Good Morning All Last week at the club we held a series of members mini lectures, showing what you had done over the summer break, sorry I missed the evening but judging by Derek's blog you were treated to some very good photography. This week, Wednesday 17th September, we are holding our September PDI (projected Digital Image) competition, with the categories of "Long Exposures" and "Open", all entries are now in, and scoresheets sent out. Tony Houlden will be our judge for this one and I am afraid I won't make it again due to a golfing holiday in Portugal. I will all being well see you all the week after. Don't forget if you want to enter the N&EMPF exhibition you need to sort out some of your best PDI's that you have not already entered and send them to me, sized to 1600px x 1200px. If you require more information, just email me with your queries. Regards Graham

And - we're back, after the summer break. Last night we held a series of short illustrated talks on the topic of; "What Have You Done Over The Summer?" Richard Hildred was up first with his trips to Vilnius, Lithuania, and Denver, Colorado, USA, which was a very interesting talk, and view of parts of the world that many of us had not visited. I gave a talk on my holiday in Corfu, and visits to Richmond, Yorkshire, and Skipton. After refreshments Harry showed us some of the photos taken on the boat trip from Bridlington, to Bempton Cliffs photographing the Gannets, and Puffins. Tony dazzled, and delighted us with his visit to the Maasai Mara game reserve, Kenya. Last but not least was Chris with some excellent photos from the Transport Museum, Sandtoft, Doncaster. It was an excellent night, and our newly purchased laptop performed well, the graphics were much sharper projected onto the screen.

A big thank you for the positive comments on my recent “Should I shoot in RAW or .jpg” blog. Following on from that blog I wanted to share with you the image editing software that I use in editing my images. FastStone (Windows only) I believe that this is an essential tool for every photographer to download, and use. The software is completely free to download, FastStone does ask for a donation, which helps to develop the software. The editing tools are easy to use, with easy to learn keyboard short cuts. Predominantly, the software is for viewing, and editing .jpg files only, RAW images can be viewed, but in a restricted resolution. The clone, and healing tools on FastStone are exceptionally good, I often use the cloning tool, then follow up with the healing brush to smooth over any harsh lines from the cloning. Cropping, and resizing images again is very easy with FastStone, open a file of images, select the image you want to crop, click “X” on the keyboard, and a range of crop sizes are available. For competitions I always use FastStone to resize my images, “Ctrl + R” to resize to say 1920px by 1200px for our projector size, “Ctrl + S” to save. The FastStone default colour space photometric is “YCbCr”, which results in a 2 or 3 times smaller file size, I prefer to click the “options” tab on the save dialog box, and select “RGB”. In preparing images for a recent competition, with a resized 1200px by 1200px photo, FastStone “YCbCr” photometric produced a file size of 871KB, switching to “RGB” produced a file size of 1752KB, and all the steps can be viewed on the attached screenshots. Serif Affinity Photo (Windows and Apple Mac) This is a comprehensive editing suite for .jpg and RAW, there are many YouTube videos to teach the tools available. I like the perspective tool, ideal for straightening buildings, and the inpainting tool is very useful to fill in gaps in a background, or blemishes in the skin. Compositing images can be readily accomplished, with different layers. Affinity Photo is available as a one-time purchase – currently £67.99 Luminar Neo (Windows and Apple Mac) This is my preferred editing suite, able to edit both .jpg, and RAW images. The main benefit of the software for me is the ability to batch edit my images. Often, I will be out with my camera, and return with several hundred images, and I can edit the first image of the batch, and copy / paste to succeeding images from the ribbon of images at the foot of the software. The masking brush tools are so easy to use, enabling direct painting in of exposure, sharpness, or any other effect into the image. Take an example of a bird, or insect against a dark background, I can just click the exposure tool, select the mask, and paint the subject directly with the mask, then use the slider to increase the exposure, and any of the tool effects can be painted in the same manner, shadows, highlights, and sharpening. Luminar Neo is available as a one-time purchase, or subscription. Currently a perpetual licence is on sale for £99. Other Editing Suites GIMP, and DarkTable are both cross platform .jpg, and RAW image editors, and completely free to download and use. Capture One Pro - Superior image quality, precision editing, and best-in-class tethering, so their website states. £111 annual subscription. DxO Photolab 9 - The world’s most advanced, end-to-end, RAW photo editing software. £219.99 one-time purchase. Adobe Photoshop - Is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. Subscription model £21.98 monthly. Adobe Lightroom - Make your photos look better than ever, no matter your skill level. New Quick Actions give you creative assistance tailored to your unique photo. And with Generative Remove, you can clean up unwanted distractions in a touch. Plans starting at £11.99 monthly incl. VAT for the annual billed monthly plan. Corel Paintshop Pro - Enjoy powerful and complete editing of RAW files with a great variety of pro-level tools available in the new AfterShot Lab, now inside PaintShop Pro. There is no need for extra applications or for running several editing processes in parallel, with timesaving and streamlined RAW image editing. Full licence £89.99. Conclusion Photo editing can be a rewarding experience with the correct tools but learning how to get the best from your software, and images can be a steep learning curve. YouTube videos can really be your friend here, Anthony Turnham, and Jim Nix have taught me a lot about Luminar Neo – and I’m still learning!! Also take advantage of any 30 day trial offers, you have to find software that you can work with, and that can speed up your workflow.

