This journal records my actual 10,000 hours deliberate practice studying fine art photography, on an hour-by-hour basis.
Hours 5,822 to 5,958
30th November
Hours 5,953 to 5,958
(½h) updating this journal, particularly with regard to the thoughts on portrait focusing yesterday.
(2h) finishing and publishing my “Multi-Year Time Lapse Photography” post.
(1h) YouTube, Travis Lee Clark: “Photorealism & The New Naturalism“
(2h) Stoke Poges Photographic Club – PDI competition – set subject “Rustic and Open. My entries below.
(½h) updating this journal.
29th November
Hours 5,946 to 5,952
(1h) first thing in the morning, shooting at Stoke Common in the snow.
(2h) a more balanced version of image 5 for my potential A panel, rebalancing, creating the following overview, then sending the whole lot to SIMLAB for printing.
(1h) YouTube:
- Ted Forbes: “Exposure Technique” – use of in-camera, and post-processing, exposure for artistic expression
- Sean Tucker: “The amazing dog photography of Ben Burfitt“
- Adorama: “The psychology of photography” – how to be a better professional photographer:
- to a person who is involved in the making of a photograph, i.e., the subject, the resultant image is a psychological anchor reminding them of the moment it was taken
- understand what the client wants
- makes the experience positive. So when they see the pictures they remember the specifics and feel good about it.
(1h) processing the morning’s images.
(2h) Amersham Photographic Society – PDI competition – no skin in the game.
*** thought: in many/ most cases, cameras that focus on the subject’s eye, are actually focussing slightly too far back. The ideal or hyperfocal focus point for portraits is between the tip of the nose and the iris, assuming that one wants the nose in focus and the background thrown out of focus as much as possible.
Maybe one can adjust for this with a micro focus feature in the camera or use the DMF focus setting that allows for manual adjustment after the autofocus has clicked in.
Interesting YouTube from Dave McKeegan: “What is AF Microadjustment? – And why mirrorless doesn’t need it” – suggests that micro adjustment is only necessary to correct for manufacturing tolerances.
Microadjustment only available for Sony mirrorless when using the LA-EA4 35mm Full-Frame A-Mount Adapter.
The DMF function on the Sony A7c seems to work well but zooming when micro adjusting means you loose the composition of the image as a whole, obviously you can’t have both but perhaps it’s possible to go back to the overall view after adjusting (?). More experimentation required.
28th November
Hours 5,941 to 5,945
(2h) processing yesterday’s “Carols on the Green” images and distributing to interested parties.
(1h) creating images for this week’s Amersham Beyond meeting.
(1h) updating this journal and associated social media
(1h) working on colour balancing the original, i.e., non-LAB coloured version of my potential A panel, based on the same techniques as used for the LAB versions. In particular balancing the top tier.
Tier 1:
- R: 89
- G: 89
- B: 89
Tier 2:
- R: 80
- G: 66
- B: 52
Tier 3 corners:
- R: 80
- G: 64
- B: 38
Tier 3 middle:
- R: 52
- G: 45
- B: 28
27th November
Hours 5,937 to 5,940
(3h) balancing the bottom 2 tiers of my LAB coloured woodland A panel using my Averaging technique of the 25th. Levels as follows:
Tier 2:
- L: 33
- A: 0
- B: 0
Tier 3:
- L: 25
- A: 0
- B: 0, 11, 4, 11, 0 – which makes the images in the centre of the bottom tier more yellow;
Then creating new panels and JPEG for printing for comment by the Amersham Coffee group next Wednesday. Particularly by Vic Attfield. Statement of intent also updated.
(½h) updating this journal.
(½h) shooting a few images of the Stoke Poges Christmas Fayre “Carols on the Green” to help support he local Stoke Poges Photographic Club.
26th November
Hours 5,934 to 5,936
(½h) updating this journal.
(1h) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – partly gaining inspiration for the current Amersham Beyond challenge which is to produce an image worth of this exhibition.
