I probably won't be contributing to this website for a while. I currently have no decent camera (in fact, I don't have a camera), and I'm unlikely to bother getting one for a while, because I'm concentrating my time and effort exclusively on music for now.

I'm working all day at improving my guitar and music skills, so I have no time for wandering around taking photos or sitting photoshopping things. I'm working on grade 8 now, and plan to get my diploma in guitar after that. Also, I've been teaching guitar for the past few months, so that means I have to learn and practice as much as I can anyway.

In February, the final year of my physics degree starts, so my time will be doubly unavailable for photography. Physics is damn hard, and music is damn hard too! Actually, I find music harder than physics, truth be told... It takes so much practice!

Anyway, thanks to everyone who has favourited and featured my photos, and to everyone who does whilst I'm away, and Merry Christmas!

P.S. Apropos of the above - to any guitarists out there, here's a fantastic video and guitar tab learning resource, made by Steve Vai's touring guitarist of the last several years:

[link]

I love Dave Weiner. Weiner! Weiner!

Signing off.

I've been looking into the issue of colour spaces today. If you want to know what colour spaces are, here's a good place to start:

[link]

The colour space one uses seems to define the colours that can be represented correctly in your digital image. Some colour spaces contain more colours than others.

...So if your camera took a photo containing colour X, and colour X is not within the colour space your image gets converted into, you lose that colour. It gets clipped. Bummer. There's a page with images illustrating such clipping here:

[link]

Now then. Up until now I've been opening my RAW files into photoshop using the sRGB colour space. It's the smallest colour space commonly used. It's also the standard colour space for displaying on monitors, on the web, and apparently it's the space in which most photo labs will print your images. So at least it's convenient.

However, I am somewhat concerned about all those potential colours that my camera captures, but that I throw away in RAW conversion. The most vivid reds, cyans, greens, blues... they all get butchered. And as it happens, your camera (film or digital) can capture colours that fall way outside the most commonly used colour spaces, sRGB and Adobe RGB. Adobe is a bit bigger than sRGB, but it still misses some colours.

The question is, so what? Well, the basic idea is that there are all these lovely vivid colours that have no chance of finding their way onto a print (and in the end, prints are what really matter to me) if you use a colour space that's too small to capture them. Obviously this means losing colour realism as well as vividness.

You know all those great deep vivid reds that you get in sunsets, that Fuji Velvia film captures magnificently but that never seem to come out right in digital? I suspect that using a colour space that's too small is to blame. Of course, you will never see such reds on a monitor anyway because no monitor can display them. But you will see it in a print.

However, there is a colour space pretty much designed for photography, and to capture just about any colour you're ever likely to encounter. That's Prophoto RGB. Photoshop gives you an option to open your RAW files using this colour space.

So if you take a picture, open the RAW file into Photoshop using Prophoto RGB, and then you can find a printer that can print in the same colour space, using paper and inks that can reproduce most of it, then you stand a good chance of getting considerably more vivid and realistic colours in your prints.

The only problem for me is that this would involve basically re-editing all of my images from scratch, starting from the RAW files - and finding a printing company that does Prophoto RGB. Whoops!

I also did some experimenting with opening the same photo into different colour spaces and seeing what happens, but I'll leave that for another time.

Your thoughts?

I am so sick of people on DA taking it as a personal insult when I disagree with them about something, or even when I only partly agree with them. Aren't we adults here? Can't we disagree without becoming hostile? There are some nice and intelligent people on here, but a load of insecure bad-mannered idiots too.

Usually it goes like this:

Them: I think 'x'.

Me: I wholly or partially disagree with 'x', and here are my reasons.

Them: Your personal character is in some way defective.

Me: Well, that's hardly fair, could you try answering my arguments instead?

Them: You are Hitler.

...and it generally just goes downhill from there.

Recently kkart posted this article he'd found on using the technique of countershading to increase the apparent dynamic range (range of brightness) in a photo:

[link]

This is pretty damn useful to know about, because the dynamic range achievable in a photographic print is quite puny compared to what a camera can capture. So, I thought I'd re-post the link for anyone who isn't watching kkart.

Since reading it, I've used the technique on a few of my own photos, so you can see what sort of results you can get. Here they are:



Anyway, you can hopefully see what how vivid images can get with this technique. They all have more *pop* than any previous versions I had done. I recommend this technique highly!

[link]

Just - wow. The night sky as I've never seen it before. Made from 1200 telescope images taken in the Canary Islands and the Chilean desert.

Make sure you look at the full screen version, but there is also a pretty awesome time-lapse video further down the page.