Homage to the Pink Ball

Homage to the Pink Ball of Snooker

A play on colour and texture....

Pink ball on Fur

Razor Clams

Nice to finish the day with a photo of some really tasty Razor Clams bought earlier from Borough Market London.
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Sorting out pages for my folio

Food photographs for the folio

Busy today sorting out food photographs for my folio. Meetings next week.

Time of year for Rhubarb!

Young Rhubarb Leaf

I have a really great patch of Rhubarb at home, every year the emerging leaves look fabulous, they are so perfect and have a crushed tissue paper look.

Photography Masters Cup Honors me!

My photo of a cross-section of Lemon Meringue Pie has won again, this time in the 6th International Photography masters Cup Awards. It was selected as a Nominee and can be seen online here.

"It is an incredible achievement to be selected among the best from the 8,521 entries we received this year," said Basil O'Brien, the awards Creative Director.

The awards international Jury included captains of the industry from Phillips de Pury & Company in New York; Kunst Licht Gallery, Shanghai; XPO Gallery, Paris; Tasveer Galleries, India; BFN, Netherlands; to BBH in London who honored Color Masters with 239 coveted title awards in 18 categories.

INTERNATIONAL COLOR AWARDS, PHOTOGRAPHY MASTERS CUP is the leading international award honoring excellence in colour photography. This celebrated event shines a spotlight on the best professional and amateur photographers worldwide and honors the finest images with the highest achievements in color photography.

Lemon Meringue Pie

Great Cartoons by Tom Fishburne

I love theses cartoons!
Here's a few to digest:

 You can see more on his web-site:
http://tomfishburne.com

Village of Footdee Aberdeen

Footdee is a old fishing village situated by the river Dee in Aberdeen, Scotland. The quirky collection of small houses and huts makes for a few interesting photographs. Here's some I took.

Footdee Aberdeen

Footdee Aberdeen

Footdee Aberdeen - Ornate tap

Footdee Aberdeen

Footdee Aberdeen

More Food Photography

I've recently been doing some food test shots and here are the results, one shot of a Pear covered in caramel and a photo of some dried chillis in a sort of abstract way.

Both photographs were taken using a 120mm Rodenstock macro Digitar lens on my Linhof. The Pear was a two part comp, one of the pear and one of the drip.

Pear with caramel

The chillis were shot separately on a cyan background and then stripped in again to make the final composition. The hue of the cyan was slightly altered in Capture One using the colour editor tool. They were back lit with a spotlight.

Abstract photo of dried chilli

Blue Dragon Food Shoot

Blue Dragon, the well known brand for Oriental sauces visited the studio to have four cooked dishes using their new sauces photographed.

There was also a photograph of a wok accompanied by a substantial array of raw vegetables, the image was to be reproduced very big on the side of a marquee so attention to detail was vital, also the image file size had to be very big too! Lighting was relatively straightforward using just two lights; one light through a trace (for the hot food shots) and a Fresnel spot, all shot on a PhaseOne IQ180 (80MP) digital back mounted on a Linhof M679, digital Rodenstock HR and Macro lenses used.

Home Economist's tools

The shoot was attended by the client, the agency account handler and creative director, and two Home Economists. All went very smoothly considering the threat of snow and disruption on the roads the night before.

Lunch was supplied by a local caterers, the coffee sponge cake went down particularly well!

Here's what the agency client said :

"Just a note to say thank you so much for today – it was good fun, super productive and the end results are, I think you agree, superb."

Creative director and Home Economists setting up first shot

Christmas Video 2012

Here's my Christmas video, hope you like Christmas Pudding !

http://www.dj-photo.com/news/merry-christmas/

Is your monitor displaying images accurately?

How to see if your monitor is giving you all the information you need to judge images accurately.

Most monitors don't show colour or grayscale tones correctly. I use Eizo and NEC high end monitors which are hardware calibrated using Basiccolor software and an Eye One device which sits over the screen during the calibration process. This has to be done regularly to keep the displays calibrated to within the tight tolerances needed for my work.

You don't have to go to the length I have if your are not in the imaging business, one simple initial test to see if your monitor is displaying the greys correctly is to view a greyscale step wedge. If you can see a difference in tones between each step from black to white then your monitor has probably already been calibrated, if steps on the scale merge into the next then the monitor will need calibrating or just may not be able to display all the range due to it being a budget version, or just an old one!

Here's a step wedge below to test your monitor. Click on it to enlarge.

There are other factors associated with getting you monitor to display accurately, such as the colours that it is capable of displaying and the environment that your monitor is in. Having a monitor right next to a window or with normal room strip lights above it (or both) will easily fool your eyes when looking at the screen. It is best to have the monitor in a room without natural light, with neutral walls (preferably grey), and any lighting in the room to be as near as possible to daylight. It can help if you replace the warm (or cool) white office fluorescent tubes with ones that are closer to daylight such as Philips Graphica Pro.

The subject of colour calibration and workflow is vast but I hope you have had a little fun in testing to see if your monitor is anywhere near showing the correct greyscale.

Autumn is arriving, time for a Casserole

Warming Casserole

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