I Close My Eyes and Slowly Dream Away
The Reverend Eric Martin
Let's begin with the obvious! The colourful versions of some of my images of Mr Big from a gig they did in London recently. If you want to read my write up on the gig, check out my previous post entitled "Mr Big Time".
It's taken me a while but I found more motivation once I realised there was a new version of Color Efex Pro 4 to trial. It's awesome! I would buy it in a flash if I was shooting more often. In fact, it actually makes me want to shoot for colour more too (a lot in fact), which can only be a good thing. It's really easy to go overboard with CFX filters. I don't recall the ins and outs of CFX3 but I don't recall you being able to layer filters on top of one another in a single session. So to see this in CFX4 was a BIG deal for me. I'd usually resort to using another tool. It's been so long since I used it, I can't even remember the plug-ins name (might be PhotoTools Pro). But in the end I found I was only really using it to sharpen and cross process images. With CFX4 I just found there were so many options with regard to light editing, that you could spend hours not even touching the colours at all, and still come away with unbelievably cool images. In fact I'm almost done with an autumn shot I took on the weekend, making it look sinister. I lot like a still from a horror flick. That's what I was going for, and I'll post that image soon. Feel free to download the CFX4 preset zip, or recipes as Nik call them, for 4 of these images at the end of this post!
Memories Never Fade
I really love how this image above of the band came out in the end. I spent about an hour on it on the train home one evening and when you get into those long contemplative processing moods you can really get bogged down, or just lose hope entirely. It took about 6 filters and although it looks like a simple split tone, it isn't. The spotlights are actually shining bright red and green. It's really easy to bump up the saturation on an image and make it pop. But I like to try and make images pop for other reasons. Like getting as close to the realistic tones I was seeing at the time (not hard with Leica gear, admittedly), or using desaturation and light.
Bass Slapped
Enough about processing though, because I wanted to encourage other compact shooters to get to a Leica Store, in particular the store in Mayfair, London, because last week I went along to a M9 Interactive Workshop, run on the day, by Edmond Terakopian. Brett also does them, so there are plenty of opportunities to get out and shoot with a Leica M9! The workshops are free, so why not? It was a baptism of fire, but a necessary one. Looking at my results, I don't think I had any problems with the manual focus aspect of range finder shooting. It's really not that difficult. And I think once you've become familiar with the camera and the style of working to the point where some of it just becomes automatic, I think you would get awesome results, like the pros. I found that I was suddenly having to use my left hand, for almost everything besides pressing the shutter release. That was a big change from a little compact like the D-Lux's. Everything with a D-Lux I do with my right hand.
A Little Too Deep
You get to shoot with an M9 and a 35mm Summicron lens. I was relieved to find the M9 is a LOT lighter when you take the Noctilux f/0.95 off and bolt on a smaller lens. The first time I ever picked up an M9 was during Brett's excellent intro workshop to the M9 I did last year and it had a Noctilux on it. I'm not sure, but it felt like the lens was much heavier than the camera. Anyway, with a more conventional lens on the M9 it really is a small camera. It was much lighter than I expected an easily comparable to my D-Lux 4. I've held my brother's Canon 5D Mk I, and I can honestly say I'll never own a camera like that. 'Ridiculous' is the best word I can use to describe the 5D, and then 'insane'.
I Close My Eyes and Slowly Dream Away
