Imsticking's Leica D-Lux 4 Blog

I post it here and it sticks.
 

The Hand That Feeds

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Prima 'paca

OK, so lets answer your first question first. They're Alpacas. They look a lot like the common dromedary camel because they share the same ancestor. I'll spare you the natural history lesson, mainly because I want to spare myself from the same. They're much smaller and better behaved than what we just refer to as a camel though, so quite popular. I didn't see a single one of them spit or foam at the mouth, and it's not as if they didn't notice me enough to get all riled up at the sight.

I've been threatening to post these images since my previous post "To Win a Bear" who's images were taken on the same day at a street fair in the town of Alton, Hampshire. "Where exactly were they?" I hear myself think one or two of you may ask. To the left of the war memorial in front of the Town Hall.   

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What you looking at?

Well, what you're looking at is the penultimate post here on imsticking.com. Don't get too excited, I'm not actually going to stop blogging about photography. I will reveal all about this in my next and final post here. I started this blog a little over 2 years ago purely as a personal extension to Twitter's 140 character limit, but soon became fascinated with the technical principals of photography, and even more so with visual composition. I find the ability to lead the viewer's eye through the art of composing and capturing moments in time, beyond my control, that can then be further developed before being presented to, or rather inflicted upon, an unsuspecting public, very satisfying. It's a wonderful way of implicitly defining your experiences in this world in a way that makes you feel as if your life has more meaning to you, than it does when reflecting on the often repetitive grind of daily life. 

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Burrow Down

Don't forget to get your entries in for the London Street Photography Festival's International Street Photography Award 2012. The deadline is Thursday 5th January 2012. The 1st prize includes an Olympus PEN camera and £2000 in cash. Oh and you get international recognition! Let's not forget that part, ha.   

This will most likely be my last post of 2012, so I'd like to wish you all a very merry holiday season, and Christmas if you do celebrate, as well as a happy and healthy 2012. May we all live in peaceful times. Bloggin inspiration provided by the super talented Richard Marx with Christmas Spirit

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The Self-Conscious Close-Up

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Chasing The Hand That Feeds

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   Street   photography  
December 23 2011
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To Win a Bear

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Score Over One

I was heading to my local cafe on Sunday to work on the preparation of my iPhone app for submission to the App Store. And then things got a bit out of hand. It seems there was some sort of street carnival on. No one had told me, however. My usual parking spot was gone, I had to queue for a coffee and sit on what can only be described as a bar stool to drink it. Meh. 

All was not lost, as I had my Leica D-Lux 4 camera with me. I really wasn't in the mood for shooting and I really, really wanted to get some work done. After throwing back my coffee I ventured out to see what was actually going on. It was mad! There was a blow-up slide thing taller than any building in the town. Double-story's as big as it gets I think, but still. A mini Disneyland, so small it's called Disney Cottage, and people as far as the eye can see. These images don't show the madness. Which in a way is quite cool.

It was chaos and taking photos in those conditions doesn't really grab me, but I found myself grabbing the opportunity. I have more images I'll post soon, once I've found time to process them. Some cool shots of Alpacas to come! 

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Hey Mickey!

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Disney v0.01

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Quality Time

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   photography  
December 5 2011
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Come Sundown

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Come Sundown

I woke up this morning and was pleasantly surprised to find the weather making a mockery of the predictions for the area of Hampshire I live in. Fantastic because I really did think I would be spending 3 hours in the wet on my mountain biking today. I took these shots on my way home from a village called Binsted. I've discovered that buying a Leica camera means you have almost no need for Lightroom at all beyond image management. While trialling Lightroom 3, I've found the image adjustments to be of little use.  So much so that this image above is just out of Capture One PRO after a white balancing and changing the colour profile to that of the Leica M9. Every change I tried using Lightroom simply made the image look unrealistic. 

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Today, December 3rd, 2011.

The one above was processed using Silver Efex Pro and bears little resemblance to what I saw. I guess hounds would disagree. There are some seriously old buildings around this area, and unfortunately they are not on public property or I'd love to take some images of them and send them back in time. Both of these images were taken with my Leica D-Lux 4.

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   photography  
December 3 2011
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Show Me a Sign

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Show Me a Sign

I went for a long ride on my mountain bike this afternoon. I usually try to get out every weekend. Just me and the country folk's exhaust fumes. Lovely. I ride for fitness and I like the rush of going 50kph downhill mixed in with the challenge of getting up some of the climbs in one piece. My heart rate averages out at about 160bpm over 2:30 - 3 hours of riding, so I don't generally stop to smell the flowers. Not that there are any at this time of year. 

