Our members’ night in the downstairs former-cafe saw PPS members being treated to three excellent presentations on three topics:
John Boyd discussed printing – do it yourself or get professionals to do it? John talked us through the pros and cons, and what’s needed, for each. Printer, paper, ink vs being organised enough to send files off and await prints by post. A calibrated monitor is a good idea for both options. And consideration of the annual volume at which point home printing starts to have the economic edge.
He reckoned it had taken a fair time to get the hang of home-printing, but we can learn from his experience and perhaps get confident more quickly.
Raymond Leinster, previously best known in PPS as a master of wildlife photography, turns out to be a master of sports photography too. As he told us, contact the clubs or watch the event listings to find out what’s going on. Your access to the action will vary depending on whether you photograph an event for your own pleasure, under an arrangement with the organisers, or on behalf of the organisers.
Either way, usual photographic principles apply – composition, technique, engaging with your subjects – all whilst not getting hit by the ball, the athlete, the horse, the car, and so on. And who knew there were opportunities to photograph harness racing, or parkour, so close to home.
Third up, Tim spoke about computational photography techniques including pixel-shift, lucky imaging, HDR and focus stacking, starting with the choices and decisions made at time of capturing data, and the benefits and considerations of each technique.
He worked through an example of focus-stacking using Ralston’s memorial Cairn in Glen Coe, processing it using DxO PhotoLab, Serif Affinity Photo and LuminarAI.
Benefits of various image-blending techniques.
Key: tick = you get the benefit, thumbs-down = you don’t; blue = secondary; orange = not without some other work