FST513

Hey Guys, Can a moderator/organiser/executive of this event please PM regarding a magazine feature so i can have a chat regarding this event being featured. Thanks, Kory

Haha well thats good then My second monitor at home is 1680x1050. And thanks for clarifying the wording of stops lol. I was explaining it to a n00b so tried to keep it simple. I found it hard to explain easily, what stops were so i just dumped them onto shutter speed as an example (i forgot to put that in their that it was an example).

Nice!!! Good to see your experimenting shooting at 1.4/2 A lot of the guys in the USA have had problems with front focus/back focus, but yours looks spot on! A guy on ozfoz asked me how i take landscape shots.... So i kind of wrote an essay reply... Thought you guys might like a read. Landscape kit as follows: - MUST have a sturdy tripod. No cheap $50 plastic piece of crap. A tripod that is sturdy and has a ballhead or a panhead. - Filters. A CPL (circular polarizer) filter at MINIMUM! Then along comes the GND's, ND's and various other coloured filters e.g. warming filter, cooling filter, red,blue etc etc.. - Cokin/Lee/Hitech Filter holder. Screw on adaptor onto the front of your lens and you can use 1/2/3 filters at once. WARNING - Stacking can cause colour casts and vignetting at certain focal lengths. - Dual Axis spirit leveller to put into your hot shoe (where the flash goes on top). I use one to make sure my camera is straight. Although don't trust it 100% as it only judges if your tripod is flat/ballhead is level. IF you shoot seascapes/beaches/uneven scenes etc... etc... It will help a lot in post but don't always trust it! Double check it in Post! That's about it, for ESSENTIAL gear. Sharpness - Sharpness all depends on your focusing spot and the effect you are trying to achieve. With landscape photos, i am going to assume you want the most you can get in focus. Google "HFD" which stands for Hyper Focal Distance focusing. This relates to focusing roughly 1/3rd of the way into the scene and this will effectively make your photo REASONABLYsharp front to back. Now i'm a pixel peeper (always zooming in to 100%) and i find this works sometimes and doesn't depending on your scene. There's no one "magic" rule for everything. Remember that. Use live view and zoom in to 5x and 10x to see if it is reasonably sharp (depending on distance from you). Remember there is atmospheric Haze, sea haze, salt etc... to deal with. Now... PHOTOGRAPHY TALK! F-Stops - Often referred to as STOPS (shutter speed). Your camera can change the way you change your shutter speed by increments of 1/3rd 1/2 or FULL stops. Lets take a base shutter speed of 1/500th. If you attach a CPL it will most likely cut 2 stops of light. to determine how much 2 stops of light is from 1/500th see below. Shutter speed: 1/400th - 1/3rd stop 1/320 - Half stop 1/250th - Full stop. 1/200th - 1/3rd stop 1/160th - 1/2 stop 1/125th - Full stop. So by looking at that, 2 stops of light will be 1/125th. ISO - You always want to shoot at ISO 100. This will reduce noise and provide nicer images. ISO is your cameras sensors sensitivity to light. Aperture - Landscape images vary on the look you want, but as said above, assuming you want everything in focus as much as possible. Shoot between F8-F22. I recommend F8-F11 but as said, ALL SCENES ARE DIFFERENT. WARNING: Shooting at and above F16 can cause barrel distortion. Also, IF your sensor is dirty it will also show dust spots. To check if your sensor is dusty/dirty, take a photo of a blue sky at F22 and look at those ugly black spots!! DoF - Known as Depth of Field. Basically, the wider your aperture, lower number, the less will be in focus. The narrower (higher number) the more will be in focus. This is the basic principle but it doesn't always work like that and i cbf explaining that. Google has TONNES of topics on this. Thats it for settings. Back to filters and reasons why you need them: CPL - Cuts light and reduces glare. Also enriches contrast. Have a play with one and rotate it (thats where circular comes from) and you will notice the difference. Best for skies and cutting glare. ND2/4/6/8/9 - Neutral Density filter in various stops. As title suggests, cuts the amount of light by X amount of stops. Best to use when you need to slow your shutter speed down e.g. panning/want water "silkiness" etc.. GND2/4/6/8/9 - Same as the ND filter just graduated. So half is clear, and half is X amount of light stops cut. Used for skies to cut the appropriate amount of light to compensate and keep the foreground nicely lit. Various other filters e.g. warming/cooling filters - As title suggests, they do what they say! Cooling filter will make it "cooler" or more blue. Warming filter will make it "warmer" or more yellow. WARNING - Filters and stacking filters cause colour casts. This is common. Make sure to correct in post by adjusting the white balance. There are several ways to do this, find the one that suits your workflow. PP - Post Production e.g. Photoshop/Lightroom etc... - This is how you add colour/correct white balance/contrast/saturation bla bla bla. Any more questions just ask Thanks, Kory