(1½h) YouTube: Travis Lee Clark: “Early Modernism, Abstraction and Surrealism before World War II“
25th November
Hour 5,933
(1h) balanced the top tier of my LAB processed woodland panel by:
- adding a stamp copy layer to the top of the layer, then applying the Average blur filter. This creates a solid colour layer representing the tonal and colour average of the image
- add a eyedropper colour checker spot to the middle of the image and open the Info window to see the values for this spot. Change to LAB setting to match the colour space I’m working in
- add a curves layer and adjust the centre point on the curve, across the various channels as, follows:
- L: 42 – this was the value of image 3 which tonally looked about right for this tier
- A: 0 – neutral
- B: 0 – neutral
- delete (or make invisible) the Average layer created in step 1 above.
Definite improvement in consistency. However, I was surprised that the curves adjustment layer didn’t make the Average layers all look identical.
Also reprocessed image 5 in my woodland panel to remove the unnaturally dark top part of the image. This makes it balance better with image 1.
24th November
Hours 5,926 to 5,932
(2h) processing the images shot yesterday. The simpler images are often the hardest.
(1h) Amersham Wednesday coffee club.
(1h) watching the recording of last Monday’s APS print competition.
(1h) YouTube, Travis Lee Clark: “History of Art to the Renaissance“
(2h) Amersham Colour Group.
23rd November
Hours 5,919 to 5,925
(½h) reviewing both the LAB coloured and original versions of my woodland potential A Panel. I have resolved to leave these for at least a day, so that I next see them with relatively fresh eyes.
(½h) updating this journal.
(1h) YouTube:
- MoMA: “How to See | Francis Picabia” – less well known contemporary of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp
- Travis Lee Clark: “Lecture 07: Post Gestural Abstractions and Minimalism” – new (to me) artists included:
- Kenneth Noland – Targets (like Jasper Johns), Chevrons & Horizons
- Ad Reinhardt – abstract painter in all black or very nearly black – also responsible for the cartoon left
- Carl Andre – responsible for the 120 bricks purchased by the Tate Modern and the black and silver tiles that my mother walked across, completely unaware that it was an art work
- Donald Judd who started life as an art critic, particularly scathing of Andy Warhol and the Pop Art scene, before becoming a minimalist sculptor
- Frank Stella – paintings, black apart from lines where the underlying canvas is showing through. Position of such lines is determined my the underlying structure of the canvas and support beams
- Victor Vasarely – Op art
- Anne Truitt – sculpture/ 3-d paintings in the colour field genre
- Sol Lewitt – Variations on Incomplete Cube – very mathematical.
(2h) shooting “Three Glasses of Milk and a Strawberry”
(1h) further processing and preparing images for next week’s “Rustic” competition at the Stoke Poges Photographic Club.
(2h) Stoke Poges Photographic Club – portraiture workshop. Image right.
22nd November
Hours 5,913 to 5,918
(4h) processing and LAB colouring the potential woodland A panel.
Learnt how to use shapes in layer masks – shapes go on a new layer, then <command><click-hold> and move it onto the later to be masked.
(1h) YouTube:
- Christies: “Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Untitled, 1982’ – The Devil“
- The Photographer’s Eye: “I Made This Mistake – Please Don’t Do The Same“
- First half of “Art 201: Minimalism, Post Minimalism, Conceptualism“
(1h) Amersham Photographic Society – North West Fed inter-club competition.
21st November
Hours 5,909 to 5,912
(1h) reassembling images for a new Woodland panel and exporting yo Lightroom Classic.
(3h) processing the components of the new panel in Photoshop.
20th November
Hours 5,905 to 5,908
(1h) updating this journal, mainly with notes from yesterday’s YouTubes.
(1h) YouTube Photoshop Masterclass: “Color Harmonization” – video about creating composites. However, probably applicable to balancing colours across multiple photos in a panel.
(2h) reprocessing potential images for my Woodland A Panel in Capture One.
19th November
Hours 5,899 to 5,904
(1h) updating this journal mainly with notes from yesterday PIC meeting but also notes from my competition entries from Monday and adding some images from the last few days in Dorset.
(1h) strategy for a new version of the woodland A Panel
(2h) YouTube including:
- Waldemar Januszczak: “William Dobson: The Forgotten Genius” – b. 1611, Britain’s first serious painter who became court painter of King Charles I (an art enthusiast) following the death of van Dyck (Venetian and more famous).