I often tweet from the road. Always while I'm not moving. The reasons for this were aptly demonstrated today when I'd just spent 15 minutes riding over some very muddy fields and had made my way back onto a tar road. I was greeted with the usual tee junction stop, but today was different. In an effort to avoid being mowed down by a convoy of cars I thought a u-turn would be a good idea, but unfortunately it was a little too sharp and my mud-caked front wheel slipped on a rather unforgiving concave storm drain cover and the next thing I knew I was in mid-air, parallel to the tar, watching my bike fly away from me. I'd gone forward over my right shoulder and the bike kicked back. Not my finest hour, but at least I didn't hear laughing and taunting from the convoy of cars. Luckily no-one stopped to ask if I was OK. I was just the idiot who fell off his bike at zero miles an hour. Go me.

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Gaikowski Learns to Drive

The top image made me think of a classic song by Tesla called 'Signs' which I was introduced to by a bass played of a band I used to play drums for back when I was in my early 20's. Their album 'Five Man Acoustical Jam' has some real gems on it. There are quite a few covers on the album, but my favourite track would have to be 'Gettin' Better'. I absolutely love the slow intro and the emotion in it. All these image where shot with my Leica D-Lux 4 and processed with Capture One PRO 5 and Silver Efex Pro I.

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Chawton Wood

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Lucky Birds

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   photography  
November 27 2011
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Terminal Delay

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5

You gotta love it when you drag yourself out of bed at 6am (after only falling asleep after 1am), get ready and up to the station by 7am just to discover that your service has been delayed. Oh what jolly good fun! It's time to bond with my fellow passengers, not. No one want's there photo taken at 8:30am while they quietly contemplate how to disable the security cameras without being seen, so they can go postal anon. 

I like this shot, mainly because it's the least embarrassing of the handful I took this morning, but mainly because it's actually straight! I was shooting blind, hanging my arm over the rail. But seriously, I like it because we have someone deep in thought in the foreground and that's contrasted with that very empty train track disappearing into the morning fog.  Taken with my Leica D-Lux 4, as always. You can find the Silver Efex Pro present for the above image, below.

Click here to download:
Platform 5.sep (3 KB)

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   photography  
November 22 2011
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Given to Fly

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Giving to Fly - 5.1mm at f/2, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/250 sec

I was driving out to a shopping centre on Saturday and was a bit disappointed to see that most of the Second World War aircraft at the Lasham Gliding Club had been removed. I'm glad I got a few pictures of them earlier in the year, but it's still a loss to the community I feel. I wonder where they are being moved to. I had my Leica D-Lux 4 with me, so I pulled over on the way home to take some photographs of the last remain aircraft there. 

I have no idea what type of aircraft it is besides kaput. My only guess would be a spitfire, but that's just a guess. Might just head out there again now, or tomorrow evening to see if I can take some abstract shots of the remains of what were I'm sure, aircraft that helped defend England during the Second World War. 

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Bull's Eye from the Sky -  5.1mm at f/2, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/250 sec

I've included the Silver Efex Pro presets at the end of this post for those of you interested in the processing of these images. The top image was actually processed twice. First with Ilford FP4 Plus 125 film. The results from that are seen in the image below. I then decided to use the preset from the image above to process it further and I really liked the result so much that I decided to go with that image as the main headline. The second process involved Ilford XP2 Super 200 film and I think the grain achieved mixing the two is quite remarkable in the sky of the top image. I think it's very cool! I like the photograph below too. 

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Giving to Fly - 5.1mm at f/2, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/250 sec

Processing and blogging inspiration courtesy of Pearl Jam - Given to Fly ♫ This is for me an Epic Pearl Jam song. My favourite lyric is right at the end of the song (but there are lots of cool parts to this track): 

"And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky 
A human being that was given to fly"

Click here to download:
Given to Fly FP4+125.sep (3 KB)
 

Click here to download:
WH291-XP2Super200.sep (3 KB)

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   monochrome   photography   transport  
August 1 2010
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Bad Horsie

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Bad Horsie - 5.10 at f/3.5, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/1300 second 

I quite like this photograph. It's a rather heavy Selenium "print". Taken on the weekend when I was back home after the morning spent in London. This field is actually just across the road from a neighbourhood of houses. I think it's more of a retirement village, and I would like to extend my thanks to the little old lady who decided that the most appropriate thing to do when witnessing strangers taking photographs of a horse was to hurl abuse at them. Clearly the concept of photography was lost on this woman. 
 
