Portfolio

For those interested in simply viewing a portfolio of my work it is now located on the home page; http://www.sbalaniphotography.com

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Talk about an 18th!

A few weeks ago was my little baby bro's 18th birthday. And boy did he get a birthday, trip to HK, friends party, and family party. And of course like any birthday, cake was involved! And boy what a cake! I think I'll let the Images speak for themselves. And of course being the strobist afficionado that I am, I lit the bajeebers our of everything :D. I think my family are still recovering from spotty eyes. I'll let you all know how that goes :D.


Dessert-2

Desert Before the Cake

Sporty-Justin

Lit my cousin from his front, I was very pleased with how the lighting came out! I'm reminded of some old Adidas ads. Anyhow, as usual the flickr version appears to loose brightness when going from Lightroom to Flickr. And as always I forget to crank it up...DOH!

Shabir's Cake-9

The Cake

Shabir's Cake-4

My brother's amusement

Birthday Blues xD

what was left of the cake after............

Godzi-bir 2

Shab-zilla got to it O.O


Shabir's Cake

The out-take AHEM!

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Hang Kang!

Firstly I'd like to thank you all for your numerous comments on my Ipad post (ahem ahem!). The input was overwhelming, I simply could not keep up with everything you all had to say! -.-. However I must press on, for those of you suscribed to my flickr you will have enjoyed a healthy dose of these images already. For those that havent here we go!

I was fortunate enough to go to Hong Kong a few weeks back ( I think about 2-3 to date), a city which I absolutely love (although few will trump  the adoration I have for my one true love, London :D). It was a fantabulistic experience! I cherished the oportunity to reconect with old friends, and of course photograph what I could of such a vibrant and busy city. Unfortunately since I was there for other reasons my camera didnt make it out as often as I'd like I did manage to get a series of descent chance shots, so here are some for you all to enjoy! And as you'll notice the flavour's a little different from the last set of Images I took on my previous visit to this city. Oh yes and have I mentioned, I absolutely LOVE shooting with the D300. Its noise reduction capacity for a camera of this level is just mind boggling, I'm no longer afraid to push the envelope to 800 or even over a thousand ISO. I love it! Makes shooting with sub 2.8 lenses that less painful :D


The Gateway

Hong Kong Traffic

More after the jump! (means click the more link if you're on the home page to see the rest of the post :P)


Monday, April 12, 2010

Apple, good, bad or draconian?

So I read a post on Scott Kelby's blog recently about the Ipad and photographers, and how it affects us. He brought up some very interesting points which I thought to address further over here. I've been told by several many people, and I'm sure that I'll continue to be told that I dont "need" an Ipad. Now I wont go into that discussion here, but as far as I'm concerned I do also WANT one (However I still to think I also need it, but thats a discussion for another time). Some people love it, some hate it. Some say it will never survive, with all the other tablets that are comming out, that theres no flash, etc. This is all true, but wasnt much the same said about the Iphone? And look where it is today. At the very least the Ipad will take the creative industry by storm. With the exception of flash the Ipad is the perfect creative tool. Its fast, snappy, gorgeous, easy to carry, and although simplistic you never have to worry about bogging it down with too much junk. When going to a meeting, presenting photos, etc, the most embarrasing thing one can have is a slow computer. next....next next shit nothings happening only to have it after a minute skip to the end of the slide-show or presentation. Not good. Although the I-series devices are very restrictive you can be sure you wont suffer a problem like this, so it has its pro's and cons.

Now as photographers I know for a fact many are starting to stress about the lack flash support. I've been told that Flash is the WORST format in which to design a website IF you're interested in SEO. Most photographers are not. They just want a pretty page to show off their potfolio. In fact thats what we have our blogs for. We count on the blog making the hits in the search engine, and thru the blog have the portfolio found. its quite a symbiotic well worked relationship. But with the coming of the Ipad, with web surfing on it a prevalent factor (I know my bedside, poolside, dinner-table side, and couch side surfing whilst watching a movie will all be done on my up-comming Ipad :D), Flash using photographers and designers are left with less options on how to present their portfolios :D.

Fortunately HTML 5 Comes to the rescue! Despite not being the standard yet most new iterations of the big browsers (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE(?!?!?!) ) come well equiped enough to handle anything HTML 5 can throw at them (I think). With things like javascript, jquery and microsofts own silverlight (I beleive its supported on the I-stuff) there are a few other options in rebuilding interactive, moving pretty portfolios. What will you do? Lightroom already offers a few basic Jquery options but are they enough? is it too "cookie-cutter" so to speak? I for one am planning to integrate a portfolio of sorts into the blog by having a moving header with Jquery. What will you do though? Will those of you who have static portfolios make a jump? what about flash users? let me know!