This is always a hotly debated subject among photographers, and I would say “it depends” quietly sitting on the fence!! Let me qualify, if your resulting image is destined to be shared on social media with very little post processing, and the image is correctly exposed, then most certainly use the .jpg format. Sharing any image to Facebook will result in a degraded image because Facebook processes the image for a small screen, Instagram images will be viewed usually on a smart phone, so a .jpg direct from a camera will suffice. For many years I used to shoot primarily in .jpg, and I’ve entered competitions with those images, when I had my Fuji cameras the RAW format images from the 24-megapixel sensor were 55 megapixel, so I tended to shoot mainly in .jpg. With my Olympus cameras and the 20-megapixel sensor the RAW images are more usable. Now, let’s examine the facts behind any decision: JPEG (.jpg) images are fully processed in camera, and all settings such as White Balance, Colour Saturation, Tone Curve, Sharpening, and Colour Space are applied to the image by the camera processor and are therefore ready to use. Many digital cameras allow changing the Colour Saturation, either by adjusting the Tone Curve, selecting a Film Simulation, or applying a LUT to the resulting image. LUT = Look Up Table, primarily used for video, but can be applied to a stills image. JPEG images are an 8-bit digital format, producing 16.8 million possible colours, (256 tonal values for Red, Green, and Blue channels) any other colours that your camera is capable of are discarded, and the “lossy” compression of a .jpg will result in a loss of data in an image, possibly displaying artifacts in a large, printed image. RAW images are a proprietary format tied to a specific camera manufacturer and must be post processed. My camera system produces a 12-bit digital image capable of producing 68.7 billion colours. The RAW image has far greater dynamic range, and colour gamut compared to a .jpg image. Highlights can be corrected, and shadow detail can be readily recovered from a RAW image. Personally, when I used to shoot in .jpg I tended to post process my images, applying a preset, and any cropping, so post processing the RAW images doesn’t take much more of my time. When I’ve been out taking a set of images, my workflow involves processing the first RAW image of the set, then copy / paste onto the following images. Attached to this post are two underexposed images of flowers, and the recovery of the RAW image has resulted in a reasonably usable image, the .jpg image is unusable with washed out colours. With the two photos of a model, one is the .jpg saved directly from the camera SD card, and the other has been post processed from the RAW – I have cropped both images to 2:3 ratio, I feel that the image post processed from RAW has a richer colour palette. In summation, .jpg for simplicity, and RAW for fine detail, and greater dynamic range.

Good Morning All I hope you're all enjoying the summer break, we have just got back from a week on the Suffolk coast, staying near Lowestoft. It was good to meet up with quite a few of our members at the King's Head last night to celebrate the life of Paul Malley. Paul had been a very popular member of our club for a long time and so it was only fitting that many of us turned up to say goodbye. Harry is now wanting two things from us all, firstly it is that time of year when we enter the LPA Interclub PDI competition, if we can, as many members as possible to send him six PDI's the best you have that have not been in the competition before. Harry will also look through past competitions for entries as well. If we say a closing date of midnight next Friday that should give you time to have a look through your PDI's. We are back at the club, Wednesday 10th September, beginning with a series of mini lectures, showing us what you have been up to during the break, about 15 minutes each. If you can let me know if you want to take part then we may adjust times to fill the night. The following week, Wednesday 17th September, a PDI competition will be held with the categories of "Long Exposures" and "Open". I was asked how long is a long exposure and that was a good question, I just put it in the program off the suggestion list and never gave it a thought at the time, I will have to give the judge some guidance as well. Please email me with any suggestion if you think this is wrong. I think slower than 1/30 shutter speed but to show movement or a night shot should give us all a chance of entering. A bit of a tricky one but if you think you can have shutter speeds of many thousands 1/30 is quite long and we want members to enter. Harry will accept our entries any time now. Regards Graham

I visited the East Kirkby Aviation Centre, Props and Pistons Event yesterday. It was a beautiful sunny day, and it was good to see such a variety of cars on display, from the unusual, to supercars, and everyday British classics there was a lot to see. As is normal at these events, it was good to watch the Lancaster, and Mosquito performing the taxiing runs, lots of noise from the Rolls Royce engines. The scheduled fly-past was a little disappointing as the BBMF Lancaster was out of action, and unable to take part, but I was able to get a snap of the Spitfire, and Hurricane.

