My main editing and storage PC has been causing all sorts of problems for me recently and this weekend I made the decision to reinstall the operating system (Windows XP) to try improve the performance. I have a long IT background and this is a fairly routine task which I've performed hundreds of times with little or no problems. This time however Windows XP decided to clear my disk partition information during the initial setup which caused a major headache.

Due to the storage requirements on hundreds of Canon RAW files and processed photographs I have a number of disk drives in my system. All are partitioned and used for the various stage of my workflow. After the initial reinstall my main photograph partition and data partitions were both unavailable. The drives were visible and a blank unformated partition was in their place. Panic quickly set in and I loaded my external hard drives to see how current my backups were. Due to some reorganisation I'd been doing all of my pre 2007 photographs were not backed up and none of my more recent shoots were accessible either.

After many hours of messing around I was fortunately able to recover the original partitions and data from my drives. After a few more hours I got all of my software reinstalled and will see how the computer behaves from now on. It's  still being cranky so I may find myself ordering a new system soon. The moral of this story however is make sure you have backups of everything important and not just some of it. Had the drive actually failed I would have been completely stuck so regular backups are worth the time and effort.

With some interesting clouds forming yesterday evening I decided to head out for a trip around the South Downs near Arlington in the hope of capturing some oilseed photographs. I was out for a couple of hours driving the lanes, parking up, walking around and then jumping back into the car and I came away with nothing to show for it. It was like a case of photographer's block hit me and none of the views seemed to work. I had a few ideas for shots in mind and at all but one location I didn't even unpack the camera. I think I need to head further afield to try some new locations to give me a fresh perspective.

I ended the trip by climbing Windover hill in hope of capturing a sunset behind Firle Beacon. As the time wore on I realised that it was looking far to hazy and not likely to produce what I wanted to capture so I bailed and returned home. In hindsight I wish I'd waited the extra 30 minutes to see what developed but looking out the window at home there was very little colour in the sky and the clouds had blown through leaving little interest in the sky. I'm planning to try that spot again as I think it has potential but I'll head out later in the evening to give me less waiting around.

With my upcoming exhibition at Eastbourne Framing Centre on the 24th June I've been busy preparing my photographs from printing. It's a time consuming process as I am a bit of a perfectionist and since I processed some of the shots I've developed my editing skills and learnt better methods. Once mistake I've made with a lot of shots in the past in sharpening them for their native size and saving that as my final TIFF file. The problem arises when I need to upscale the shot for printing at the larger sizes. This causes blocky artifacts on the edges of detail which although barely noticable in print aren't quite perfect.

As a result I've ended up re-processing a lot of the older photographs so that I can perform the sharpening steps after upscaling the file for print. This will be the first large batch which I've printed from my new print supplier and if the proofs and tests are anything to go by then the results should be fanatastic. Their colour accuracy is much better than my old supplier and the paper stock also seems to be better quality. Another advantage is that they flat pack the prints up to 18 x 12 inches which makes mounting them a bit easier.

The poster advertising the upcoming "Sussex Scenes" exhibition at Eastbourne Framing Centre is completed.

Unfortunately the weather forecast for this weekend is looking a bit mixed at the moment but unless it's bucketing down I hope to scout out a few new locations on the South Downs. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of my goals at the moment is to capture some decent oilseed photographs. I've noticed the fields around Firle Beacon seem to be quite yellow right now and I'd like to find a decent angle to capture the scene.

My approach to location scouting is to research some potential locations and routes online before heading out. I've now marked a few high vantage points which may give me the angle I want so I shall try to visit those spots to see if the views are actually like I imagine. I always take the camera gear in case a surprise moment presents itself but I expect this trip to mainly involve walking and making notes. Some places I hope to test out are Windover Hill and possibly Mount Caburn. Once I know the access to suitable locations and approximate walking times from carparks I can plan my proper trips at times when the light is best.

I have uploaded some of the photographs from our recent visit to Arlington Bluebell walk to the Woodland Gallery.

Arlington Bluebells

I am very pleased to announce that a collection of my photographs will form part of an exhibition of Sussex Scenes to be held at Eastbourne Framing Centre. The exhibition will be taking place on Wednesday 24th June starting at 7pm. Alongside my work you will also be able to view canvases by local artist Jon Cornford.

I will be available to discuss my photographs and the prints will be available for sale.

The framing centre is located opposite Eastbourne train station on the corner of Terminus Road and Grove Road. More details about the exhibition can be obtained from Eastbourne Framing Centre on 01323 647822 or alternatively please contact me by email.

Something I have been wanting to include on this website since day one has been a proper shopping cart solution so that prints and products can be ordered directly and paid for via PayPal. Since this whole website has been self coded this task has been a bit of learning curve for me and is currently still undergoing work to complete. With plenty of other commitments as well as taking, editing and cataloging my photographs this new feature has been in development for over a month but I believe I'm rounding the finishing post for version 1 of the cart system.

Features in Version 1

1. Add to Cart Feature in Galleries
2. Checkout Page with automated shipping calculation
3. Direct secure payment via PayPal

A visit to Arlington Bluebell Walk has been on my to do list for a couple of years but somehow I always miss my chance. Yesterday we (my partner Rhiannon, my mother and I) took advantage of the wonderful afternoon weather to at last make a trip to this walk. I've never been before and once on the walk I was amazed by the shear number of flowers on show. The walk is well routed and offers plenty of nice angles into the woods with a carpet of blue. The strong afternoon light was perfect as my aim was to capture the dappled light on the flowers to add some extra dynamics to the scene.

