Peerless Pixels

With this site being so new and unplanned, there is not a whole lot to look at right now, so I thought I’d show you a picture or two. 

 A year ago I photographed a ploughing competition not far from where we live at Rapaura, and while chatting to our local MP Colin King, he made the point that we were lucky to have somewhere to hold it because our landscape is so predominately laid to vines.  As a photographer, I often feel the Marlborough landscape lacks variety and interest because of this.

One of the sites I use to show my images arranges them in order of ‘Interestingness’.  The formula used to determine this order is apparently a closely guarded secret (or people would try to second guess it in order to gain precedence for their own pictures), but it has something to do with how many people view the image on flickr; how many mark it as a favourite, and what mood the boss is in (I made the last one up).  What surprised me when viewing my images on this site, was that most of them were taken very close to where I live, so perhaps there is always a new angle to show things in a different light.

So if you are a Marlborough local take a look and see how much you recognize.  If not, then I hope you’ll feel pleased for us who enjoy living in such a beautiful location:

Click on the link to see the pictures:  Flickr Hivemind

There is a saying that ‘enough monkeys, given enough typewriters, could eventually produce the works of Shakespeare’.  That you are able to read this, assuming you actually exist, is due to just such a chain of accidental events, because this site went from concept to disarrayed reality during the evening of the 20th October 2009. An evening that, looking back, is a blur of random key clicks, and blindly stumbling through servers, hosts, and ftp clients (whatever they may be). If my luck holds, I might even get some meaningful content uploaded.

My motivation for this site is to bring together, and make accessible, the mass of tips and advice about photography, and post processing using Photoshop, that I have placed in various forums and flickr discussion groups over the years. Some of the techniques you’ll find here in the coming weeks and months do not appear in any books, but can make apparently difficult tasks remarkably easy.

The photography tips will be about taking control of light. After all, it is the single most important element in any photograph. Without it there would be no photograph, so why would you leave it to chance or waste your life waiting for the right light to appear?  The post-processing tips will make clever use of blend modes, and targeting techniques, to overcome difficult masking situations, and show you how to remove things like sharpening artifacts, halos and chromatic aberration.  You’ll kick yourself when you discover how easy it can be.

But before I can do any of this I have to unravel the mysteries of Wordpress.