Tag: rain

Rainy Market Day

On By themichaellamcollectionIn PhotographyLeave a comment

A couple weekends back, I ventured out of my vehicle to try and get a few shots on the outskirts of Mon Repos market, by the time I arrived at the road junction it had begun raining, not knowing the weather resistance of the DXO, I didn’t linger too long, but I did manage to snap a few shots, and one stood out for me.

Hope you like it.

Rainy Day at Mon Repos Market – 20-1051 | DXO One Camera

By the time I arrived back at the vehicle I was almost soaked through, I don’t think the camera would have survived much longer in that weather, luckily I managed to protect it for much of the way back to the car.  🙂

Click on the image to see it in the gallery.

Saturated Saturday

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography1 Comment

Its a very rainy Saturday morning in Georgetown, much like many we’ve had this week and last week.

I just felt the urge to take a mobile phone photo, so here it is 🙂

Samsung Galaxy S7  |  Lightroom Mobile Camera  |  Processed in Lightroom and Nik Silver Efex

Click on the image to see it in the Gallery

Every Tool

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography, thoughts6 Comments

I’m not a purist; I don’t hold the belief that whatever JPG comes out of the camera is the reality that existed in front of the lens.  I do, however, believe that there is a certain amount of “truth” in my photographic work.  Friends and colleagues, other photographers and budding photographers in the Guyana Photographers’ Facebook group have heard me make the distinction between Processing and Editing many times.  And I will briefly make it here again…

Since I shoot in RAW format, the camera does no processing to the file (whenever you shoot JPEG the camera applies certain adjustments to the image, contrast, brightness, etc.) so I have to Process it in software, often referred to as Post-processing.  This usually involves adjusting sliders in a software like Aperture, AfterShot, Lightroom, LightZone, etc., things that are adjusted range from brightness and contrast, to hue and saturation, cropping, temperature, white balance, noise levels and more.  Although this is usually applied over the entire image, some software allows you to do it to parts as well.

Where I draw the distinction between Processing and Editing, is when the image is altered so as to become a new image, distinct from the original in content.  Simply put, if I add something or remove something from the original photograph, then it is no longer the same, it is now a work of graphic design, not only photography.

Do I Process my images? Always.  Do I Edit my images? Sometimes.  I’ve cloned out trash that otherwise marred the scene (the lone plastic bottle on a grassy stretch), but have often left in loads of trash because it was part and parcel of the scene.  I don’t have anything against editing, but I don’t think its fair to call it a photograph after you’ve added in entire clumps of trees, removed several utility posts and added muscles to an individual… that is definitely in the realm of photo-illustration or Graphic Design.

I am also a big proponent of using every tool that you need to get the image that you saw with your eyes, and in your mind across to the viewer.  Whether its special filters on the lens to get a mood or effect, an angled lens in the developer of a dark room to create a distorted view, using Black and White (Film or processing) for an aged or structured look, using long and super-long exposures for light trails or flowing water, external flashes and reflectors for extra lighting on a subject, gels and filters for colour enhancements, or even doing some of this on the software end, I am for it, but I believe in being true to the original vision as much as possible.

Fancy processing and editing is no substitute for a good original image.  I am no expert or professional, many of my images come out of the camera looking very disappointing, and I often discard or simply not process them.  Yes, you can “save” them, I have even done so on some occasions, simply because I believe that they were worth saving, but they had to have something good in them to begin with; a good composition, a relatively good exposure, and maybe even compelling elements to the composition.

I’ve rambled enough… time for a photo.  This is one of those photos that I “saved”…  The original was good, maybe better than good, but it was not what I wanted….  I wanted more detail in the sky, more of a structured appearance than the original coloured version, and (because of an architectural quirk) more symmetry.

Canon EOS 60D  |  Tamron 18-270mm  |  21mm, 1/160s, f/7.1

I used Lightroom to create five different exposures from the original, each 2 stops apart in exposure, then I used Nik HDR Efex Pro to merge my new exposures and coax the detail I wanted from the overall scene, then I used Photoshop (I know, I’m a horrible person) to skew the perspective ever so slightly to gain some symmetry.

Although I did not add or remove anything, I normally would consider this edited since I used Photoshop to change the original proportions of the image, but in this case I’d let that slide 🙂

Click on the image to see it in the Gallery along with others in the Black and White series.

Cricket, lovely Cricket!

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography14 Comments

In the Caribbean and Guyana, this is our game, Cricket!  Played by more countries than baseball, but less recognised by the “west”, the only thing played more and enjoyed by more around the world is probably football, NO, not that thing played by Americans, where they hardly use their feet except to run (with amazing speed actually), I’m referring to the real football, also called Soccer worldwide.

In cricket there’s variations of the game,there’s the one called Test Cricket, where everything is tested from the players endurance to the spectators’ patience over several days, usually five but it could be seven, then there’s the One-day Cricket, or standard 50-over matches, the World Cup for which is actually being played now.  The newest forms of the game have been Twenty 20, or a twenty over form of the game, shorter and more exciting, and adopted by the governing cricket body, the ICC, as a new standard form, and here in Guyana, we have the yearly 10/10 games now sponsored by local telecommunications company GT&T.  But those are the structured forms, as children growing up, other than the usual school-yard cricket we knew of three types of cricket, Cricket-in-the-street, Cricket-in-the-rain and the one that none of us could play but loved through the Dave Martins and the Tradewinds song, Cricket-in-the-Jungle!

As much as I’d love to catch a photograph of Monkey batting, the Elephant bowling, the umpire Parrot and the rest, I have to settle for the ones I can find, and I was fortunate to recently see a group of youngsters playing Cricket in the Street, in the Rain!  Can’t beat that combination!  I would have gone down to get closer photographs, but two things held me back, the camera isn’t weather-sealer and I hadn’t walked with the zip-lock bag as suggested by others, and if they saw me taking photos, it would lose some of the natural feel to it.

As always, click on the photo to see it on the site larger!

Sitting in the Rain

On By themichaellamcollectionIn Photography2 Comments

I seem to live in a location where the “city” meets the “country“, do they call that the suburbs?

One benefit of living here is that I get to see a little bit of both, I have family living in both sections, as it were.  On occasion, when I am leaving home for work, I would see some birds, usually too far off for me to photograph, but sometimes, they’ll be perched on a nearby fence, or post, or wire (you get the drift) and if I carefully lift my camera I may even get to photograph them without scaring them away first.

Sitting in the Rain
On Graham Hall Road, Cummingslodge, Georgetown.

My favourites are the various hawks that prey on snails from the gutters and trenches in the area, anyone who has seen my photographs  would have seen these quite a few times over the years  🙂  I probably need to try and capture those in new ways, even I am getting tired of just seeing them staring at me  🙂  Quite common, in our area are some types of white birds…  OK, I just noticed that I know nothing of bird nomenclature, if anyone knows where Waldyke Prince is, tell him I need help in this area.  Anyway, back to what I was saying…  there are these white birds,  and once in a while they’ll pose just like the hawks.

I have also found that I don’t take enough photos in the rain, this may have to do with the fact that my camera is now weather-sealed, but still, I don’t do it enough.  My favourite rain shot is still my Fleur de Lis Gate Toppers, which I did twice, once when I used a Canon Powershot S5 and then recently with the Canon Rebel T1i, anyway, enough advertising for Canon,  here is that white bird sitting in the rain  🙂

Of course, if anyone knows the name, common and scientific, I would be grateful for the knowledge.