- Contemporary Art Issue: “The Most Influential Artists Born after 1970“
- Contemporary Art Issue: “Basquiat: Boom For Real – A 360 Exhibition Tour” – 2018 exhibition at the Barbican
- PIXimperfect: “Remove Fence with 3 Simple Steps in Photoshop!” – great Photoshop tips
- paint over fence on a new layer – brush just wider than each wire; shift click to paint a straight line
- use Content Aware Fill, again on a new layer, Option click the layer above to select just the fence area
- Tidy up:
- Rotate clone: hold Shift-Option and press “<” or “>”
- Selective focus using the Tilt-shift filter
Separate note: Neural Filters is where the AI colour harmonisation and Super Zoom facilities are located
(2h) reprocessing the RAW files from the Woodland panel.
18th November
Hours 5,895 to 5,898
(1h) shooting seascapes at Dancing Ledge, Dorset.
(1h) transferring the last few day’s images from laptop to my main computer and processing this morning’s images.
(2h) at the Amersham PIC group meeting. Shown were:
- potential A panel for the Travel section of the RPS, in monochrome:
- generally a huge improvement over previous version
- one image needed to be replaced as the subject was too small and purpose of the image was not obvious
- on a few image whites were too white at the edge of the frame – either tone down or add a keyline to all images
- other images lacked a bit of contrast in the subject, i.e., were “too flat”
- statement of intent used too complicated language and didn’t immediately reflect the achievement of the images, i.e., the images didn’t quite address the issues of, or otherwise measure up to the promised made in the statement.
- Steve Hunter’s successful Fellowship panel
- super-minimalist Japanese snowscapes
- will always be compared with Michael Kenna but is by contrast is:
- more subtle
- in colour (Kenna’s are shot on monochrome medium format film)
- more Japanese influenced
- images presented very small in square mounts, inside a 210x210mm mount aperture with about 10mm of white all the way round giving the impression of double mounting
- no keyline, whitest white was sufficiently differentiated from the pure white of the paper to show the edge of the image
- work from Dundee Camera Club
- 4 exceptional prints were presented – 2 colour, 2 monochrome
- mounted small as above, with no keyline
- intriguing images that drew the viewer “into them”
- Steve Smith’s “Made in America” with main image as accepted by the Royal Academy
17th November
Hours 5,892 to 5,894
(1h) shooting at Winsip Quarry.
(1h) at the Sculpture by the Lake exhibition near Wool.
(1h) first edit of this morning’s images.
16th November
Hours 5,890 to 5,891
(½h) Shooting on the cliffs of Winsip, Dorset.
(1h) first pass processing the morning’s images, including producing the following panorama.
(½h) editing the Stoke Common images shot yesterday morning.
15th November
Hours 5,888 to 5,889
(1h) Shooting at Stoke Common first thing in the morning
(1h) updating this journal
Missed the Amersham Photographic Society – Print Competition – my skin in the game below:
14th November
Hours 5,884 to 5,887
(1h) processing and collating images to submit to the Amersham Photographic Club following the trip to Cassiobury Park on the 11th.
(3h) processing new images and entering a FIAP competition.
13th November
Hours 5,881 to 5,883
(3h) processing a lot of new images and entering FIAP Autumn circuit.
12th November
Hours 5,878 to 5,880
(½h) updating this journal.
(2½h) processing images from yesterday, including the following.
11th November
Hours 5,870 to 5,877
(1h) shooting in Stoke Common at day break.
(2h) shooting in Cassiobury Park with the Amersham Photographic Society
(½h) updating images and sending to GS Photos for printing, ready for next Monday’s print competition at the Amersham Photographic Society.
(½h) Working to a Brief – Assignment 7 – Milk Splash.
(1h) YouTube including:
- PIXimperfect: “Use Photoshop’s New AI to Make Colors Pop!“
- Sotheby’s: “Ominous Land: Philip Guston’s Striking Depiction of Injustice“
- Sotheby’s: “Untitled 1949: A Revolutionary Sculpture by Alexander Calder“
- Photography Online: “How to use INFINITY FOCUS to get your Sharpest Shots” – actually, really interesting analysis of what infinity means in the context of camera focus
- Rule of thumb: infinity = 1 metre for every mm of lens focal length. So for a 14mm lens, focus 14m into the scene and everything thereafter will be in focus
- For maximum depth of focus, don’t focus a third of the way into the scene, but a third of the distance between the first point of interest and the point of infinity
- Is the above the hyperfocal point?