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Saturday Tid-Bits

Hey guys!

Lots of news to get thru this week, its been quite eventful as I'm sure many of you know! Lots of new toys coming for us all to play with! The Ipad, Ipod 4.0, CS5, Wooh! I'm sure if you're any kind of tech reader you know this by now! Are you excited? Dissapointed? Stoked? I for one am pants on head excited! (term coined from Yahtzee over at the escapist magazine). 2010 is turning out to be one heck of a year! This coupled with with those constant game releases (Almost done with AC 2, bout halfway thru on Bioshock 2, and dont get me started on Dragon: AofOrigins. Still got Mass Effect 2 on my list and Just Cause 2 to pickup and probably the best Splinter Cell Game I've ever played (at least on the demo) Comming Up. AHHHH not enough time! To top that off we got Glee next week, and A brand new season of RedVsBlue. I'm in geek heaven. In between all this I need to squeeze in two jobs aswell as photography and design time. Not to mention I'm also learning to program for the Iphone (why do I feel that these Items should be prioritised differently o:)) God knows where I'm going to find the time....oh did I mention I'm also back into comics? And feverently learning japanese more so than ever? Yes I'm nuts. Anywho I'll stop on rambling. I've got another post comming up just for that :D, in the meantime enjoy these pics of Manila I've taken here there and around!

Smiling Beagle
Carpet Texture
Jeepney
Its Flamable....Apparently
Power Lines
Driveway to the skies

OH P.S. You will all be happy to know, after being the advocate of Worpress for the longest time, and recieving several complaints to make the jump the new website design has been finalised! :D. Now comes the fun part.....coding.....ugh, I'll keep you all appraised on how that goes! But if all goes well the move should be done in a few weeks! Enjoy!

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Inspiration!

As part of my daily reading I came accross this on Abduzeebo http://abduzeedo.com/awesome-multiplicity-photography

I think I'm going to play around with this concept! :D Its got some potential for some mighty zany portraits! (and simply some of the individual characters gave me some ideas too, stay tuned folks!

Saturday, April 3, 2010

HDR Software Review: Hydra

So I recently got the oportunity to play with & review  an interesting piece of software (review also featured at http://www.sevenbyfive.net/), Hydra from the company Creaceed. Its an interesting piece of HDR Processing software, with lots of potential but unfortuantely brought down by a few minor faults. 