So many Matt's on this forum No problems You got a ND10 They are like $300 (Or am i thinking of the wrong filter). Super exy. I want one too, but can't afford to buy one when i wouldn't use it as much as i would like. But yep, a GND would definitely have helped you expose correctly. Unless you HDR and stack it in post. Keep up the good work man, you'll only get better the more you get out there

Nice shots 33driver! Have you thought about buying some filters like a Graduated Neutral Density filter and like a Cokin holder? Your shots are really nice and would look even better if you used some filters! I love the goldy. Thanks Mat Wow, sounds like you do need a new monitor lol. Dead pixels too?! Shall i start a charity fund raiser for Mat to get a new monitor?! Hahaha. Well, the house is worth a lot more than a monitor. Theres some bargain monitors out there at the moment! Although if your looking for an IPS you'll be paying ~$350'ish minimum

Hey Zennon, thanks for the kind words!! Yeah i figured i couldn't cater for everyone. 1920x1080 i figured most people have that resolution and 1680x1050 is large enough for everyone else. So hard to find a mutual agreeance thats not too big people can steal images and claim as there own (by printing or cropping watermark etc.)! Appreciate the comment mate!

The desktop section is finally up on my site! Please see this link: Desktops! Please comment and let me know what you think and if you would like to see more desktops i'd be open to suggestions but looking at adding 2-3 a week hopefully

They would probably be the Avenger F1000 suction cups GoldZilla But yeah, Xmetal takes some sweet shots

I've just ordered all my rig stuff. The main thing you need is a strong ass boom pole. Something that won't flex and besides that, getting good locations helps out. Normal pole length is 3m to 4m. Besides that, get some mates and push the car (out of site of course) or drive extremely slowly, with a long shutter speed and enjoy processing. You don't actually need the magic arm, but it helps alot if you want more creative angles and extension from the boom. The australian site is www.rigshots.com.au they sell all this stuff, but the website has been down the last week, not sure whats going on there. Otherwise plenty of places sell this stuff, check out www.shopbot.com.au or any of the other comparison websites as well as www.bhphoto.com or www.adorama.com

Haha sorry.. Forgot to comment on your photos also! Nice pics. Nice, simple, clean and sharp Although i think i might of preferred it without the headlights on maybe? Well pretty much open the image in photoshop - CTRL + J duplicate the layer, at the top of the layer palette will be opacity etc.. there will be a drop down menu that says "Normal" change that to multiply/screen/wahtever you want. Thats how you change blending modes. Layer masks - Down the bottom of the layers palette there will be a icon that kind of looks like a camera this is the layer mask icon. Click that and it adds a layer mask to your current layer. It will be white or black. Press B for brush and change your colour to the opposite colour (white or black or just press D to get white black then X to alternate) and paint as you wish To see what you have painted press the "\" key, underneath backspace. Hope this has helped. I am adding a DESKTOPS section to my website if anyone would like desktops, just tell me which ones. Will be up in about 2 days. Thanks! Kory

