2-7pm

Bramley Room, Saracen’s Head Hotel, Southwell. NG25 0HE

A personal one-to-one portfolio review with Amateur Photographer editor Damien Demolder. A great chance to get some first class feedback on your images, your image making process and to seek advice on any photographic subject, be it a career, equipment, software, techniques or concepts. Bring 5-10 images either in print or digital format (USB stick or CD).

Sessions will last 35 minutes

Book here

• Group Therapy Session £15.00

Sunday 31th July 10am-12.30pm

Bramley Room, Saracen’s Head Hotel, Southwell. NG25 0HE

Join a small group of like-minded photography enthusiasts for a session of chat and group critique. Damien Demolder will lead the discussions on pictures submitted by the participants, so you can get advice on your own image and listen in on the advice given to others facing the same problems, dilemmas and sticking points as you. It will be fun, informative and, most importantly, inspirational.

Book here

Flying South, by Damien Demolder

Flying South, by Damien Demolder

• Essential Software Routines Masterclass £15.00

Sunday 31th July 2-4pm

The AV Room, The Minster Centre, Church Street, Southwell. NG25 0HD

Whatever you know, think you know or simply don’t know this masterclass, presented by Amateur Photographer editor Damien Demolder, will give you a firm grounding in the proper use of primary software tools, such as Levels, Curves, Layers, colour control and sharpening, and will set you up with concrete routines for processing your digital photographs. These aren’t skills that will make your pictures looked worked on, but which will help you to bring out the best from whatever your camera has captured. The class will last two hours, including a Q&A session.

Book here

See more of Damien Demolder’s recent photographic posts here

To see more of my pictures visit my galleries at www.damiendemolder.com

To see more of my pictures
visit my photo galleries site
at www.damiendemolder.com

To download a Mac Dock widget to keep you
up to date with the posts on this site click here

Morning Frost, Damien Demolder

Morning Frost, Damien Demolder

Midday Red Sea, Egypt

Midday Red Sea, Egypt, by Damien Demolder

Flying South, by Damien Demolder

Flying South, by Damien Demolder

Posted in General knowledge, Post Processing, Seeing | No Comments »

Using exposure compensation – Walking into the light

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

Walking towards the light, Millenium Bridge, London
Man walking into a streak of light early in the morning.

Here’s a simple but effective way of making a small subject stand out from the background. Early in the morning, or actually any time that the sun is low in the sky, we get great shafts of light that streak between buildings to carve streets in two. Usually, if we allow the camera to do its own thing, these powerful beams of light will appear white and burnt out in the frame, but if you measure and expose for the beam instead of the scene in general, you can use them to great effect.

In this instance I was looking for a way to pick out a single person in this very busy part of London. Often I will do this by using a very shallow depth of field, or by getting close with a wideangle lens. On this morning though the sun was acting as a spotlight on a stage, so all I had to do was use it.

The camera was set to evaluative metering, which obviously was reading for the whole scene. With no interference from me the exposure chosen worked well for the scene but left the area where the sun was falling as a burnt-out white line. Obviously this wasn’t making an interesting picture, or illustrating what I could see with my eyes. The excitement of the scene was that the sun could pick anyone out who walked through its rays – and that is what I wanted to catch.

I was using a manual focus lens at the time, so set the focus point for the paving right where the sun was shining. I guessed that I would need exposure compensation of about three stops (-2EV) so I set this and took a trial shot. It looked about right. I could have set spot metering and measured that way, but I would have had to have walked over to the spot to fill the spot zone, and a guess, with the chance to make corrections, seemed a better and quicker option.

Once I was happy that the exposure and focus were good, I framed the shot and waited for the right person to come along. This is a popular route for runners, school children and to workers travelling to the office. I didn’t really know what sort of person was going to make the best shot, but I knew that when that person came along it would hit me. I didn’t have to wait long for this chap to pass by and make the scene complete. The face, the pose of the arms and legs and the outfit all work to tell us the story of the moment.

Samsung NX100, with Samyang 85mm f/1.4 lens in Nikon fit via a Samsung to Nikkor adapter. 1/500sec @ f/5.6, ISO 100.

See more of Damien Demolder’s recent photographic posts here

To see more of my pictures visit my galleries at www.damiendemolder.com

To see more of my pictures
visit my photo galleries site
at www.damiendemolder.com

To download a Mac Dock widget to keep you
up to date with the posts on this site click here

Walking towards the light, Millenium Bridge, London
Man walking into a streak of light early in the morning.

People walking near The Millenium Bridge, London
Without user intervention your camera will record the scene this way.

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Posted in Camera Skills, Pictures taken with Samsung cameras, Seeing | No Comments »

Colour toning for reality – Palm Tree Reflections

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Palm Reflections

Palm Reflections

I took this picture of palm trees reflected in a swimming pool on the last day of a two-week trip to The Dominican Republic. For the whole fortnight I’d been taking pictures of the beach, the blue sky, the swaying palms and all sorts of views and scenes that to me typified the sense of the place. In the end though, looking back over them as the end of the trip came in to sight, I wasn’t convinced that I had really captured what it all meant to me. I had some great images, even if I say so myself, that were laden with messages and atmosphere, but I hadn’t made the shot that reflected my own personal experience of the country or what I would want to remember most.

Sitting by the pool after another excursion along the coast to take more pictures I was wondering what it was I had liked the most about the place and what view I would want to take back with me to remember. It had been a very relaxing trip that was very much needed at the time. I’d been knackered before we left home, and it had taken several days of doing nothing and pure relaxation to bring me around to a normal human state. Work had been pretty hectic and long days had been running into late nights and early mornings, and I’d needed this holiday.


Sitting there, drinking up the atmosphere I realised that what I’d enjoyed most was staring back at me. The reflection of the palm trees in the rippling surface of the water, and the deep blues of the sky enhanced by the blue tiles of the pool’s floor. It is the kind of view you can sit and stare at for hours with nothing going on between your ears.

Adding  the right colour

I made this image to include enough pool edge so that it could be seen to be a pool but with the majority of the frame occupied by the palm reflections and the lines of the tiled floor. I shot in colour, of course, as one would with such a scene, but was surprised when reviewing the images later on at home that the blue I remembered was not as dominant as I had sensed at the time. I resolved this issue by taking a sample of the blue that I remembered from the image using the sampling tool and then switched the colour file to black and white. I did this using the green channel, in Channel Mixer, and then used the Curves tool to lift the contrast a little. Next I created a new colour fill layer, which I flooded with my watery blue, reducing the layer opacity to 10% to allow the detail of the scene to show through.

The final result is not actually a technically accurate representation of the scene I shot, but it is an extremely accurate representation of what I saw, of what I remember and of the essence of being there, in that place at that time. The camera never lies, of course, but it is a dumb instrument that is not capable of understanding emotion and the way the human eye filters what it sees. The camera often needs help to make a picture that conveys what is happening in the mind behind the viewfinder rather than in physical form in front of the lens – and it was one of those occasions.


Samsung GX20 with Pentax SMC FA 43mm f/1.9 lens. ISO 100

See more of Damien Demolder’s recent photographic posts here

To see more of my pictures visit my galleries at www.damiendemolder.com

To see more of my pictures
visit my photo galleries site
at www.damiendemolder.com

Palm Tree reflections - the original version

Palm Tree reflections - the original version


Palm Reflections

Palm Reflections


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Posted in Pictures taken with Samsung cameras, Post Processing, Seeing | No Comments »

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