Enjoy the review below :) :
Firstly, What is HDR?
The term has recently entered the jargon dictionary of most photographers out there is HDR. You hear it mentioned regularly by the guys at Photoshop user, and intensively featured again and again in various magazines at different levels of photography. Almost to the point where it needs no introduction. However everyday the art that is photography sees more and more users pick up an SLR or semi-SLR camera, often overwhelmed by what is available in the market. Brands, Lenses, Techniques, Photoshop etc. For those who have only recently began to dip their feet in high end digital photography, or decided to expand their horizons and try out this "HDR" thats been so raved about one must first delve into what HDR stands for. High Dynamic Range. If you're still as confused about what this all means as you were a moment ago, not to worry. Dynamic range is the range that a light sensory device can attain when capturing and interpreting detail within the light. What this means is that whatever the dynamic range of a device is, defines the amount of detail that can be captured within a specific range of light from zero darkness, to so bright its all white. This is why often in cameras when shooting directly into the sunlight either our family is well lit, and the background is completely white, or our backgrounds are relatively well lit with detail, and our subjects are often obscured in darkness. This is because modern camera's simply cannot process the entire light spectrum from absolute darkness to fully white in the same image, unlike our eyes which perform much better because humans have a much wider dynamic range. In the past to combat this often a sacrifice was needed between light and dark, or in more recent times, using flash to light your subject out of the darker bottom of your camera's dynamic range allowed one to successfully balance backgrounds and foreground. However lighting a subject may not always be the desired solution to a lighting situation. Often in landscape situations there isn’t a subject to light that isn’t the building or landscape. So what do you do, if you're shooting in a cathedral, with light oozing in thru the rafters creating this beautiful scene? Only to realize your camera will only let you expose so that those beam of lights are surrounded by darkness loosing the gorgeous detail that is the cathedral except for what’s lit? Or do you keep the cathedral and blow out those shafts of light. Curse my camera's dynamic range you think! (Or not). You're on location and certainly not equipped to expose for the shafts of light and flash the bajeebers out of that cathedral. So what do you do? Well you do expose for both! Thankfully modern Image processing has come up with a technique (HDR) which allows us to artificially expand our camera's Dynamic range by shooting the same scene at various ranges, and essentially piling the various exposures on top of each other to recreate the scene our eyes gloriously basked in which was being, "under-appreciated" so to speak by our camera. And the best part is, all you need is your camera, and one of many available HDR software available out there. Making it a quick, easy and professional solution to capturing those scenes just as our eyes saw them. Ladies & Gentlemen the magic of HDR
The Software
The HDR Scene has been predominantly dominated by Photomatix with their Lightroom Plug-in, or standalone version. Made easier as such by Lightroom's ability to quickly "merge to HDR" in Photoshop, creating a merged Image in Photoshop which could quickly have the photomatix plug-in filter applied to it, to bring out more customized sections of the dynamic range. Enter "Hydra" another contendant in producing those lovely HDR Images we all love. Available only for Macs in Aperture and Stand-alone flavors (coupled with a lightroom plug-in). Presenting itself in a lovely and what appears to be, simple UI, the software appears to be very promising indeed. Unfortunately this is not the case as its simple interface is essentially its downfall. Like most users who consider themselves computer literate, I quickly delved into the software not interested in going thru guides, or documentation. However I quickly discovered that this would unfortunately be inevitable. With various unexplained modes, buttons, tabs and jargon, I was at a loss of where to begin or what did what.
Being a heavyweight lightroom user my first priority was to install the advertised lightroom plug-in. This was unfortunately not explained and took me about 30 minutes of scouring their website and Google before figuring out there was an install option located inside hydra’s file menu. Having accomplished such, I went into Lightroom, and selected six of the images from my recent trip (a landscape) to convert to HDR. As opposed to using the “merge to HDR in Photoshop” function, Hydra requires you to use the export panel to make use of its plug-in. So I dutifully exported the Images, using the originals to maintain maximum dynamic range and under Hydra options I set it to Tiff8 Simply because my computer is old and rickety.


Once Inside Hydra I was greeted by an artful UI, Displaying the Images I had chosen on the left with a “result” large central Image.

Not knowing what was obviously available I clicked Render, assuming it would bring up some dialog boxes of some kind. I quickly discovered it was the render button, producing a grayed out jpeg, similar to the initial image you get when “exporting to HDR” in Photoshop. However considering the framework of the software I don't think that's what was supposed to come out.

Upon my second trial and doing some reading on the website I discovered that the little dialog box to the right (the transparent one) is the software’s control panel and where all the fun happens. If you see there are four options along the top, Import, Align Merge (or fusion) and Pro.
For the purposes of the review I tried out the Align option and found it to be a nice addition in being able to fine-tune the software’s align feature, however I eventually left it on automatic as I found it did a pretty good job of aligning the Images.
The Merge button is essentially the most important one in the software, transforming the tool dialog into the sliders that give your image that HDR look. And of course leading to the confusion.



Initially this is what you will get
This left me quite stumped, as it appeared a little too simple. And Upon investigating the three methods in the dropdown box to and finding them to be independent of each other, I was confused as to how to get the results I wanted. That's what the final pro button is for.



Opening up options more closely tuned to those available in photomatix.

The rest is simply a matter of playing with the modes (HDR & 8Bit) and shifting the sliders to get a desired result. Something, which is also not clearly outlined (I.e. what do I play with for a specific outcome)

Image Critique
Below are the 7 Images I used to produce the final HDR Image (3 Stops Below, Above plus the “correctly” metered Image)


And this is the final Image I outputted from Hydra



As you can see the colors are considerably more punchy, and I have managed to retain most if not all of the detail from the previous Images.

The software manages to produce Images in a variety of output options form TIFFS to PSD’s to simple Jpeg’s making it easy to incorporate into any workflow. The quality of the Images are of a high enough caliber to compete with Photomatix, although it may not be as visible thru these Images due to the compression for web, but Noise Levels are low, and detail and sharpness is well maintained, as well as colors.

Conclusion

Overall Hydra is a sturdy and well-rounded piece of software with lots of potential in producing incredible HDR Images. Its biggest flaw would be its UI and its inability to properly explain itself. Some work in explaining what each slider does In Software (even a first time “what does this do” dialog box which opens the first time (and every progressive time unless the checkbox do not open anymore) with some explanations would go a long way in making this more user friendly than it already is. Everything is laid out in front of the user, in an easy to view format, it just needs some clarifications and tooltips. Overall a descent piece of software