Thanks Mat and Rhys Yeah i'm digging the black and white also! It was weird, that couple was out there for about 3 minutes and they randomly stood still (relatively) for 25 seconds haha. I didn't even notice them. I took 2 of these for 2 days ( been so busy!) and didn't want to miss a day. I Was going to try an idea where if i missed a day i would use a placeholder (like a post-it note with the day) but i didn't want that Yeah i got a project 365 gallery on my website! I could change it. It would be cool, i'll try it out, thanks for the idea. As for how i PP'd it. I wanted to use the keyboard and black everything out except PROJECT 365 but then i knew it would just look like a black image with the text and you wouldn't be able to tell it was a keyboard. Tried to clone everything around, but would take way too long because lighting on each key was so different and cbf lol.. So i did it the easy way and just ripped the keys off. To get it to "pop" I just duplicated a layer changed the blending mode to Screen (lightens it) and used a layer mask and painted PROJECT 365. Then duplicated another layer and changed the blending mode to multiply (darkens) and painted the rest of the keyboard. IF you hold alt then click layer mask it inverts it, so that you can paint in parts you want, without the rest of the image being affected. In my case, painted project 365 instead of painting the whole keyboard (if that makes sense, probably just confused you.. never mind!).

Nice Mat. The cleanup looks much better IMO This weeks Project 365. Comments and critique welcome!

Adobe Bridge or Adobe Lightroom.

Nice work Matt! Looks great. Is the first pic over-saturated or is my monitor at work really bad? Only thing i would change is add another flash/strobe to try get rid of the shadow under the front bar. Besides that, it looks sweet! Oh and the reflection in the windscreen on the first pic. Keep it up!

Lightroom can do everything that photoshop can do basically. They run off the same engine of Adobe Camera Raw. It's just more simplified in Lightroom. E.g. Adjustment brush = layer mask pretty much but you control it with sliders etc... Have a play around! Even just slight editing in Lightroom will make your photos look tonnes better! I suggest shooting in RAW once you have got the hang of shooting in JPEG and the controls of your camera etc.. then start shooting in RAW. The only problem is file sizes are a lot bigger than JPEG. There are so many more advantages to shooting in RAW than JPEG as long as you can accomodate PP and file sizes. Random fact: 95% of pro sports photographers shoot in JPEG for ease of file use and sending to there editors.

I'm pretty keen to come to this and take some pics. Always love motorkhana style stuff! Awesome noises too judging by last years youtube videos!

Lil Flipp and Rallye - I hope you do well at this shoot. Shooting that many cars in that LITTLE time frame is going to be extremely, EXTREMELY hard. Considering that you have to setup lighting for one shot and then take the shot and chimp, then move yourself and setup lighting again and then chimp and then get the car moved as well, 10-15 images will be extremely hard per car with only 5 hrs. I hope you do well at this and looking forward to see the results...

No problems Ooo Khaled from Rexnet? Hehe, now i remember. Good to see you joined up Matt - If you have any problems with wordpress let me know. Its quite simple to use once you get the hang of it. Website is looking good mate Also, i lol'd on the Kory hotline part. Now i know what your talking about

Awesome shot Khaled!! Definitely wallpaper material right there. Nice processing also.

Sweet photo by Easton. Although i thought Easton would of cloned out the telegraph pole growing out of the roof. Would make this pic 100x better. None the less, sweet pic!

Thanks Mat! Appreciate it. Although unsure what you mean about the "story allegory". So i'm guessing it means Story = Ok or along those lines in regards to my blog post.

Hey mate, RAW Files can't be handled by Microsoft office picture manager. They only show a preview (AFAIK). You will need either a RAW convertor like Adobe DNG convertor or install photoshop with Adobe Camera Raw (depending on which photoshop you get will depend on what version of adobe camera raw you will be able to download. Camera Raw 4.6 will handle in CS3 but a newer version you will need cs4). Otherwise you can get Lightroom, this will handle RAW files with large previews and options to edit the file also, or adobe bridge.

Wow, thought there would already be a thread! Oh well, post up! This weeks Project 365!

I swear Sidd, you quote me word for word on the above hahahahahaha. You love wordpress now? Matt - Everytime i see your name i just think of the Sierra Sierra driver David Empringham (sp?) haha.

Nice Matt. Only problem is halo's around the trees. Besides that, looks pretty sweet! Nice shot Sl!m also!