The word “photography” literally means “painting with light”, and as photographers we use light to create our images. The painter Canaletto is known to have used the camera obscura – the predecessor of the photographic camera – as an aid in painting his views of Venice. Canaletto’s contemporary Antonio Zanetti, wrote in 1771 that “Canal taught the proper use of the camera obscura.” It might seem, then, that the ‘photographic’ character of the paintings is explained by an optical method of production. Light was projected onto a polished glass screen, and the artist was able to create his paintings from those projected images. The “right” light is important to create a photograph, however if the light is poor, photographers can encounter problems. These problems can be resolved on a digital camera by increasing the ISO, using a smaller lens aperture, or slowing the shutter speed, all of which can create other problems. Take this photo of the cement works at Melton Ross at sunset, the red sky was spectacular, but because I didn’t have a tripod with me I was unable to slow the shutter, opening up the aperture would have reduced the depth of field, my only option was to raise the ISO, to 1600, but that unfortunately increased the noise in the photo, thus the photo was degraded. This photo of Fleur in natural window light, was taken at a wide aperture of f/2, with a low ISO, and you can see the natural flow of light around the face, highlighting the eyes, and producing a perfect portrait. Lately, I have had a few outdoor location portrait opportunities, the difficulty here when working outdoors can be harsh summer light, this can be mitigated by placing your model in the shade of buildings or trees, but then you lose the light!! On-camera flash can be used as fill flash, but it’s important to avoid the “deer caught in the headlights” look. I use a large bounce card reflector (purchased from a large online shopping channel for under £10) to give a soft light on the subject, as can be seen on this recent cosplay photo of Merida (from the Disney film Brave) taken in Peasholme Park under trees, using this method I can create a photo where the subject and colours “pop”. My camera setup can be seen in the next image. In an indoor setting, off-camera flash can be used, with an umbrella, or softbox to soften the light, I tend to favour an LED light nowadays with either a shoot through white umbrella, or a reflector umbrella. Use the natural light where possible or provide your own. Enjoy your photography, Louth Photography Society will return with our next meeting on 10th September.

