Sunday's spotlight - Kaleidoscopes

By guest blogger Pete

I can never understand why the majority of people in the world drive on the WRONG side of the road! What's wrong with them? Surely they realise that the English way of driving is the best? Now, I'm a wrinkly - a BALD wrinkly too - and although I've driven in the States - I would guess, in all, about 35 miles - it is not my favourite occupation.

When Ruth and John lived on Sanibel Island my wife and I took up cycling. I won't say which one of us fell off because that wouldn't be fair to her. We regularly used to pass one of those road signs that told you how fast you are going and, being delinquent daredevils, we used to speed up and flash by the sign at something approaching 10 mph. No speed cop ever caught us!

It was whilst on Sanibel that Ruth and John arranged for me to meet a character called Dick Shepherd. He had a photography business somewhere in that vast hot expanse that goes under the name of Fort Myers. Now the 35 miles I've driven in the States didn't include Sanibel to Fort Myers. Ruth took me on this occasion and arranged to meet me at a coffee shop called Borders; I think they sold books as well as coffee! However, this meeting place involved crossing a multi-lane highway - at the time it seemed as though there were 50 lanes at the particular spot I decided to cross on. I waited for the traffic lights to favour pedestrians and set off at a good sprint for a 60 something year old. I must have been about 2/3rds of the way across when the lights decided to favour the movement of vast amounts of traffic. That was an experience that did wonders for my prayer life. It is, also, the only time I've argued with a 50 ton truck!

Dick was very much into photographic kaleidoscopes and much of his keeness rubbed off onto me. Kaleidoscopes feed my love of detail. When I got back to that special land favoured by all people with good taste I tried it out for myself using as much of Dick's basic method as I could remember. They were a bit too basic but over time I developed my own method that gave me more detailed kaleidoscopes.

From this:

to this:
The main weakness with my method was that everything had to be done "by hand". Recently Ruth introduced me to a programme (sorry "program") known as "Kaleidoscope Kreator".

It took this photo from this:


To this:
Now this programme offers speed and detail with some amazing results. If you're into digital photography then why not try it out.

(Editor's note: I actually won my copy of the program from the Metal Clay Store - and it can be used to create photopolymer plates for metal clay - but only on a PC, not mac!).

Sunday's spotlight - "H(igh) D(efinition) R(?)

By guest blogger Pete

I seem to spend quite a bit of my summers taking photographs and even more of my winters developing and improving them in Adobe Photoshop. I was never more than an occasional photographer in the olden days of film before the advent of digital photography but I soon caught the bug for the digital variety very early on and have been addicted ever since. The freedom from film - and the expense - added to the bonus of never being caught out changing a film just when something you would have wanted to photograph passes by caused me to fall instantly in love with the digital variety. Another big plus is the freedom from the number of shots you can take without thinking perpetually of 24 or 36.

With my love for detail it was with some anticipation that I began to experiment with HDR. The "HD" stands for "High Definition" but I've no idea what the "R" represents. Perhaps you can tell me because I've never discovered it (nor have I really looked into finding out the answer either)! With genuine HDR I'm restricted to Photoshop, which doesn't offer the same refinements as the leader in this particular field - Photomatix. Basically HDR is the combination of 3 or more different exposure shots of the same scene, person, etc. The HDR program then aligns these shots and combines the 3 into one image without any detail being lost in shadows or highlights. Photomatic gives you a free 30 day trial but all the attempts during that trial are heavily watermarked and the full program is a little expensive. If the minimum of three different exposures puts you off then you can take one image into Photoshop and make 2 copies, each of which you can give a different exposure to from the original.

I recently came across a program called "TOPAZ ADJUST", produced by "topazlabs.com". This is a more reasonable price and gives very favourable results using just ONE image. The two examples I give you below in this blog are from Topaz Adjust but please bear in mind that I have gone a little over the top because I don't know what difference you'll be able to see on these pages and, if it is good, then, believe me, you can go much further or far less than I have gone. Topaz Labs give a 30 day free trial but with their program there are NO limitations or watermarks at all.

Original image:
Topaz Adjust-ed Image:
I've never seen it mentioned but one thing I have found useful when using Topaz Adjust is to make a copy of the image you want to adjust before starting. When you get the adjusted version if there is ANY part of that image you don't like (i.e. the sky) then you can either put a mask on the new version and paint out the sky with black (thus revealing the original sky) or else just erase the unwanted portion. I have used this quite a bit.

Happy snapping.