photography

Here are some photos in Christchurch converted to black & white, with contrast and noise boosted to partially emulate high speed film. Cranmer Square Armagh St, looking east Bowker Fountain, Victoria Square Victoria, Victoria Square Cathedral Junction from Gloucester Street New Regent Street The Christchurch Club, Latimer Square Transitional Cathedral across Latimer Square Transitional Cathedral Cashel Street 170 Cashel Street High Street Christchurch Cathedral Godley Statue, Cathedral Square Municipal Building, Oxford Terrace Crossing the Avon Great Scott.

In my previous post I was extolling some of the benefits of darktable such as cross-platform (Linux/Mac preferred), fast operation, comprehensive processing, etc. I also indicated there is plenty of online support to fasttrack understanding the software. Here are just a few resources I’ve started with: Robert Hutton’s youtube tutorials are an excellent start! Cambridge in Colour has a straightforward summary of digital image workflow. Jim McCormick has a nice summarised darktable workflow.

For the last four and a half years since I’ve owned a digital camera that can store images as raw files, I’ve needed a method of post-processing these images to produce jpgs suitable for general viewing/sharing/wallpaper. My camera, a Pentax K-30 came with a program called silkypix. I tried it and discarded it early on in the piece. I then looked to other free solutions and came across rawtherapee. It came with a bit of a learning curve but it served me well for a number of years.

My new Sigma 17-50mm zoom lens arrived earlier in the week. I was out of town travelling for a few days and today was my first opportunity to give it a whirl. First impressions? It’s fairly heavy (a little over 500 grams, from memory). It has a large hunk of glass at the front. It’s quite fast to focus. Images seem crisp and clear. The zoom is nice and precise, not sloppy.

When I was a kid I was heavily involved in and interested in photography. It was the type of interest that would get me out of bed early whilst on holidays to be in place before the morning sun would rise. Often our holidays were taken in late autumn or very spring and there would be a fog around our holiday haunts. My father was the lead - having been involved in black and white photography for decades.

When you buy a camera that can accept interchangeable lenses, you’re not so much just buying a camera as buying a system. Why? With little exception a Nikon body will only accept lenses made for it, and the same for Canon, for Pentax, for Sony, for Olympus and so on. Some lens manufacturers such as Tamron and Sigma make lenses to suit a range of bodies, but those still have different mounts to the others.