Shooting a horse with a camera is a little different to shooting it with a gun. I didn't even touch the horse. It looked a little to dirty for my liking. But nevertheless, she wanted her dog to "sic" me. Nice. He husband was no fool. He was hiding around the corner and peering out from the front door patio.
 
This image has nothing to do with Steve Vai's Bad Horsie guitar pedal, but I do love the name. The horsie in question was actually very well behaved.
 
One of the cool things about this image processing is the red filter I applied. That contributed massively to the look of it. It's also been processed with the Ilford FP4 Plus 125 film type. The toning is somewhat customized after applying the Selenium 15 Preset I got both the Silver Hue and Paper Hue to be equal in strength. Check out the modifications in the Silver Efex Pro preset below.
 

Click here to download:
Horsie Seilford FP4+125.sep (3 KB)

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   Selenium   monochrome   photography  
May 19 2010
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Burning the Cross

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Burning the Cross - 5.10mm at f/2, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/125 second

I took my twin brother to the industrial site I went to shoot at yesterday. The weather was quite different also, which although brings new challenges, weren't my favourite conditions. I have some images to process from today, but before I do I wanted to share this image I took yesterday. I will be entering it into the BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY magazine's alternative printing process assignment. Luckily they accept digitally processed images too, or I really would have nothing to submit! 
 
This is a selenium print.  I pulled the image into Silver Efex Pro and processed it with the Kodak 100 TMAX Pro film type. I then used selenium (preset 13) toning to give it the style you see. One other thing I experimented with was the color filtering. I went with a yellow color filter as this seemed to accentuate the grass in the foreground in a way that was more pleasing to me. Which ever color you choose to filter, essentially lets more of that color through thereby rendering those tones lighter. Choosing a yellow filter allowed me to bring more definition to the grass in the foreground.  
 
I was tempted to post the M9-ified color version of this image because it looks cool too, but didn't want to spoil the mystery. This image was shot with my Leica D-Lux 4.

Filed under  //   Canine   Hampshire   Leica   Monochrome   Selenium  
May 3 2010
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Fire In The Sky

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Fire In The Sky - 5.10mm at f/2, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/125 second

I've been experimenting with PhotoTools Pro again. Can you tell? It's been a bit of a wet day today. Not just in Hampshire I believe, or so Twitter tells me. It's funny but, sometimes I know what the weather is like outside from reading my tweet stream with my one open eye, before I've even put my bedroom light on. 

Anyway, the day did get better, and I ventured out after about 6pm looking for something to photograph. I took a bit of a walk around a local golf course which just happened to be completely deserted. A lot of mown lawn, pylons and rows of trees. Not particularly inspiring, for me at least. 
 

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Original RAW to JPEG - Leica M9 ICC Profile, 5.10mm at f/2, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/125

I drove further south to Kingsley and took a random side street I've often seen but never ventured down. I ended up at a small collection of industrial buildings and a few well worn barns. It also appears to be the starting point of a few public footpaths that lead across farm land. I shot till it got cold and dark and then headed home to refuel and process my results. 

The image above is a JPEG of the RAW file captured and M9-ified in my usual process. The Leica M9 ICC profile definitely adds a bit more red to image. I put the image through a Kodachrome process in PhotoTools Pro and then cross processed it with E6 in C41 B. The result (top) is quite dramatic and somewhat cooler than the original image. I like everything about it except the fire in the sky.  

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Dynamic BW Film Mode - Contrast -1, 5.10mm at f/2, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/125

I thought I'd include the black and white JPEG saved with this shot, purely for amusement sake. For better or worse, I usually select a black and white film mode on my Leica D-Lux 4 and then just shoot with it for the duration unless the light changes, then I'll make a few adjustments and go with that. This was shot using Dynamic BW film mode with the Contrast at -1 and the sharpness at +2.

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   photography  
May 2 2010
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The Skyway

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The Skyway - 5.10mm at f/2, ISO 80, Shutter speed 1/200 sec.
 
During this week I've been out photographing again after a bit of down time due to a head cold that caused more dizziness than I'd care to articulate. I've decided to take on the monochrome challenge laid down in the latest edition of BLACK+WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY magazine, so you'll probably see more monochrome images from me over the next few weeks, possibly months. 
 
If, like me, you are curious or interested to learn more about monochrome photography, then you should check out alternativephotography.com. It's a site that is recommended in the May 2010 edition of the magazine. There is also an article on how to create digital cyanotypes, as well as an article on photographing architecture and a review on Canon's new EOS 7D and Epson's Stylus Pro 3880 printer.  

Filed under  //   Hampshire   Leica   cyanotype   monochrome   photography  
April 30 2010
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