(1h) processing today’s images, including creating the Tree Top Pentaptych above.
(2h) Amersham Mono Group.
10th November
Hours 5,862 to 5,869
(1h) creating the following image as a potential FIAP salon entry.
(1½h) at the Amersham Cafe Africa group, showing my Astro and Boarder Morris Men images. Generally positive feedback minor adjustment to the Durdle Door image suggested by Vic Attfield: reduce the distraction in the cliff.
(1h) Karl Taylor review of Working to a Brief assignment #6 Fruit Pie ingredients:
Main issue with the above was “Hero vs Supporting Cast”:
- background too dominant – needed to be lighter
- strawberries need to be better lit, or otherwise given more prominence, currently a bit lost
- some lighting issues including:
- apples being burnt out
- flour too bright, especially against the too dark background
- direction to straight on, rather than from the top left.
Karl suggested using the Art Director’s sketch as an overlay when shooting tethered. However, I think my approach of working out the overall scale of the image, based on the relative size of items in the brief drawing relative to real life, has the advantage of producing the specified density of content. this being a point that was frequently commented on in Karl’s review.
(2h) FIAP salon entry – Natural World circuit
(½h) updating this journal.
(2h) Rosebowl competition on behalf of the Stoke Poges Photographic Club at the Whitchurch Hill Camera Club – done by zoom.
9th November
Hours 5,857 to 5,861
(½h) updating this journal.
(2h) entering the Indian Vivid FIAP salon, including adding the “Crested Gecko” image
(½h) preparing prints for this evening’s “Man Made” competition
(2h) at the competition with the Stoke Poges Photographic Club. My skin in the game below:
8th November
Hours 5,850 to 5,856
(5h) entering 2 FIAP salons with lots of new images.
(1½h) North West Fed inter-club competition at Pinner.
(½h) updating this journal.
7th November
Hours 5,848 to 5,849
(½h) Social Media
(1½h) YouTube including:
6th November
Hour 5,847
(1h) rewriting my 15×10″ Photoshop Print action to automatically, and more elegantly, cope with images of all aspect ratios. Processing the Boarder Morrismen and recent Astro images and sending to Similar for printing prior to presentation for discussion with the Amersham Coffee Club on Wednesday this week.
5th November
Hours 5,843 to 5,846
(½h) updating this journal.
(3½h) creating mono versions of the Border Morrismen
4th November
Hours 5,839 to 5,842
(1h) YouTube:
(½h) updating this journal
(½h) social media, putting the Comic Con images on Instagram (first upload in a while).
(2h) at Amersham Beyond, my skin in the game below:
Next challenge to create an image worthy of the entry in the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition.
3rd November
Hours 5,836 to 5,838
(1h) Updating this journal and associated Social Media.
(1h) creating a better version of Durdle Door and Milky Way
(1h) YouTube:
2nd November
Hours 5,830 to 5,835
(1h) preparing images for next week’s Stoke Poges Photographic Club print competition.
(4h) creating the following images:
“Fran Thrice at the Ashmolean”
A variation on my Hoodie Descending a Staircase theme.
(1h) Stoke Poges Photographic Club – Charles Harding presentation competition; my entry, 12 images from Comic Con.
1st November
Hours 5,822 to 5,829
(1h) updating this journal, including all the new month admin.
(2h) finishing processing the images from last week’s portraiture workshop including making a new “Model Face Frequency Separation” Photoshop Action.
(1½h) finalising and practicing a presentation for tomorrow’s Charles Harding presentation competition at the Stoke Poges Photographic Club.
(1½h) preparing and processing images for the Amersham Beyond Group meeting this Thursday.
(2h) Amersham Photographic Society – Lecture by Philip Dunn “Local Papers to Sunday Times” – several images were either set-up or are the best of multiple attempts.