Bluebell Carpet

I worked purely with the 17-40mm lens on a tripod as we took the main walk and extra white walk up and around the lagoon. Shooting on a tripod allowed me to work in AV mode at F/16 for a decent depth of field and I also chose to bracket my shots by plus and minus one stop to ensure I could capture the darker areas and bright patches equally.

I've had a quick review of this shots this morning and am quite pleased. I'll spend the next few days picking out the main keepers before getting them online.

If you fancy a nice woodland walk I highly recommend a visit to the Arlington Bluebell Walk. I'd get there as soon as possible to make the most of the bluebells before they expire for the year. Some were beginning to droop this weekend so I don't think there's much time remaining.

I have added some more of my Long Man of Wilmington photographs to the South Downs Gallery.

The Long Man of Wilmington at Dawn

I've been wanting to try some dawn shots of the Long Man of Wilmington for a long time and last night I made the decision to get up extra early and head along the A27 to capture some photographs.

The Long Man of Wilmington is a landmark located on the South Downs near the small village of Wilmington on Windover Hill. Visible from the A27 this giant outline of a man with poles can be seen from quite a distance. I parked up at the nearby car park at about 5:50am and set off with the 1D MKIIN and 17-40mm lens. My plan was to capture the Long Man with the first golden light from the rising sun adding dynamic shape to the hills and foreground. Initially the sun was a bit low and the light was quite flat and unexciting but as I worked my way along the walking path towards the Long Man the sun started to rise and light up the landscape. I picked a few locations along the way that contained good foreground interest and hopefully were a bit different from the shots you tend to see day to day. Early on the cloud cover was at about 50% and I had to do a fair bit of waiting around while the clouds blew through. When the sun was free to shine it was great light and lit up the hillside just as I'd hoped.

As always with my landscape shots I used my Manfrotto tripod as support and a shutter release cable to further reduce the chances of blurring the shot with camera shake. I also enabled mirror lockup under the custom functions which again is worth doing for static landscape photography. I set my camera to manual mode and opted for an aperture of around F/16 for a good depth of field. Early on my shutter speed was around 1/5th of a second but as the sun rose higher I was up to around 1/25th. In order to control the exposure of foreground and sky I tried two techniques. Firstly I used no filter and simply bracketed my shots. This allows the exposures to later be merged in Photoshop to produce a balanced exposure. This requires some manual work and also the foreground flowers were blowing in the wind which was likely to make merging the exposures a real pain. My next method was to attach one of my Cokin ND Graduated filters to the lens which I then aligned with the hill top to allow less light from the sky onto the sensor. This meant I could expose for the foreground and not worry about blowing out the brighter sky. This teachnique can work well, although my results with it have been mixed. On this occasion it seemed to work pretty well and that's good news as it saves me a chunk on post processing time at home.

I'll be processing the shots as soon as possible and will upload them when I get the chance. For now here is one of the shots I that I feel came together pretty well. I used a low angle to capture the water trough in the foreground. I like to try and keep some interest in that section of the frame to keep the viewer interested. It also sets the scene of a rural area quite nicely.

The Long Man of Wilmington at Dawn

One feature in Adobe Lightroom that took a while for me to find and utilise was the ability to run Photoshop actions at the end of the export process. Quite often there are some Photoshop steps that I need to run on my photographs after I've processed them from RAW and completing these manually can take a lot of time. Within Photoshop there are actions which we can create to repeat tasks quickly and easily and I wanted to use some of these within Lightroom as well.

The solution is to create some Droplets from your actions which you can then assign from Lightroom. Droplets are simply a way of saving an action into a format that Lightroom can execute. By encorporating droplets and actions into your workflow you can save large amounts of time, freeing you up to take more photographs!

How to Create a Droplet

Creating a droplet is quick and easy. Firstly you will need to record the action which you wish to use as a droplet.

With that complete you can save it as a droplet from the File > Automate > Create Droplet menu.

This will open a dialog of options for the droplet. Firstly you need to choose a location and filename for the droplet in the "Save Droplet In" section. I tend to save mine to a subdirectory under My Documents as they are then included in my backup routine.

You can configure the save options here as well, although for JPEGs I find it easiest to record a Save As step in my action which allows me to configure the save options more precisely. If you have included a Save As step in your action you will need to select the "Save and Close" option from the Destination area and then tick the "Override Action "Save As" Commands" option. Otherwise you will need to specify the output directory and filename configuration for your droplet.

Using the Droplet in Lightroom

Before you can use a droplet in Lightroom you need to add it or a shortcut to it to the "Export Actions" folder in the Lightroom directory. This is located at C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\Application Data\Adobe\Lightroom by default. If you are unsure of where you droplet folder is located you can find it by opening the Export dialog. At the bottom you will see an "After Export" dropdown. Click 'Go to Export Actions Folder' which will open a Windows Explorer window pointing the Lightroom directory.

Once you've copied the droplet it should be available in the "Export" dialog within Lightroom. Configure the export settings as required and at the bottom there is a "Post Processing" section with an "After Export" dropdown. Your droplet should appear in this dropdown which you can then select.

When you click Export the file will processed by Lightroom before launching Photoshop to run the droplet action steps.