Can I just start this blog with a very bold statement? A full frame sensor equipped camera is not necessarily “better” than a crop sensor equipped camera, yes, it will have improved dynamic range, and light gathering capability than a smaller “crop” sensor equipped camera, that is a simple fact of physics. As regards photographic quality, I do not believe that there is a competition judge in the world that will be able to tell the difference between a photo of the same subject, cropped to the same size, and taken on an smart phone, compact camera, a crop sensor camera, or a full frame camera, especially if the image is processed from RAW, thus negating any signature JPEG colour processing from the camera. A crop sensor camera, and a full frame camera will easily produce quality prints up to A3 print size. Less weight, and smaller size are often given as advantages of using a crop sensor camera, but this is not universally true, a Panasonic G9 camera with a small crop sensor of micro four thirds is actually physically larger than a full frame Sony A7 iii. The Panasonic G9 measures 136.9 x 97.3 x 91.6mm weighing 658g, and the Sony A7 iii measures 126.9 x 95.6 x 73.7 weighing 650g, however my micro four thirds sensor equipped Olympus E-M5 iii does have a considerable size / weight advantage at 125.3 x 85.2 x 49.7 and weighs just 414g. It is the full frame lenses that weigh proportionally more, are usually physically larger, and can be more expensive because of the extra glass required to illuminate the larger sensor. The effective focal length of a lens will vary according to the camera sensor size, a typical zoom lens range on a full frame camera would be 24 – 70mm, the 24mm wide angle giving a field of view of 73.43 degrees. An APS-C sensor is smaller than the full frame camera sensor, and a typical zoom lens would be 16 – 50mm, the 16mm wide angle giving a field of view of 72.59 degrees, this apparent reduction of focal length is known as the “crop factor”, therefore an APS-C sensor has a crop factor of 1.5. (or 1.6 for a Cannon APS-C sensor camera) A micro four thirds camera sensor is half the size of a full frame sensor, therefore the crop factor is 2, this gives a typical zoom lens of 12 – 40mm, the wide angle 12mm producing a field of view of 71.88 degrees. So far, so not too confused, whatever camera sensor your camera is equipped with you will become accustomed to the most appropriate focal length to use in various scenarios. Most photographers agree that a trio of prime lenses, a 35mm full frame, (equivalent 24mm APS-C, 17mm micro four thirds) 50mm full frame, (equivalent 35mm APS-C, 25mm micro four thirds) 85mm full frame, (equivalent 56mm APS-C, 42.5 micro four thirds) is ideal for most photographic situations. Third party lens manufacturers, companies such as Tamron, Sigma, and Samyang have produced some stunning optics for various camera mounts. I used the Sigma 19mm f/2.8 lens on my Sony A6300 for several years with excellent results. The Sigma trio of excellent primes the 16mm f/1.4, the 30mm f/1.4, and the 56mm f/1.4, have been acclaimed by many photographic journalists, and are available in several lens mounts. The real confusion sets in when a camera manufacturer uses the same bayonet mount fitting across the camera range of APS-C, and full frame cameras, this is the scenario with Sony cameras, and the “e-mount lenses”, and seemingly with Nikon and the “z-mount lenses”, a 35mm prime (fixed focal length) lens on the full frame sensor acts as a 50mm prime lens on the APS-C equipped camera. I used the Sigma 16mm f/1.4, e-mount lens, on my Sony A6300, and reviewed the lens on Amazon, and I have lost count of how many times I’ve been asked if the lens will fit on the full frame e-mount Sony A7, the answer of course is yes, BUT, the lens will act as a 24mm lens because the camera will default to “crop sensor mode” only using an APS-C portion of the full frame sensor. I owned the APS-C Sony A6300, and the full frame Sony A7ii for a couple of years, the lenses were interchangeable, but I had to do some mental mathematics whenever I swapped lenses between the two camera bodies. It is no wonder then that many photographers are confused by the range of lenses available for the various lens mounts, and sensor sizes. The images shown on here are taken with a crop sensor micro four thirds camera.

I’ve recently read an article on “Fstoppers”, written by Adam Matthews, his opinion is that improving at photography isn’t a step-by-step process. It’s a winding, often unpredictable journey shaped by curiosity, creativity, and the kind of images we want to make. There’s a great deal of correctness in the article by Adam; however, I would argue that composition is the most important part of photography, and that is where the biggest improvement in our photography lies. When we pick up our mobile phone and snap an image, we take that photo because we want to capture the moment, some of the most iconic photos ever taken were taken on mediocre cameras, often with a fixed focal length, fixed aperture lenses, and the resulting image was everything. When we view an image, it’s the image that we see, we don’t analyse the camera, or settings, many of us will remember “The Napalm Girl”, taken during the Vietnam war of a girl running away from the American napalm bombs. More recently there’s an image of President Trump at the top of the steps entering the door of the Air Force One aircraft, just as he enters the door, he is looking into the aircraft, and his image is reflected on the outside of the aircraft, the journalist who took the photo commented that the image was more of a reflex action, she saw the image and took the shot. Recently, I was asked for a copy of some images taken some 4 years ago at a Lincoln Hotel, inside the hotel room using natural light, I was fairly surprised when I looked at the technical settings of the images, the camera was set with an aperture of f/4, which was a deliberate action on my part, even though the lens used could open up to f/2.8, but I do find the f/4 aperture preferable for contextual indoor shots, what did surprise me though was the use of auto WB, and the auto ISO setting of 1000, but regardless of the semi-automatic settings the photos had worked, and the client was very happy with them. As the Fstoppers article notes, we learn photography in often a nonlinear way, we get to learn our cameras, the associated lenses, the camera settings, composition techniques, watching the light, perhaps introducing artificial lighting to enhance our images, eventually it all comes together, and we gradually improve our photography. We learn from other photographers, we learn from viewing other people’s work, and we learn from photographic club competitions where a judge’s constructive critique can be invaluable. In my eight years of serious photography, I’ve become more confident in fully using the camera, choosing the correct aperture, and lens for the scene – but I still make mistakes as this photo of Scaleber Foss shows, I shoot it at f/2.8, and the foreground is out of focus, attached are some of my better photos. I still want to improve with my landscape, wildlife, and macro photography. In conclusion, continue to learn, use your natural creativity, try different techniques, and above all enjoy your hobby.